Al'Rashad

So I've been drawing a weekly webcomic for the past, oh, almost two years now. It was right around the time this place became a ghost town. It only occurred to me just now that I should post something about it here.

The comic is called Al'Rashad, it's written by Christopher Bird of Mightygodking, and we're well into the fourth chapter. We're coming up on a hundred pages, and you can read the whole thing for free. You can see page 1 here, click through to get to the rest.

This is Canada’s Game

Alpha Flight playing hockey, in honour of the big win yesterday in men’s hockey.  Crossposted from my sketchblog.

3 Things I want to do more of this year

I read a line somewhere that seems to fit as this year’s motto: “What you do every day is more important than what you do once in a while.”  The three items below are what I hope to chip away at this coming year.

Reading

I read a ton of stuff this year, but despite that this is my stack of books that I bought but haven’t yet read:

And that’s just the graphic novels and TPBs!  Time was, new comics wouldn’t last a day in my house.  I’d tear through anything I hadn’t already read.  Now I’ve got this monster pile, with books I bought years ago and still haven’t gotten to.  Part of me likes always having something new waiting, but that also keeps me from rereading old stuff, and rereading is where I get the most value out of books.  This wonderful pile of potential is also an anchor.

I have another shelf that’s just novels waiting to be read, and one more full of non-fiction books.  A line that I used in many conversations this year is that I wish we had some of that Matrix technology so I could just put a plug in the back of my head and download a book into my brain instead of actually having to read it.  This statement ignores the idea that the effort involved in reading acts as the gatekeeper to knowledge.  You have to be willing to work to get at the ideas.  If you can’t be bothered to slog through a book to get to the kernel within, then you didn’t want it badly enough.  That’s how we keep the riff raff out.  I used to know that.

Writing

The only place I get to write these days is this blog, so I was more than a little surprised to log on here today and find that my last update was in September.  I felt bad enough before when I thought it was sometime in November. 

When I go long periods without writing, I find I have a harder time organizing my thoughts in other, non writing-related contexts.  My brain turns to cheese.  Even articulating to myself why I liked a movie can be a problem because I can’t summon the language.  Composing simple pieces of writing - like emails - becomes more difficult too, as I dwell on little word choices to the point of immobility.  When you write regularly, a large part of the task becomes intuitive. 

I don’t expect to be posting daily, I’m hoping to make a few updates a week.

Drawing

I’ve been pretty good about drawing daily, but I want to be better.  To that end I’ve set up a sketchblog here: http://davinderssketchblog.blogspot.com/

If all goes well, it should be updated daily.

Baking with Batman

This made me chuckle:More here.

David Mamet on visual storytelling

I'm reading David Mamet's Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business, and I came across this passage about visual storytelling. He's talking about movies, but I think it relates pretty well to comics, too. It starts off as a discussion of Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, but that's just context, the third paragraph is the important one:

...Hitchcock designs each sequence magnificently. There is no "master, over, close-up" about it. Each sequence is designed around its particular theme and purpose in the unfolding story. Once could easily label them, e.g., alarm, suspicion, second thoughts, challenge, remorse. It may be the world's best silent film, undiminished even by the addition of dialogue.

Why are silent films potentially better?

The perfect film is the silent film, just as the perfect sequence is the silent sequence. Dialogue is inferior to picture in telling a film story. A picture, first as we know, is worth a thousand words; the juxtaposition of pictures is geometrically more effective. If a director or writer wants to find out if a scene works, he may remove the dialogue and see if he can still communicate the idea to the audience.

Ancient theological wisdom put it thus: "Preach Christ constantly - use words if you must."

I've heard that suggestion before, to watch movies with the sound off to see if you can still follow the storytelling, though I've never done it, because, seriously, who has the time (and patience)? But I'm always meaning to look at my comics the same way, skipping the words and just reading the images to see how the artist tells the story. The only artist whose work I've ever made time to do that for is Sean Phillips. I don't know why I do it with his work and not any of the other dozens of artists on my shelves. Maybe it's the starkness of his drawings, or his cinematic approach, I don't know, but I should really start paying attention to what other people are doing, too.

I am so glad I don't know how to do this...

...because if I did, I'd spend all my time making my own little action figure movies.

The entire video is done so well, and looks really professional, from the motion blur in the opening, to the way the camera moves, to the laser special effects. The music and the choreography are pretty good, too.

The same person who made this has another series up as well, in the format of some kind of YouTube game. The game isn't particularly interesting, but the images of Batman and the Joker dancing crack me up. (On a side note, I really, really, really loathe the ads that show up on the videos on YouTube now, particularly because they're ON the videos).

Pack it in, nothing you ever do will be as awesome as this

At least I don't have to go to the movies anymore, now that I've seen the peak of cinema: