The Gay Geek (June 4, 2008)

Blood and showtunes go together like love and marriage?:
There’s a long list of stage musicals based on popular movies and, apparently that includes a tongue-in-cheek adaptation of the camp-tastic horror classic, Evil Dead (which, now that I know about it, I want to see it very, very badly). A Toronto production of Evil Dead The Musical is getting attention for their very clever parodies of iconic Broadway imagery, with the brilliant line “It’s like the musicals you love, only evil.”

My favorite is the Hairspray parody, if only because I can imagine John Waters being particularly ticked by the image of a zombie Tracy Turnblatt.

Two other posters parody Les Miserables and Mamma Mia! I’ve discussed before how I didn’t care for Mamma Mia! when I saw a touring version, but I wonder if I would have liked it better if “Voulez Vous” were performed by a zombie horde.

That gets me wondering if Evil Dead The Musical is anything like Takashi Miike’s big screen horror musical The Happiness of the Katakuris.

Singing zombies from The Happiness of the Katakuris

It’s hard out there to stay in print:
The boy-meets-boy romances of YAOI may be one of the strongest-growing comic genres, but that doesn’t mean the genre hasn’t seen publishers struggle in a tough market. It’s been years since BeBeautiful hit hard times leaving fans of titles like Kizuna and Embracing Love waiting for their series to continue (followed by the bankruptcy of BiBLOS, the Japanese publisher of those titles, which put BeBeautiful’s right to finishing those series in question).

Last year, my optimism for Iris Press, a Bay Area publisher that hoped to publish an anthology magazine, quickly fell through. Now, another publisher, DramaQueen, looks like it’s struggling to stick around.

DramaQueen wasn’t a publisher I really followed (aside from thumbing through one of their Rush anthologies until I found something that wasn’t for me) but I know it did have its fans. Did that include any AfterElton readers? Are there any great DramaQueen titles that my radar has been missing?