When I was his age I was sloshing through the jungle dodging enemy fire with nothing but a necklace of ears to talk to

The blog has lain fallow for a while now, so I thought I'd bung up my "sketchbook" for August - or at least the latter half of August - as I have of late tried to get away from filling physical notebooks with doodles as I believe it makes me lazy not having to refine or follow through on anything I jot down and then throw in a pile and forget about, and I rarely use Manga Studio even though I recalled it being great for sketching (and not freezing up with files over 7mb like Photoshop does), so I've killed a couple of birds with the one stone here and created what I think can best be described as less a sketchbook and more of a digital napkin covered in doodles.
Don't mind the big red blobs on some pages, that's just me redacting things I shall be using in some form elsewhere, and for the most part this was me keeping my hands busy while I watched tv, so I hope you shall forgive me my lack of ability with MS' colouring, lettering, or inking tools, I'm more a Photoshop man (at least for now).

Punches are not hugs

Having taken a respite from blogging thanks to Vista finally making good on its daily promise to kill itself and take my pc with it, I've got a bit bored so have gone back to doodling on the laptop.  The steam-powered laptop that sounds like a plane and which runs on GOD DAMN IT Vista.

I have been watching:
The Carrie Diaries, a prequel series to Sex And The City, which you may or may not be aware of seeing as it's a pretty old show now, but from what I could tell it was a New York-based sex drama about three whores and their mother, begging the question "why is a teen drama the natural follow-up to that?"  I think we're supposed to mock the reasoning that led to this show's creation and then ask "who is the intended audience for this?" but let's face it, it's a teen drama that sexualises children and that needs no justification to programme-makers because they know exactly who its audience is - everybody.  From Home and Away to Hollyoaks to 90210 to Secret Life of the American Teenager, kids shagging is what people want to watch at the end of a day spent frothing themselves into a fury at the latest pedo-scares in the news and I am, of course, postulating what I hope is an amusing contradiction and not actually suggesting that there are people who spend all their day merely being angry at the existence of pedophiles and imagining what they get up to, as not even Daily Mail writers do that - I picture them fantasising what pedophiles get up to at most takes up their morning, and then after lunch they fantasise about immigrants, maybe squeezing in the odd payment to someone to say they've fed crack cocaine to their 17 children or have only come to the UK to sell babies to pimps because unlike the workshy unemployed sponging benefits from hard working taxpayers, Daily Mail journalists actually put some effort into their day.
Anyway - The Carrie Diaries' biggest problem for me is arguably Anna Sophia Robb, who is supposed to grow up to look like Sarah Jessica Parker, which pretty much blows the series finale as we know it now has to end with some kind of disfiguring car or horse-trampling accident, but she also ruins it because when the Rock goes to the trouble of saving your ass, the least you can do is make good use of the second chance he's bought you and not make bad television.  Shows like this fascinate me because they're basically the same thing as, say... Gidget, which is not the first female-fronted teen romance "dramedy" but it's a nice handy yardstick seeing as it was made in the 1960s (the Sandra Dee film version even earlier in 1959) with the attendant moral standards of the time, and the aspirational ideal of the lead female in Gidget is to eventually kiss Moondoggy on the lips, while her modern counterpart Carrie constantly writes in her diary of  how she secretly longs for a good fisting while a bus full of special needs orphans watch - the end goals are different and reflect the times in which these shows came to be, but they are still essentially the same show*, and therein lies the problem because some yearnings are universal experiences and work as the focus of teen dramas even in the 1960s, so you don't really need sexy sex to spice up proceedings as long as the emotions at the center of the writing ring true with experience and aren't - for instance - simply recycling the work of other shows and movies and filtering them through the arbitrary mandates of producers to create an uninteresting work of homogenised telefeces whose primary audience lies in a no-man's land demographic where the terminally bored, the moronic, and those who just aren't paying attention at all overlap to create whatever audience share this horse-trampling of a show ends up with.



* And when I say the same show, I mean "dramedy centering on a widowed father-daughter relationship, sister problems, school stuff and major hobby of main character" pretty much covers both of them.

I'd like to thank the Academy, my agent, and most of all, my operating system, Windows Vista

Vista is back to it's lovable old self:

Sometimes I wonder what I'd do without having to stop after extended periods of time on photoshop while the pc decides if it's going to crash entirely or merely hang for a few minutes, but I do like that Vista basically has a timer of sorts that reminds me periodically to go play a videogame, watch a movie or get something to eat - without it I'd never have racked up 80 hours on my current New Vegas save, and for that I should probably be thankful.

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.

The Losers

Caught The Losers tonight (it was supposed to be Predators, but plans change), and it was pretty lame. The comic book original should have been a template for a big, dumb action movie with just enough toe-dipping into realworld politik and techno-fetishism of the latest war hardware to get the alpha male in you whoopin' and a-hollerin' for carnage, but the movie felt really, really small in scale, which is a problem for something that has a hijacked military helicopter making off with an armored truck plucked from the middle of a gunfight in downtown Miami while under fire from an anti-aircraft gun - this should feel epic, but instead just feels like a lesser rehash of much grander things, among them the source comic book, Bond villains, and the A-Team. It never gets beyond the level of visuals of a decent-scale tv show like 24 or Fringe (it even borrows the latter's clunky captions built into the backgrounds of establishing shots), and the direction is no more than functional, which means that it looks like a music video more than it does an action movie, lacking the flair for the visual language of the more successful boom-boom flicks of the 1990s in favor of slo-mo and never realising that the thing about action movies is that they're exactly what they say on the tin - they're supposed to pivot on action and not just movement. The problem is the action tv series died off in the 1990s so everything could become some version of the X-Files hinging less on physical conflict and more on interpersonal drama: up until then, action directors cut their teeth on tv and learned their trade on the A-Team, Knight Rider, Viper, the Fall Guy, but once this kind of television became obsolete there was nowhere to learn to direct action sequences except music videos, and the big name action directors of today indeed learned to capture perfect abs in slo-mo but never how to make a thrown punch look exciting, hence the visual whitenoise of the Transformers and Jason Bourne series. In fairness, the action series seems to be making some sort of comeback of late with Human Target, Philanthropist, Trauma, etc, but anyway...
The characters in the Losers comic were pretty broadly drawn and as a consequence quite easy to tell apart, but here they're interchangeable and uninteresting, with Aisha especially reduced from a far more imposing and menacing presence to an unconvincing daddy-issue femme defined by her relationship with anemic male characters. She's a blandstrosity when she should be a monstrosity, and the preening Max - upon whom the film's quest for vengeance arguably rests - is about as menacing as a blind kitten.

It goes nowhere, does nothing new, isn't particularly enticing as a re-watch, and for much of it you cannot escape the feeling it wants to be taken more seriously than it deserves, but to be honest, any movie that can take a book that has dudes fistfighting in the cargo bay of a fleeing aircraft and then falling onto moving muscle cars giving chase and can't make an action scene out of that? That movie deserves to fail, and at least on that front, Losers delivers.
I did not like it.

Just back to the doodling while I plan the next bit of the GN like a military operation, so in the style of Quentin Blake:

Though it looks like it should be Mr Rat if anything.

Just having a wee doodle in among my thumbnailing jiggery-pokery as it's that time of year again when I have to come up with a cover for TKT - well, actually it was that time of year again several months ago, but I got busy. Now me and my good friend Vista will just load up some blank pages so I can get started on my real work thumbnailing that graphic--

GOD DAMN YOU TO HELL VISTA.
GOD DAMN YOU TO THE HELL THAT SPAWNED YOU.

How am I not drunk at this time on a Caturday? Because I'm a penniless bum and it's the end of the first month after Christmas - ain't nobody on the tear tonight, son.

Reading: The Incredible Hercules #140 - there's a reason why Marvel has become the playground bully in terms of comics publishing of late, and that's because books like this about nobody characters from their roster are some of the best reading you'll find in funnybooks. Hephaestus' deathtrap and it's rather glaring flaw is a standout moment in a book full of daft setpieces and funky ideas, and I'm surprised not only at the consistent course the book has steered over the last few years even with crossovers to navigate every few months, or that it's a fun title that doesn't talk down to the reader through its use of boorish wit from the musclebound title character, but that I actually care at all enough to have kept reading this far, cynical tosser that I am - it's an unashamedly fun title that revels in the standards of the medium, particularly in the inventive use of SFX.
Watching: My Life As Liz, Ugly Betty, Cougar Town, Modern Family, Time Trumpet.

Saturday 26th September 2009

Lightning saturday tv roundup:
Vampire Diaries: emo.
Mercy: smug.
Monk: Monk.

That's as insightful as I get when I haven't watched much tv through babbysittin', gymin' and laying on my arse without booze. This is not how you day off!

Sunday 23rd August 2009

I don't know what shames me more - that I willingly watched Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: the Movie, or that I enjoyed it, post-production sound and visual edits to the kung-fu and all. Well, maybe not that last bit, but the nostalgia factor for the movies - tosh or not - that I and my mates sat through for the odd decent bit of kickery punchery is good to experience once in a while. We put up with a LOT of crappy movies during our kung-fu phase (because everyone goes through a kung-fu phase), our tolerance even extending to a brain-amnesty for the films of Albert Pyun, the non-budget Segals, the Eastern Van Dammes, the careers of Cynthia Rothrock, Gary Daniels, Mark 'Iron Chef' Dacascos - all glorious to the growing mind of the pre-interweb kung-fu fan who's willing to overlook their craptitude for want of anything else to watch, but not something to revisit too often in adulthood, or what laughably passes for that in a household where a sizable portion of the living room floor is taken up by Playstation peripherals shaped like guns, guitars and drum kits.
Still doodling away, aimlessly as it's the weekend. Come the weekdays and we're back to the deadlined material. Gettin' closer, that deadline...

Sunday 5th July 2009 - more thumbnails and Watchmeh review

Just watched Watchmen, and my main complaint is... not bad. Misses the point on so many levels in slavishly recreating the tropes and idioms that the original comic book deconstructed, not least by introducing newer superheroic tropes created by modern cinematic interpretations of the genre, such as the body-armor costume and 'normal humans as superhumans by way of slo-mo and wirework' fight scenes, one of which - the prison dust-up - was clearly meant to be whitey one-upping Old Boy's memorable "1 man, 1 hammer, fifty thugs" hallway fight, but Snyder is just so addicted to multi-angle slo-mo and technology doing all the work for him that the scene merely serves to make the original look better in all it's lo-fi glory. You could argue it's a microcosm for the Watchmen movie's problems as regards being an adaptation of an original work, I suppose.
It's pretty soul-less and shallow, and that's the problem - it's neither good nor bad enough to be entertaining, and any fun to be had comes from having the recognition-buttons pushed rather than any new insight or a better interpretation of the material or themes - the ending especially is too much the makers trying to have their cake and eat it, because this is inherently silly stuff that's only ever as serious as it's treated by those making it - a giant blue man with no pants who's going to kill us all is just as silly as a space-squid from Dimension X.
A solid 'meh'.

Wednesday 3rd July 2009

Hmm... Trying to break out of my comfort zone and learn to draw new things on demand, I'm beginning to think I've bitten off more than I can chew with a short story for FutureQuake Press about a time-traveller trying to destroy organised religion, as by page three I have to draw Abu ‘Ali Mansur Tāriqu l-Ḥākim, who's an 11th century caliph and imam, and it only occurred to me while thumbnailing the pages and seeking out reference that some things - such as devout muslim leaders who discourage the creation of images of their likeness - might be hard to find visual reference for, as might the Church of the Holy Sepulchre before it was destroyed in the 11th century. Ah well - this must be where that 'imagination' thing I've read about comes into play, but I don't think it'll catch on.

Watching: the season of ATHF I didn't realise had just been shown - hurrah!
Reading: Power Pack Classic, Captain America
Playing: Sudoku, Fallout 3

snapsot of a weekend

Obligatory daily update, and not much to report beyond the usual saturday routine of sleeping in late on a glorious morning only to wake up later so I can go into town and get to the bank and find the weather's turned to bloomin' rain. Then gym to watch me programmes, which are admittedly thin on the ground with the end of the US season, but I still have anime to catch up with, ranging from the under-appreciated Turn A Gundam (an entry in the giant robot genre inspired by the Studio Ghibli visual aesthetic) to the tweener fantasy Magical Witch Squad Alice (a Harry Potter-influenced cross-dimensional adventure that turned up in the west as Tweeny Witches, and features visuals veering from functional to exceptional alongside a great musical score). After the gym, back home for dinner and a lie down to recover from all that effort and beery haze for an hour or two while I catch up with my Star Wars rewatch to coincide with Phantom Menace's 10 year anniversary (Lucas isn't credited much as a director, but he's workmanlike enough across both action scenes and drama that he's actually ahead of other 'event movie' directors like Michael Bay who lose it in busy sequences - the prequels aren't as bad as I thought first time around), then off down the cinema for the latest Terminator, although in the end I didn't bother with that and decided to have a wee scribble instead.


Apart from that, I just wandered about, occasionally sitting down for tv catch-up - if Henry is the killer in Harper's Island and the end of episode 8 isn't a bluff, I totally called that in episode 1.