Did you manage to get any good stuff at the con? Or were you too busy being beset by ginger, mouth-breathing nerds who wanted to talk to you about Rush for like ever?
No, no, no: Ian has BLACK hair (Sorry, Ian; some jokes, I can’t resist).
I only brought home four things from the con, all of which were good: A back issue of Oni’s Letter 44 that I’d inexplicably missed, the second issue of Caleb Goellner and Buster Moody’s Task Force Rad Squad, postcardsfromspace’s buttplug zine and Lucy Bellwood’s Grand Adventure.
I went back issue bin diving, but my appetite was lowered by the Marvel Unlimited app making so many Marvel books available for cheap and the surprisingly high cost of a lot of books I’d want to get otherwise (I’m sure I missed out on a pile of bargains elsewhere, but I didn’t see anything that drove me wild). I suck at comic cons.
High school satires don’t run much darker or more delicious than the 1988 film Heathers, which complicated its Mean Girls social dynamics with murder and suicide. As the heroine, Veronica Sawyer, mordantly observes: “My teenage angst bullshit has a body count.”
Now at New World Stages, composer-lyricists Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe have adapted Daniel Waters’ screenplay into a new musical, amplifying its cheerful vulgarity while softening its social critique, replacing black comedy with candy-colored camp.
They made Heathers into a musical? That sounds like a singularly bad idea, or at least one that suggests a distinct misunderstanding of either (a) the movie, (b) the demands of musical theater or © both of the above.
