While you were gone the Globetrotters held a press conference informing everyone that I was a jive sucker.

Manga Studio fiddling continues apace as I pull a move from an actual manga studio like what they have in Japan and start making myself a library of backgrounds and whatnot for basic gag strips or whatever. Still not entirely sold on MS, but then I wasn't sold on Photoshop either and now can't draw a straight line without the bloody thing.
I think my main issue is finding the right balance of line weight and stroke correction so it comes out how I want rather than relying on serendipity, as I can't actually tell what I'm doing around actual pixel size and for the most part just try to make blobs roughly the right shape.
Also, it's Friday night and I miss the booze.


Watching:
four films called Sahara from 1943, 1983, 1995 and 2005 respectively. Why? Because they're there, really, though nobody needs a reason to watch a Humphrey Bogart movie.
Batman: Under the Red Hood, which seems to mistake 'brooding' and 'moping' - quite an unfortunate mix-up for a film about Batman, as you can imagine. He spends long minutes moping and having heartfelt conversations with Alfred about his feelings rather than punching people in the head. This is - as far as I'm aware - Jason Todd's first appearance in a medium other than comic books and as such his death and resurrection seem a contrivance for the purposes of the movie and its heartfelt conversations about the Dark Knight's feelings and stuff rather than a story that might once have held a lot of cache because Jason Todd - alongside Bucky - was one of those rare characters who stayed dead (until someone brought him back). This being his first appearance outside funnybooks, there's no resonance to Todd's death as there was in that medium and I suppose that could be what all the moping is supposed to be about, but it still doesn't change that there's no sense of gravitas or import, it's a story about someone Batman thought was dead that could have been told a dozen times already across several iterations of tv show and straight-to-video movies and wouldn't have been especially interesting there, either. It's not a terrible film, just unexceptional, though John "Bender" DiMaggio is a terrible Joker, which is an opinion I certainly wouldn't have expected to hold given the toss I've paid attention to once I realise Bender is in it. I'm also pretty sure they're going a little too far out of their way to paint Nightwing as a homosexual, which is fine if you're going to go ahead and actually make a character a homosexual man - but if you pussyfoot around it to the point you create an equivalence between effeminate/gay and 'funny'(abnormal), you're not helping the case for diversity much, you're just reinforcing stereotypes.