Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...America's first female serial killer for her murder of seven men, is playing theaters. There is also an unsavory but frenetic market in serial-killer collectibles. Fans are swapping trading cards of their favorite murderers. Dahmer T shirts are big sellers at heavy-metal concerts, and a comic book celebrating his exploits ( has all but sold out to buyers. Most bizarre, collectors are paying up to $20,000 in posh galleries around the U.S. for Gacy's paintings of eerie clowns; the killer used to dress up as "Pogo the Clown" to entertain neighborhood kids between his bouts...
...many Americans, these modern-day ogres offer a perverse thrill. "Serial killers are the werewolves of the modern age," declares Hart Fisher of Champaign, Illinois, who published the Dahmer comic. "By day they walk around unassuming, then boom! By night they turn into monsters. People want to know why." The most fascinated seem to be the most nonviolent people of all, "the kind who would find a spider in the bathroom and take it outside with a tissue," says crime writer Ann Rule, who turned her experience on a suicide- prevention hotline alongside fellow volunteer -- and serial killer -- Ted Bundy...
Curtis and director Mike Newell (of "Enchanted April") concentrate so hard on getting the comic trappings of this story right (with frequent success) that they seem to lose track of the love story at hand. In the first half hour we witness the comedic havoc wrought upon the life of bachelor Charles (Hugh Grant) after he meets a beautiful American named Carrie (Andie MacDowell) at Wedding Number One. We find ourselves wondering why he is suddenly so smitten with a one-night stand...
...begins with two policemen falling into a comic argument over whether to let their prisoner, an army deserter, escape. The quarrel leads to one of them killing the other and then committing suicide. It climaxes with a priest -- a worldly and genial man -- hanging himself in his church. He has fallen into despair after too profound an exposure to the antireligious writings of the poet-philosopher Miguel de Unamuno...
...British writer G.K. Chesterton once offered this tongue-in-cheek theory of human origins: "If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head." In light of the comic outrages and tragic absurdities of almost any given week of news, it's hard not to agree. Which is why the best news editors know that when taking stock of events, a little wit is no less important than a proper fund of sober intelligence. That's certainly the working philosophy of Bruce Handy...