FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Three years ago, the Barfly cartoon by Wayne Bertsch began appearing in the pages of NUVO Newsweekly. After drawing nearly 150 strips reviewing local music, Bertsch, in conjunction with Birdy’s Bar and Grill, has put together the second annual showcase of live music hand picked by ‘Barfly’ as a sampling of the best live music Indy has to offer. The May 20th multi-genre show begins at 9:30 pm and boasts a diverse lineup that includes Indy’s best rock, pop, country and soulful blues.

Bertsch’s Barfly strip was born three years ago after drawing a band flyer for local blues rock cover band Karen and The Beast. The strip was reprinted in NUVO Newsweekly and soon became a regular feature of its music section. The strip is available every Wednesday in NUVO as well as online at its website NUVO.net. Barfly strips have also appeared occasionally at Indianapolismusic.net.

The line up for the May 20th show consists of five bands:

STEREO DELUXE: Indy's Best Power-Pop band: This tight four-piece seemed to come out of nowhere to run away with the $10,000 cash prize as winners of last year’s Indianapolis Battle of the Bands. Their recently released debut disc is a wonderful collection of toe-tapping tunes that are impossible to get out of your head after even a passing listen.
VIEW STEREO DELUXE BARFLY COMIC HERE

EMERSON ROSE: Indy's Best Rockers: Forget alt-rock, forget emo rock--these guys play good, straight for the jugular rock and roll. Andrew Bean is easily one of the most charismatic frontmen who treats every stage like it’s a sellout show at Madison Square Garden. If you miss the days when Guns and Roses and the Black Crowes ruled the airwaves, this will be your favorite new act.
VIEW EMERSON ROSE BARFLY COMIC HERE

THE ROUNDUPS: Indy’s Best Country/Western swing: If names like Spade Cooley and Tex Williams mean anything to you, then you might understand why the music of The Roundups is nothing like you’ll ever hear at a Toby Keith concert. They harken back to the days when country music hadn’t given birth to rock and roll but was about nine months pregnant.

ORIGINAL STATE OF MIND: BEST GROOVE BAND: Original State of Mind are hard to categorize. They’re known for a hip and positive groove but without any of the annoying improvisation of a jam band. They’re wholly danceable without sounding contrived or pre-programmed. They fall some place between Sublime and Urban Dance Squad with a touch of Michael Frente thrown in for good measure.

View BARFLY Original STate of Mind Comic here

JESSICA BENGE BAND: BEST PIPES: Opening for a great blues mama like Susan Tedeschi would be a tall order for any vocalist, but the golden pipes of Jessica Benge were perfectly suited to the task. Her strong but velvety voice will surely raise comparisons to Aretha Franklin, Bonnie Raitt and Tedeschi herself. Make no mistake--Benge is one of the best pure vocalists in the city.

Contact information:
Wayne Bertsch
317 696 9751
Email at wayniac5@comcast.net

Birdy’s Bar and Grill, 2131 E. 71st St., Indpls, IN  46220, (317) 254-8971
http://www.birdyslive.com

Artwork Available at the NUVO BARFLY ARCHIVE:
http://www.nuvo.net/music/barfly_archive/

Feel free to reprint in whole or part for promotional and informational purposes but include the legal line:

Copyright Wayne Bertsch and NUVO Newsweekly 2005

There's probably no band in town that's been longer overdue for me to draw in my Barfly comic. I've loved Extra Blue Kind for years, and I've seen them live numerous times. Every time I'd get ready to draw a strip on them they would go through a line-up change and I'd think, "Wait until you hear their new sound."

Finally, I got around to drawing it (despite yet another lineup change). I really think these cats are on the verge of something. Their music video for "Pinch, Blink, Stay Alive" is terrific and recently saw some airtime on MTV2.

Check them out!

Also, watch the video for "Pinch, Blink, Stay Alive." CLICK HERE TO VIEW

Did anyone see this last night? Hilarious in all the wrong ways. Minoriteam debuted on Adult Swim last November in a one-shot episode, but last night marked its debut as a regular series.

WATCH THE MINORITEAM PILOT ...CLICK HERE

The artwork is aped from the style of Jack "The King" Kirby . The animation is weak, but the focus isn't on the art but on the writing in which they skewer the ridiculousness of racial stereotypes by going to the extreme.

They are led by:

A wheelchair bound Asian named Dr. Wang the Human Calculator.

A Rabbi who shoots jets of molten lava named Jewcano.

A black super-speed character named Fasto, the fastest man that ever was.

El Jefe, a Mexican who battles racist supervillains with his super-powered leaf blower and a modified weed-whacker.

Non-Stop, an Indian convenience store owner who is immune to all forms of live ammunition, presumably after being shot so many times.

They battle such white oppressive supervillains as The Corporate Ladder, Racist Frankenstein, and the White Shadow.

All of them have non-stereo typical secret identities. Fasto, for instance, is a professor of women's studies and Jewcano dates African American women and has a penchant for soul food.

The only one who doesn't have a non-stereotypical life is Dr. Wang, who seems to be a stereotype all the time.

This series is pretty over the top. So far that some may see it as being racist instead of making fun of racism. It's a fine line, one that Robert Crumb has struggled with for years. What do you think--a hilarious lampoon of our racial attitudes or insulting exploitation?

I fell in love with Bettie Page in the pages of my dad’s Frolic, Sir and Titter magazines when I was a kid. She stood out immediately from the peroxide bimbos that filled the book up.

I saw her first in little classified ads in the back where you could send away for pictures of Betty but eventually one of the magazines ran a retrospective on her and the other girls that worked out of Irving Klaw's mail order biz.

She was immediately so different than the other girls with those black bangs and those scolding “you’ve been a bad boy” looks she was shooting the reader.

Years later as a comic fan I discovered the comic the Rocketeer by Dave Stevens who littered the series with characters both real and fictional of the period. Howard Hughes, Errol Flynn and the Shadow were seen in small roles but Betty was front and center in the spotlight playing herself as the girlfriend of Cliff Secord.

Shortly after falling in love all over again (this time with Stevens wonderful art) I subscribed to a 'zine called the BETTY PAGES and got caught up in what was the “Mystery of the missing pin-up queen”.

A feature every issue that detailed the ‘zine editors quest to find out what had. Happened to the queen of pin-ups.

Wild theories of her being mixed up with mob figures were floated but the truth turned out to be not as adventurous. She had just put it all behind her, gotten married and moved to Florida. She had some unfortunate turns in her life after that and its all been chronicled in a book about her life.

But the reason for writing this Blog now is to let people know about the web cast interview she is doing March 17th at noon EST.

Hopefully someone will transcribe it when it’s done.

My Legion of Superheroes Techno remix
(not official by any means)

LEGION INTO ETERNITY CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

hosted by putfile.com

Here’s a round up of comic-related information updating my recent post about the Legion of Super Heroes animated series.
Brainiac 5 has been cast. Adam Wylie of Picket Fences fame (Zach) will do the voice.

Another sketch proported to be from James Tucker of Braniac 5 has surfaced. Some are speculating that it's a hoax because the style is nothing like the sketch from my last blog that has now been verified as a legitimate James Tucker sketch. Bruce Timm said as much on the website Drawingboard.com. The styles look so different I lean towards it being a hoax, but Timm did say that the sketch released was a very early version and the finished versions looked nothing like it. So who knows...

***Lightning Lad (Andy Milder): Over on Comics Continium, Andy Milner did a short Q&A and the working logo/title card for Superboy and the Legion of Super Heroes was revealed.

***Timber Wolf (Shawn ?): Shawn (last name unknown) has been cast as Timber Wolf and posted a blog about the first day of voice recording , including a picture of the birthday cake. Someone put the kibosh on it and his blog got deleted, but here's the text and pic from the deleted blog.

Recording went well. Friday morning I woke up sounding like a bull frog. I had pretty much blown out my voice the previous night rehearsing growls and howls...it was pretty funny. I spent the greater part of Thursday night crouching on the floor snarling and howling and making animal like movements in hopes that would help me find the right sounds. Whomever mentioned wanting to see a video of my rehearsal would have been entertained.

My dang camera was acting janky. I didn't get to snap as many pics as I would have liked. I am thinking about creating a scrapbook for myself. They have murals painted on a lot of the walls. A pic of the cake they had at the party. The comic book theme was hot.

*** Superboy: Reportedly cast but I have no info on who it is yet.

Other characters set to appear are:

***XS
***Bouncing Boy
***Brainiac5
***Saturn Girl
***Phantom Girl
***Cosmic Boy

The Ovi Nedeclu and Ben Caldwell designs are definitely out now. The sketch that appeared at the top of my last Legion blog was by James Tucker and is reportedly the look that is likely to be used. Though that sketch appears in color, it is a very, very early draft and the final results may be much different. It looks to me that his style is a little influenced by Ben Caldwell's, or at least they share similar influences. Another Ben Caldwell rejected sketch of Cosmic Boy surfaced a day or two after my last blog.

James Tucker was a producer, writer and director who worked on Batman Beyond and Justice League Unlimited. A James Tucker interview from last year can be read here. No mentions of the LSH toon, but you can get a general feel for his devotion to the DC universe.

Also circulating the web are some production sketches by Steve Lightle. These are pretty cool but they originate from a pitch back in the 1990’s for a Legion cartoon that got rejected. As cool as they are, they have nothing to do with the new toon that’s coming.

Norm Ryang is the prop designer for the Teen Titans cartoon and has been identified as the designer for LSH as well. His work on the Titans vehicles has been pretty cool. I can't wait to see what he does with the Legion cruiser. Remember--his vision will be the template for many toys to come, so I look forward to his first sketches as much as James Tucker's. Keep an eye on his site as he seems to like to talk about his work on Titans maybe somenews will leak out soon. Many of the links on there include people that may be working on LSH now as well but none confirmed so far.

Kelly Ward (best remembered as one of the T-Birds in Grease) is the voice director.

Allan Heinberg is the writer of many episodes of Sex and The City, Party of Five, Gilmore Girls, and The O.C. He’d been mentioned early on as being involved with the Legion animated series. This is starting to look like a bogus rumor as he hasn’t been mentoned in relation to the cartoon in months.

Everyone is up in arms about the price to fillup these days. I'm right there with you.
It's crazy how expensive things have gotten these past few years. The biggest factor it turns out are the booming economies of China and India where few cars were purchased before the past few years. Now that things have seemingly exploded for thsoe regions economically there are lots of employees able to afford cars that were once a luxury.

Look at the disparity in these prices compared to middle America. We're not the cheapest or the highest. We're somewhere in the middle but the range is pretty vast.

5 cheapest per gallon are

Venezuela .12
Nigeria .38
Egypt .65
Kuwait .78
Saudi Arabia .91

5 most expensive per gallon are:

Netherlands 6.48
Norway 6.27
Italy 5.96
Denmark 5.93
Belgium 5.91

.12 cents to 6.48? thats a pretty crazy difference. A 5400% markup between the two.

Wow.

Gigposters.com posted three of my posters on their site. This site by the way is one the best work time timewasters you'll ever find on the internet. I could spend hours ( and often do) browsing the great posters here.

45 grave poster click here!

To view my whole gig posters archive click here!