Arizona Daily Star from Tucson, Arizona • Page 44

Tucson, Monday, September 8, 1997 pnr Section ST Alternative-comic fans hanker for 'Red Meat' (Qje Arizona Uailn Slar I (tool waiwa to you no mote 'cause you're always mean to me. Wwi Dan. Von know. Karen, day, when you're all grown up. you'll be jratelul lo me for taking, the time each day to teach you to withstand relentless and wanton cruelty.

Hell course not. ki lad. at! subsequent inhumanities you experience in your Ittelime Kill probably seem Me a game ol jump rope compared to out "spetiat little relationship: II you people set fire to my house and wrote 'Get out of town, freak' on my front lawn. But now I'm back." Ted, benign smile still frozen on face: "So which part of 'Get out of town, freak' weren't you clear on, John?" Our editor isn't the first one to mistake Cannon's characters for something they're not. Another Star staff member proceeded to say that his father could swear he had Last week, Sitings told a story that had absolutely nothing to do with Tucson: the story of Forum 2000, a mock celebrity advice World Wide Web site created by a group of computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Or so we thought it had nothing to do with Tucson. An example of Forum 2000 repartee included an answer from a cheery drawing called Milkman Dan, whom an editor proceeded to describe in print as "a '50s-style cartoon ad character." Well, not quite. On Tuesday, Star Tech got a call from the agent of the guy who created Milkman Dan. That guy just happens to Mitch Gitman seen those same tigures back in the '50s or '60s. Cannon relishes such confusion.

"Several of the characters are designed to have the look of late '50s, early '60s, real pleasant advertising art," he said. "They're pop culture icons in a way. They're designed to be iconic." One might be reminded of the postmodern paintings where Roy Lichtenstein took '50s comic-strip-style -m have his own Web site that gets 400,000 impressions a month: That guy just happened to have signed a book deal in August with major publisher St. Martin's Press. That guy just happens to write and draw a The readers' Internet column work appears in have a combined readership of around 6 million, Cannon said.

And "the book "Red Meat: From the Secret Files of Max Cannon" will be released in November by St. Martin's Press. A printing of 5,000 by small publisher Black Spring Books of Tucson has already sold out, according to Cannon's agent, Jennifer Powers. Then there's the Web site. Introduced in November and named a "Cool Site of the Day" in June, www.redmeat.com features, among other tasties, around 60 or 70 of the 500 "Red Meat" cartoons.

A new cartoon, the same new cartoon that makes the weeklies, appears every Monday. So why the name "Red "I guess because the name 'Peanuts' was already taken," Cannon quipped. By the way, Max Cannon does not eat red meat. He describes himself as "mostly vegetarian." Red Meat: www.redmeat.com Karen off to the side: "Mommy! Mommy! Milkman Dan throwed up in my treehouse again!" Matt Groening of "Life In Hell" and "The Simpsons" fame is quoted as spying: "In a culture full of sick, twisted, perverted art, 'Red Meat' is up there at the top it's that good." The New Yorker, too, has praised "Red Meat." Cannon, 35 years old and a 20-year resident of Tucson, majored in fine arts at the University of Arizona. It was only after college, though, that he approached the school newspaper, The Daily Wildcat, with the first slices of "Red Meat." But the Wildcat editors began censoring "Red Meat," yanking strips and asking Cannon to change them.

For fear of much the same treatment, Cannon has eschewed the daily newspaper market. After two months on campus, "Red Meat" got picked up by the Tucson Weekly. The strip's self-syndicated roster (none mainstream dailies) has been growing ever since. The print publications his comic strip that appears in the Tucson Weekly and more than 50 other alternative weeklies and magazines across the United States and Canada. And that guy just happens to live in Tucson.

He's Max Cannon, and Milkman Dan is just one of the twisted, wicked individuals who populate his 8-year-old comic strip, "Red Meat." The "Red Meat" universe looks benign enough, with wholesome-looking faux-'50s characters like Milkman Dan and Ted, based on Cannon's father Merv. (Well, never mind the disturbed- and disturbing-looking Bug-Eyed Earl.) But then read the captions. Here's pipe-smoking Ted chatting with Johnny Lemonhead, who does indeed have a lemon for a head: Ted: "Johnny Lemonhead! I haven't seen you around since we graduated high school." -Johnny: "Well, I left town shortly after images and enshrined them into giant, colorful monuments. In "Red Meat," there is the same winking play on classic white-bread American culture. And you don't get anyone more white-bread, or more demonic, than Milkman Dan.

"Here your '50s neighborhood milkman is your friendly civil servant," Cannon explained. Dan, though? is "sort of a sad, substance-abusing, smart-alecky just basically he's a bastard." Most hysterically, Dan focuses much of his evil on a seemingly innocent "spoiled little brat" (Cannon's words) named Karen. We enter a strip midway as Dan ponders his employment: "The hours are short. I work an unsupervised route. The pay is decent And thanks to some rather tawdry home videos of Mrs.

Perkins in personnel, I have great job security as well." If there's an Internet experience, tip or topic you want to share, or an Internet-related question you want to ask, please report your Siting to Mitch Gitman at mgitnianazstarnet.coni, or call 573-4196. If your contribution gets published, you will receive an incredibly stylish Star Tech mouse pad. Networks, TV makers not in sync on digital broadcasts networks hope to "reinvent themselves," as Padden has put it, and stop the steady decline in viewer-ship that is afflicting the networks. Consumer electronics companies, meanwhile, have seen lackluster profits recently and consider high-definition television sets to be the most important new product in decades. But the manufacturers say they want assurances that the networks will actually broadcast high-definition programming rather than use digital compression to squeeze more channels of conventional programming into Padden, president of ABC.

And at NBC, President Robert Wright complained that "manufacturers have not locked in well-communicated marketing plans. I don't know what they are doing at Sony, Thomson, Panasonic." But equipment manufacturers are voicing their own complaints. They say they are hamstrung because the networks have been too slow to declare their own intentions. "We are very focused on the digital transition; it's the only way we are going to survive," said James Meyer, executive vice president of Thomson Consumer Electronics, the United States' largest television manufacturer. "But if the broadcasters don't choose to offer products that take advantage of this, then that's another thing." As Jack Bergen, a senior executive at CBS, ruefully observed: "The networks are waiting to see What the TV makers are going to do, and the TV makers are waiting to see what the networks are going to do." The broadcasters and manufacturers have much at stake, as does the viewing public.

Using digital technology, the By Joel Brinkiey 1997 The New York Times With the introduction of digital television only about a year away, leaders of the three major television networks are caught in a standoff with television manufacturers. The network executives say they cannot move forward with plans for the new service until television manufacturers commit themselves to producing enough srJordsbfe sets to receive the programming. "We aD need to work together on this, or there's going to be a train wreck," said Preston, their space on the airwaves. Under government order, network-affiliated stations in the 10 largest cities must begin digital broadcasts next fall, and the other stations are to follow over the next few years. But stations are free to offer a single digital, high-definition signal on their new, digital channels or several lower-definition programs in the same space.

At ABC, a unit of Walt Disney Padden gave a speech recently ago suggesting that ABC would forgo high-definition broadcasts and offer several vr Se HDTV, Page 13T.i.