2008 - 09/2008 Meeting

Page Created: 09/16/10. Last Updated: 11/01/10. Last Google Group Page Update: 01/15/09.

PETER GUTIERREZ

Peter Gutierrez has been a professional writer for close to twenty years.

To this day, he may be best known for his work in comics in the 1990's when he wrote the best-selling indie title SHI: THE WAY OF THE WARRIOR, eventually spending several years under contract developing a film version that was never produced. The other comics characters he was fortunate enough to write include Grifter, Daredevil, and Witchblade. As an editor, he developed the historically-minded SHI: SENRYAKU mini-series, which featured art by Jeff Smith, Joe Quesada, Marc Silvestri, and Jim Lee. In 1997, he was nominated for a Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for creating and writing SHI: KAIDAN, a collection of original Japanese ghost stories on which he collaborated with Michael Kaluta, David Mack, and Stan Sakai.

These days Peter is still involved in the world of comics and graphic novels, speaking on their value to both literature and literacy at comic book conventions and other major conferences. Much of his work in this area is done as an advisor to Diamond Book Distributors, to whose magazine BOOKSHELF he is a contributor. Peter also uses comics in his teaching in the Montclair school system, where earlier this year he taught a media literacy course entitled "What Makes a Superhero Super?" He has been teaching film appreciation and media literacy since 1990, most recently a course called "Fantasy Films, from Oz to Harry Potter."

For the education market Peter has authored several books, on such topics as European literature and Asian culture, and has edited many more. He has written non-fiction and fiction for print and media publishers such as Scholastic, Sesame Workshop, Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and National Geographic. His specialty is the use of hig-interest media in the classroom and he is a member-elect of the Commission on Media of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the largest teacher organization in the U. S. He is also the Education Director of SPLAT!, the graphic novel symposium. And for SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL his articles cover a variety of topics related to the graphic format.

As a film and pop culture critic for Foxfire News, Peter's essays, reviews, interviews, and reportage focus on horror movies, thrillers, and Asian genre films, whether they appear in theaters, at film festivals, or on DVD. He also covers manga, graphic novels, children's books, television, and whatever else interests him in his work for FFN. Other publications to which he has contributed include SHROUD, WITHERSIN, and THE FINANCIAL TIMES, and he has recently started writing literary and film criticism for RUE MORGUE, generally considered the preeminent horror publication in English. This fall his online work is set to appear on the science-fictin Web site Strange Horizons and on ComiPress, with his column "Black and White in a Color World;" he also blogs on media for MIT's Project New Media Literacies.

Very occasionally Peter still produces fiction; this summer two short stories of his were published in anthologies, DARK TERRITORIES, from GSHW, and the third volue of READ BY DAWN, the prestigious international series affiliated with Edinburgh's Dawn by Dawn film festival. Other markets to which he has sold short genre fiction include APEX SCIENCE FICTION AND HORROR DIGEST, TQR STORIES, UNICORN 8 and RENDING THE VEIL. In 2006, the editors of the online literary magazine AntiMuse selected his horror poem, "his face, a rebuttal" for "Best in Show" honors.

LINKS OF INTEREST:

Peter Gutierrez @ Foxfire News

Peter Gutierrez @ Linked In

Review of Dark Territories from Cinema Eulogies

Diamond BookShelf Interview with Peter Gutierrez

Perma Link for NTCE Assembly on Media Arts NCTE Journal

MEETING SUMMARY:

Meeting Date: September 13, 2008.

Meeting Site: Saddle River Valley Cultural Center, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.

Official Attendance: 29.

Meeting Program: Talk by Genre Popular Culture Critic.

Notes:

Peter Gutierrez distributed four hand outs during his talk:

From Firefox News by Peter Gutierrez: The Self-Possessed Killer: Class Shame in Halloween.

From UGO.com by Peter Gutierrez: Review of Mister Foe.

From The Salon by Stephanie Zacharek: The Disappearing Movie Critic

List of Films for "Fantasy Films from Oz to Harry Potter Class"

The following is a list of films shown in whole or in part at Peter Gutierrez' Fantasy Films from Oz to Harry Potter class:

A Trip to the Moon (1902)

The Wizard of Oz (1910)

Gertie the Dinosaur (1914)

The Pet (1921)

The Wizard of Oz (1925)

Sherlock, Jr. (1926)

Metropolis (1927)

[Woman in the Moon (1931)]

King Kong (1933)

The Invisible Man (1933)

Things to Come (1936)

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Flash Gordon serial (1936)

The Thief of Baghdad (1940)

Fantasia (1940)

Le Belle et la Bete (1946)

Them! (1954)

[Forbidden Planet (1956)]

The Time Machine (1960)

The Harryhousen Chronicles (1998) (doc by Richard Schickel, inc. Jason, Sinbad, etc)

Fantastic Voyage (1966)

Mad Monster Party (1967)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

[Destroy All Monsters (1968)] - replaced by Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965)

[Equinox (1970]

Star Wars (1977)

[Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)]

The Empire Strikes Back (1980) - replaced by Return of the Jedi (1983)

Back to the Future (1985)

Innerspace (1987)

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

[Batman Returns (1992)]

Shrek (2001)

Spiderman (2002)

[Fantasia 2000 (2000)]

A Grand Day Out (2001)

Spirited Away (2002)

LOTR (2001 - 2003)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

Batman Begins (2005)

[The Host (2006)]

Newsletter Account

The following account is reprinted with permission from THE STARSHIP EXPRESS Copyright 2008 Philip J De Parto:

Popular culture critic/commentator/writer/educator Peter Gutierrez spoke at the September 13, 2008 meeting of the Science Fiction Association of Bergen County held at the Saddle River Valley Cultural Center.

Mr Gutierrez was a Psychology Major whose thesis was a psychological analysis of the Modern American Horror Film. His criticism and commentary have appeared in Foxfire news and far too many other places to enumerate in this space. Go, instead, to the 09/2008 Meeting Page on the SFABC Speakers & Programs Google Group.

Much of Peter's talk concerned the nature of criticism. While a reviewer helps you to learn about a film, a critic helps you learn about FILM. He described criticism as discovering connections from text to text, text to world, and text to self. Text in this context is not just the printed word, but film and other media.

According to Peter Gutierrez, fan writing tends to make good text to text connections (how a story or idea appears in another story or medium) and sometimes text to self (how a work touches the writer), but rarely does fan writing do good text to world connections (depictions of Captain America battling caricatured Japanese and its repercussions for American society's attitudes on race in general, for example).

A good critic makes you have a discussion with yourself. Mr Gutierrez cites Armond White of the New York Press as someone who drives him (Peter) crazy, but who makes him think. Mr White speaks to a different part of Peter's brain.

The discussion meandered into horror. Mr Gutierrez believes that the scariest films are those which depict war realistically. On the print front, he finds Thomas Ligotti a diabolically scary writer. He is also looking forward to viewing some Swedish films which have received good buzz, but noted that you should be careful what you wish for because many hyped films have little but hype going for them.

There was also talk of how broader changes in society effected how a work would be received. He mused that even if there had been a pirate television station broadcasting it, could DEXTER have found an audience in 1970?

Peter Gutierrez teaches film classes to sixth graders. It is important to know your audience. He presents Windsor McCay?s Gertie as the first Giant Monster movie. Fritz Lang's DESTINY is the first horror anthology he can recall. This account only scratches the surface of what was discussed at the meeting.

Meeting Memories: