Spill the beans, old man - word beans!

Somehow Blogger managed not to post yesterday, so that's a new wrinkle to look out for in future...

Been playing Tomb Raider today, and it's not much to do with Tomb Raider so far.
I find the actress an odd choice as they were harping on about how much we'd want to protect poor wilting flower Lara this time out and yet I find it impossible to warm to the voice performance at all to the point I've started skipping the cut scenes and care not a jot when she's choked to death in closeup by her would-be rapist, or crushed to death by falling rocks and the camera closes in on her face as she dies, or when she's stabbed through the heart with an axe, or shot to death with arrows, or when she cries and whimpers as I'm trying to play a fucking videogame - there is an odd emphasis on the suffering of your character that I am having difficulty ratifying with the supposed narrative demands of seeing the formative exploits of the character, especially given the character's oversexualised nature.  As presented so far, all we're actually seeing is someone being so abused and brutalised for the entertainment of others that in later life she is destined to become a robber and sociopathic mass murderer, it is all a bit rum to be honest.

I'm back to drawing my own comicy stuff for the first time in months, and I'm struck by how overly-talky and badly laid-out it all is. Clearly there are lessons not yet learned - or learned only recently. Something like that.

Been to see Iron Man 2 tonight - liked it, but not sure what the rest of the world will make of it. It seems a little more scatological than might be expected, possessed of some pretty odd logic leaps, a largely pointless Black Widow appearance and probably too much self-referencing, though I liked that its self-awareness extended beyond lampshade hanging into a genuine sense of the absurd, like Iron Man and Black Widow hanging out in a donut store and the Iron Man-themed cheerleaders/chorus line. Probably could have done with a more substantial fight to finish up, but all in all it's an enjoyable enough romp, even if it does feel a bit too much like Robocop 2 near the end - not that this is that big a deal for me as I re-watched Robo2 recently and quite enjoyed it.

This dude: living the dream.

God fucking dammit, the joke was supposed to be I'm so late to do Saucy Mondays that they actually happen every Tuesday, but here's Tuesday night and me not even given thought to what I might have drawn.

Watching: Home and Away, American Dad, Clone Wars, Smackdown

Watching: Dark Knight, Bones, Starcom

Watching: Human Target, White Collar, Greek

Watching: Eastwick, White Collar, Batman: Brave and the Bold
Reading: Dear Billy, Death Day

Just scribbling some rough cover sketches for Babble, and boy, but the flu is not conducive for the old creative energies, as it's just one strike-out bad idea after another so far.

Anyhoo... flu. Not great. Slept most of the day away today, and I know from lengthy periods of unemployment in the past that this is not a good thing to do with your time.

Watching: A Christmassy Ted - a revisit of a Christmas standard that in Ireland is akin to the rest of the world's It's A Wonderful Life or The Great Escape, and a daft bit of whimsy tinged with self-awareness it is, too. One of my favorite lines oddly doesn't even get a chuckle from the canned laughter machine: Ted checks the newspaper to see if he's averted disaster and remarks that there's nothing about it in "the Catholic scandal supplement", and Dougal doing a funeral is always fun to see.

Otherwise just aimlessly doodling away, wrapping prezzies and playing GTA4, which I'm finally getting around to finishing well over a year since I actually got the damn thing.

Scribbles today. Getting into edits for Babble and layouts for a Zarjaz fanstrip about a cuddly bear, but otherwise just doodling or watching telly.

Still redrawing the sample pages of the GN, as they were the wrong resolution and dimensions - D'oh! Remarkable how crisp lines and a chance to fix some SHOCKINGLY POOR ANATOMY (that luckily didn't sink the submission) can keep me happy enough redrawing pages I thought I was done with.

Thoughts on rewatching Smallville season, 1 which I have on in the background to keep me amused while I scribble:

1) I'm struck by the generic 'menace of the week' format and lack of glaring story-arcs, but it seems to suit the format, not least because it doesn't make the show seem inaccessible and up its own ass like current seasons, which seem to start every installment with stuff exploding and people shouting even though most of this has little bearing on the actual plot of the episode that follows.
2) I was once asked by a younger family member of Clark/Lex "why are they friends?" and I had no answer then just as I have none now. For the most part it seems to be barely-sublimated attraction tinged with a bit of frisson created by neither character trusting the other, and this is slightly troubling because of how likable Michael Rosenbaum is in the role of Lex Luthor: despite later turning into a sneering panto queen before the character was killed-off Ernst Blofeld style in an exploding truck, you really get a vibe off the guy that he's trying to be a better man than his dad, and despite knowing metatextually how the Clark/Lex dynamic plays out in lore, there's no indication of Lex actually being evil within the confines of the Smallville show itself, he just seems to come from a bad home but is trying to be a good guy by fixing the damage his massive asshole of a father caused to a rural farming community. So when Pa Kent gives Lex the evil eye in early appearances, it's baffling to see that behavior from someone held up by the main cast as being a paragon of heartland American values, unless you're willing to stretch the homoerotic attraction subtext to read Pa's hostility as a dislike of what he sees as a growing attraction between his son and another man, but that would make Pa more than a little unlikeable, and he really doesn't need any more fuel for that fire, because one of the main things that struck me about early Smallville was that

3) Pa Kent is a self-righteous, sanctimonious prick. I don't just mean because he hates gays - though that doesn't help - but because he really is a stifling presence best summed up when he goes to one of Clark's football games after telling the boy that he didn't trust his son around other kids. Clark makes an effort to reach out to his dad by telling him that he's glad his father is there to see him play, only to be rebuffed with "I don't support your decision, I'm just here to see no-one gets hurt" in much the same way Dewey Cox's dad tells him that the wrong son died.
4) Clark isn't much of a hero. I don't mean because he doesn't have a costume or get into fights, but because he has to be guilted into acting by believing himself responsible for the deaths caused in the meteor storm that bore his starship to Earth from doomed Krypton. Before this, he's basically "fuck those armed robbers and that baby that's dying in a crackhouse fire - my dad wants me to hang at the farm" which is just bullshit. Superman can help people so he does: that's what makes him not only a hero in a long-running series of funnybooks, but in popular culture as the ideal American, acting out of good conscience rather than a guilty one, with nothing to gain and no guilty secrets to keep at bay with bravado and funny quips. In other words, the antithesis of that cocksucker Spider-Man, who I've never cared for and don't give a toss that the Devil showed up and gave a divorce in a comic one time that fans are still bitching about.

Watching: Smallville
Reading: Scott Pilgrim 3, X-Factor, Batman and Robin
Listening: player on shuffle
Playing: Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel