Broken Glass Makes Me Laugh

This is Canada’s Game

2010-03-01T13:41:00.001-08:00

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

2010-01-01T23:26:00.001-08:00

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

2009-09-02T13:09:00.003-07:00

This made me chuckle:More here.

David Mamet on visual storytelling

2009-06-22T19:37:00.002-07:00

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...

2009-04-17T17:31:00.004-07:00

...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

2009-03-02T20:40:00.001-08:00

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

Is there any such thing as celebrating too early?

2009-02-15T17:01:00.001-08:00

Remember the consternation about Usain Bolt's celebrating his win before the end of the race? Well, it hasn't stopped him:

The fastest boy alive

2009-01-28T21:25:00.001-08:00

My brother's always buying hockey clothes for my sister's older kid. Being an athlete himself, I think he'd like to see my nephew take up sports. I got to thinking that I should get my say in from the comics side of things, so I bought this outfit for him:

"Time to get to work."

Hockey player or superhero? I know what I'd choose, but hey, it's up to him. I just want the kid to have options.

I almost didn't buy this costume for him because I thought, "Well, Hallowe'en's so far off." But then I remembered that when you're two, you can wear stuff like this anytime, anywhere and it's fine. Nobody cares that a two year old is at the mall dressed like the Flash. Just one more disadvantage of growing up, I guess.

Let's start the year off right

2009-01-04T11:48:00.001-08:00

I posted Matt Harding's last "Where the Hell is Matt" video once before, but in order to get the full effect of the actual content of today's post, I think you need to watch it again, so here:

The lyrics for the song in this video are from a poem by Rabindranath Tagore. This is "Stream of Life":

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

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And here's a link to a more recent video in which Matt Harding explains how he is an actor and he faked the whole video (but not really).

It's New Year's Eve, so party like you're in Sweden's pants

2008-12-31T10:30:00.003-08:00

I've watched this video way more times that I should have over the past two weeks, and I still laugh each time. Now it is my gift to you. Go into the new year with a hearty viking belly laugh:

If Superman were in The Dark Knight

2008-10-27T14:01:00.003-07:00

This'll make you laugh:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

The Glorious Mane of Michael Bay

2008-10-14T15:48:00.002-07:00

Okay, while I still think Michael Bay is a bit of a tool*, this video makes me want to be him:

It's all the pointing that makes me love it.

*To be fair, not really. He might be perfect lovely as a human being, I just don't like his work.
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Here's the pitch: Someone sets up a Twitter account as Michael Bay, and they post regular updates as if from the mind of the man himself. Hilarity ensues. Here's a sampling:

Fuck you. 11:21 AM September 29, 2008 from web
No. Seriously. Fuck You. 11:22 AM September 29, 2008 from web
Boom. That's it. That's all you need to know. 11:40 AM September 29, 2008 from web
If Im groggy in the am I get a triple venti espresso from starbucks and dump it on the first homeless person I see in downtown LA. It works. 08:25 AM October 02, 2008 from web
Right now, I am combing my hair. Holy hell it's a breathtaking mane. 09:46 AM October 02, 2008 from web
Would you describe my jaw as chiseled or cut from the finest marble man has ever quarried? 01:55 PM October 03, 2008 from web
This is the worst commute EVER. I'm buying a faster helicopter. 08:46 PM October 03, 2008 from web
C4 was not enough. That's what I invented C5. DOUBLE BOOM. 12:57 PM October 08, 2008 from web
I make all of my own furniture. Out of dynamite. 01:45 PM October 07, 2008 from web

The Dark Knight meets Toy Story

2008-10-10T12:44:00.006-07:00

There's a bunch of these trailer mashups out there for the Dark Knight trailer, but this one's worth pointing out. It starts out okay, but I think it really comes together after the bit with Mr. Potato Head.

If you click through on the video, you can watch it in higher definition at YouTube.
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While we're on the topic of The Dark Knight, I spotted this image on Digg today, under the title, "Why Halloween Will Suck This Year":

God, that's awful. The thought of these clowns (ha!) roaming the streets is enough to make me want to stay inside that whole week with the door locked and the curtains drawn. It's going to be like the 'Year of the Borats' a couple of Halloweens back.

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I don't know what's worse, though, all those guys above, or this prefab Joker costume being sold in stores now:

What is that? The Joker as played by Rodney Dangerfield? "I told that last joke to my wife and she didn't laugh. Why so serious? I tell ya, I get no respect." Someone should get those guys that make the burgers look so good on Wendy's commercials to use their wizardry to make this costume look halfway decent.

Bono is a harsh and unforgiving god

2008-10-09T12:13:00.001-07:00

This is pretty funny:

Flash photography

2008-09-16T11:16:00.001-07:00

Okay, fine, I'll admit it: some photos are better with a Flash.

I didn't make this*, and I don't know where it came from, but I love it.

*I did make a small colour adjustment on the hand, though. Not sure whether I should messing with someone else's work, uncredited though it may be.

I spotted Plastic Man in a Toronto subway station last week

2008-09-12T14:15:00.003-07:00

Sorry the quality of my photo isn't so great, but I didn't want to blow his cover.

Summer Comic-Movie Review: The Dark Knight

2008-07-26T16:04:00.002-07:00

It’s been over a week since I saw the Batman movie and I’m still trying to come up with something intelligent to add to the conversation beyond, “Joker = good = Oscar. AmIrite?” The short version is that the movie is good, almost as good as everyone says it is. This is the Batman movie that gets is right, the one that we’ve (or maybe just “I’ve”) been waiting for. The Dark Knight is the best Batman movie to date (not that the competition in that arena is too fierce), and it’s one of the four or five best superhero movies made so far. This is a well thought out movie and it requires a well thought out response.

(Minor spoilers ahead)

The movie overcomes a lot of the problems I had with Batman Begins. Superhero movies, like any adaptation, are a tightrope act. The best adaptations demonstrate an understanding of the source material without being a slave to it; they show something new, while staying within the boundaries of the characters and their world. You can’t have Batman firing lasers out of his fingertips or detaching his head and throwing it at someone, but the same old kicking and punching isn’t going to cut it either. Movies like X2, Iron Man, and even the Blade series, succeed because they know what to keep from the comics, and how to use film to do things that comics can't. The failing of Batman Begins was that it didn’t show me anything I hadn’t seen before. They got the character right, but none of it was new. Batman Begins had no moments that made me sit up and say, “Yes. Exactly.”

The Dark Knight is chock-a-block full of those moments. I was smiling right through the first half of the movie (you know, until it got serious). The entire sequence in Hong Kong, to take one example, is perfect, from the rooftop preparations (which finally made me accept that the armour is a better choice (aesthetically and practically) than the cape and cowl of the comics), to the glide (which takes my least favourite aspect of the previous movie (the fucking gliding) and makes it awesome), to the fighting (showing how scary having Batman come after you would be), to the escape (pure Batman; a perfect combination of planning and daring. The WTF look on the cops’ faces says it all). The fighting in the building is just one of the many satisfying beatings Batman lays down in this movie, another great one being at the nightclub where Batman cuts a swath through mob goons, pummelling his way to Maroni. Nolan leaves behind the choppy Bourne-style fights of the first movie and pulls the camera back to let us watch the beatdowns in full. They have to use the first act to make Batman look cool, because he spends the rest of the movie getting punked.

The centre of the movie is, of course, Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker. Ledger’s Joker is a magnetic presence, and he lights up the screen whenever he appears. Just as Jack Nicholson's Joker is (undeservedly) held up as a classic, Ledger's performance here is one for the ages. The movie falters around the midpoint after a catastrophic death, and doesn’t fully recover until Ledger reappears in the hospital at Harvey Dent’s bedside. Ledger disappears under the Joker’s tics, mannerisms, and vocal intonations. If I hadn’t known who was playing the role, I’d never have been able to identify him. Hell, I still can’t see him in there even though I know who it is.

The writing plays just as important a part in defining the character. Each of the Joker’s speeches is perfect in the insight they give into his psyche. I particularly liked the bit where he explains his capriciousness by saying he’s like a dog chasing after cars, and that he wouldn’t know what to do if he caught one. When he started telling the (admittedly terrific) story of how his father gave him his scars I was disappointed that they’d nailed him down to a single origin, and then overjoyed when he gives a different explanation later in the movie. In one of several parallels with The Killing Joke, this bit of dialogue mirrors a line from that story in which the Joker says, “Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice.” Grant Morrison also has this terrific line in Arkham Asylum, in which a psychologist theorizes:

Unlike you and I, the Joker seems to have no control over the sensory information he's receiving from the outside world. He can only cope with the chaotic barrage of input by going with the flow. That's why some days he's a mischievous clown, others a psychopathic killer. He has no real personality. He creates himself each day.

(clipped from Adherents.com)

Nolan deserves much of the credit for taking this daring approach to the Joker. He abandons some of the traditional trappings of the character to give him a new, modern scariness. I was unsure about the Joker having face paint instead of white skin, but one of the opening lines describes it as “war paint,” which makes it make sense, and hints at the character’s savagery. The Joker’s appearance sets up an immediate and obvious contrast with Batman. The two characters’ masks make them inhuman, reducing (or elevating) them to archetypes or avatars. The clean and rigid lines of Batman’s armour are almost architectural, and reflect the order on the surface of the city, while the Joker’s scarred face and crumbling makeup suggest the underlying decay at Gotham’s soul.

Does anyone else hear the Bosom Buddies theme song when they look at this photo?

At the center of the story, between these two forces, is Harvey Dent. The dualism that pulls at him eventually manifests itself on his face. Dent is the true protagonist of the story, not Batman, because Dent is the only one who changes during the course of the movie. Dent’s fate shows the pessimism at the core of the story. (I honestly thought the movie was going to end in the aftermath of that big death and Dent getting his face burned off. I thought, "Well, I guess Batman loses in this one," because there was no way he could hurt the Joker like the Joker had just hurt him). A major theme of the movie, as several characters say outright, is escalation. Batman’s hasn’t improved the city; rather his presence has made things worse by drawing out a “better class of criminal.” The Gotham City of the movies isn’t the dystopia of the comics…yet. It’s getting worse since Batman showed up.

In adopting this worldview, TDK reflects the major Batman works of the 1980s, which shared this pessimistic vein. While Batman Begins took much of its inspiration from Denny O’Neil’s 1970s Batman stories (which, now that I think about it, may explain that movie’s blandness), The Dark Knight draws on the darker Miller/Moore Batman of the 1980s. Both Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan cite Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke as a major influence on their respective Joker stories, but while Burton used only the superficial aspects of the story (ie. the Joker’s disfiguration being a result of a plunge into a vat of chemicals), Nolan goes deeper into Moore’s story to draw out the psychology and motivation of the Joker. In The Killing Joke, the Joker terrorizes Commissioner Gordon in an attempt to show that madness is the appropriate response to the horrors of the world. In The Dark Knight, the Joker repeatedly puts people in situations where they are forced to confront their own capacity for savagery, as when he tells the people on two boats that their survival is contingent on them detonating the other boat. The Joker wants everyone to have the same epiphany he did: that the world is insane. Following from this, I’m convinced that if either boat had pressed the detonator they would’ve blown themselves up, leaving the other boat to realize what’d happened, and that their altruism had left them vulnerable.

The turning point in The Killing Joke is when Gordon, despite being put through hell, insists that the Joker be brought in by the book, “…To show him our way works.” In the movie, it’s when the people in the boats refuse to blow each other up to save themselves. (MGK has a perfect one sentence review of the movie hinging on this point). As in the comic, the movie Batman confronts the Joker with the idea that Joker’s failure in bringing others down to his level indicates that the Joker’s madness is a sign of personal weakness.

The depth of thought behind this Joker, and the magnitude of this actions (for example, the demolition of the hospital) elevate him beyond the comic book Joker, and leave the Burton/ Nicholson Joker looking like a joke. The scene in Burton’s Batman where the Joker and his goons dance their way through an art gallery, slopping paint on fine art, to the accompaniment of Prince on a boom box, seems like a Saturday morning cartoon in light of TDK. Months ago, Jack Nicholson stated that he was furious that he hadn’t been considered for the part of the Joker. I wonder if Nicholson, who wrecks the first Batman movie with his hammy acting, is sitting somewhere right now, having seen TDK, saying, “Shhiiiiitt.”

Some critics are writing that this movie is at the level of Heat or The Godfather II. I think that might be overstating the case. Parts of the film do transcend the genre to reach those heights, moreso than any other comic book genre movie. However, some of the speechifying is just too earnest and sentimental. As well, the movie drags in the middle after that catastrophic death, with Batman’s moping being less interesting than you’d think it’d be. The movie is close to perfect, but it isn’t quite there. However, it is exciting, complex, and both emotionally and psychologically draining. Oh, and the score is pretty amazing, too. The question I’m left with is that with the way things are at the end of the movie, the way everything has gone wrong, this movie is Empire Strikes Back, and the door is open for a sequel, but how can they possibly top what they’ve done here? Anything less will seem like a joke, but anything more won’t leave a city standing for Batman to defend.

The goddamn animated gif Batman

2008-07-17T22:54:00.003-07:00

This shouldn't be nearly as funny as it is. But it is.

Read quickly, though.

'Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter'

2008-07-10T21:14:00.003-07:00

George Bush surprised world leaders with a joke about his poor record on the environment as he left the G8 summit in Japan.

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

Mr Bush, whose second and final term as President ends at the end of the year, then left the meeting at the Windsor Hotel in Hokkaido where the leaders of the world's richest nations had been discussing new targets to cut carbon emissions.

(from The Telegraph.co.uk)

Why does shit like this always happen while The Daily Show is on hiatus? I've noticed that the weirdest, most satire-worthy events take place during those weeks when Jon Stewart and Colbert are off, as if public figures are using their absence as a "get out of jail free" card. Meanwhile, between this and the Jesse Jackson Obama comments, I'm going nuts (no pun intended) imagining the field day Stewart and Colbert would've had with this stuff.

I mean, come on. "He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock"? Seriously, COME ON. That can't be real. Am I on the Truman Show? It's like an Onion article come to life. What place is there for satire when real life is this farcical? What could you add to this scene to make it more ridiculous? "He then squatted and defecated in the doorway before moonwalking out of the room while pretending to fire six-shooters at the heads-of-state left in the room." See? That adds nothing. The whole situation is already as stupid as it can get.

I'm smiling for days every time this guy puts out a video

2008-06-25T18:39:00.002-07:00

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Watch previous versions here: 2005 and 2006.

New Hulk Movie = Not So Good

2008-06-23T22:54:00.003-07:00

I saw the new Hulk movie a few days ago, and I wasn’t very impressed. I didn’t out and out hate it either, but the movie doesn’t have much to recommend it. I came away pretty firmly neutral, which is the same way I felt about Ang Lee’s version a few years ago. Just as with that one, I have a hard time pinning down why the new movie doesn't work.

The main failing is in the writing. Good writing can excuse a lot, from shoddy effects to leaps in logic. Unfortunately, The Incredible Hulk, lacks in clever moments and memorable dialogue. I liked the “You wouldn’t like me when I’m hungry,” and “Why are you always hitting people?” but for the most part no one had a personality. Part of the blame lies with the actors, who, with few exceptions, come across as one dimensional. In particular, Liv Tyler (who I’ve liked in other stuff) began to grate on me with her breathy delivery.

Also, the movie waffles between genres, going from a dark, suspense story to the type of action movie that keeps logic at an arms length. I’m all for suspension of disbelief, but at times the military stuff in this movie is too dumb to be ignored. In the battle at the university, a full-on military assault with live ammunition and explosives is carried out in a public area. Later, during the fight in New York, a helicopter gunship fires at the Hulk and the Abomination in the middle of Manhattan, while they fight on rooftops. Never mind that bullets travel through buildings. None of the military's actions have consequences, whether that be injured civilians or General Ross getting bawled out. All of this is just lazy writing. Even one scene in which someone asked for an authorization for using this kind of force would have helped, but there’s nothing. I’m a fan of stupid action (I’ve had several conversations over the past few weeks in which I extol the virtues of Red Dawn), but the movie doesn’t live up to the tone it sets for itself.

Leaving aside smaller, technical details, chunks of the plot don’t make sense. I still don’t understand what Tim Roth’s character was supposed to do. General Ross juices him up to go fight the Hulk, but Roth can’t beat him in a fist fight, and guns are useless, so what was the point? (If that character had a personality, I’d say he should be commended for taking things to the next level and hulking himself up). A legion of soldiers like that I could understand (and that would’ve looked pretty cool too, a whole squad racing around like Roth does).

The tone of the movie is hurt further by all the “cute” moments. I remember reading something somewhere that said that a strength of the Ang Lee movie was that it didn’t have any moments where the Hulk bounded by and someone gawped and rubbed their eyes. This movie is filled with moments like that. The moment where they almost have sex is a cheap laugh. He can’t because he’ll get too excited, never mind that he ran full out through the streets with soldiers chasing him for several minutes before his heart rate became an issue there. Liv Tyler’s freakout at the cabbie is another example. It might’ve worked if something in her mannequin-like performance had hinted that she was capable of anything other than passiveness. The film abandons consistency in the style of a sitcom in order to pander to the audience.

Where Iron Man was subtle with its Easter eggs, Hulk is ham handed (although I suppose that’s appropriate in a way). Even the cameos are handled poorly in this movie. I accept that Stan Lee has to be in all these movies, but his cameos are work better when he’s in the background (in a Waldo sort of way) instead of the in-your-face appearance here. And with Lou Ferrigno, I can understand why you’d want to put him in, but his appearance only serves to remind you, “Hey, I’m watching a movie!” Even the Robert Downey Jr. bit, though cool, should’ve gone after the credits, like the equivalent Sam Jackson scene in Iron Man. It’s not part of the movie proper, and with the Banner scene preceding it, it gives the movie multiple endings.

What would’ve helped the movie? Aside from a complete overhaul, I don’t know. I do think the movies are missing something by not bringing up the Jekyll and Hyde aspects of the Hulk. The films treat the Hulk like a bigger, dumber Banner, instead of a different personality. I like the idea in the comics that Banner and the Hulk hate each other; Banner is afraid of the Hulk, and the Hulk hates Banner’s weakness. Moving the franchise more in the direction of horror/action might work, too. That’d accommodate the psychological aspects of the character that don’t seem to fit in the current pure action framework of the movies. The Hulk should be scary. The most effective scenes in this movie were during the fight in the factory at night, when you couldn’t see much. Changing the Banner/Hulk relationship by making the Hulk scarier would also help make sense of why Banner wants to get rid of the Hulk so badly. After all, in this movie every time the Hulk comes out he fixes Banner’s problems. Why would he want to get rid of that?

DC Comics via 60s Anime, and Marvel Characters Smoking

2008-06-05T17:40:00.007-07:00

Cliff Chiang posted an awesome series drawings of what the DC universe would look like if it'd been put together by old school Japanese animators. My favourites are Batman by way of Gatchaman:

And Superman via Mazinger:

Check out more at Chiang's site.
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While I was looking around for links, I found this sweet picture of Mazinger by an artist named Jose Liebana:
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And finally, Drawn! linked to this great set of images by Chris Schweizer of Marvel characters smoking. The research that went into the project is pretty good, as some of these characters were only ever shown smoking once (if my memory is correct).

Marvel instituted a smoking ban in their comics a few years back, which I can understand, I guess, but you sometimes forget how many of their characters have been shown smoking. I mean, geez, Captain America?!

I notice that a lot of these instances came out of the 1960s, which paints an interesting picture of what a Mad Men-like place the 60s Marvel universe was. The number of cigar smokers at Marvel jumped out at me, too. I guess it comes out of Jack Kirby's own cigar smoking. I was looking for cigar smokers at DC, but I could only come up with supporting characters. Can anyone out there think of any DC leads who smoke cigars?

Italian Spiderman

2008-05-27T12:32:00.003-07:00

I haven't been the biggest fan of the Spider-Man movies, but this new direction they're taking looks like something I might be interested in:

As an aside, the people that made this clip deserve a lot of credit for how well they approximate the 70s look. Check out their site here. Background information here.

(links via Blog@Newsarama)

Movie Review: Iron Man

2008-05-06T11:27:00.004-07:00

I wasn't going to write a review of Iron Man, seeing as plenty of reviews were already going up by Friday afternoon, but after watching the movie I have got to talk about it. Short version: If you haven't seen it, go watch it. You will enjoy yourself, I promise. Come back and read this after you've seen the movie. Oh, and if you haven't heard, stay to the end of the credits.

Things I liked:

- With great difficulty, I managed to watch only the first trailer before seeing the movie. That self-restraint paid off, because almost everything in the movie was a surprise. After the initial scenes, I never knew where they were going to go, or how nice the effects were going to look. The unpredictability that Robert Downey Jr. brings to his character only adds to the feeling that anything could happen.

- I had this image as my desktop for a while, and one day I looked at it and realized, the suit is his jet-pack. The movie follows through on that idea; it isn't about Tony Stark adopting the identity of Iron Man, it's about him building stuff and wearing it. As Warren Ellis (I think) says, he's the test pilot for the future. All the building and experimenting scenes are fun to watch, and the slow build before his first real flight makes the flying seem that much more exhilarating.

- Robert Downey Jr. owns the role of Tony Stark. I like him in everything he does, but here I stopped seeing him and only saw the character. He's got that jerkish charm, so that in the beginning of the movie you like him despite his arrogance, and later you like him because of his arrogance.

- They do a great job showing how smart Tony Stark is, and how his mind is always working so fast that people around him can't keep up. The movie Stark is a lot like Mark Millar's Stark, but with better dialogue.

- Jeff Bridges is terrific as Obadiah Stane. With his shaved head and beard, the physical change is enough so that you forget it's Bridges, and he's such a good actor that he never reminds you. I knew he was the villain beforehand, but the way he finesses Robert Downey Jr.'s character is so effective that even I started to doubt.

- The tech in the movie is awesome. It manages to seem cutting edge but still plausible.

- The movie makes being rich look really fucking cool. That might seem like a given for most people, but usually when I watch things like Entourage, I'm entertained and repulsed at the same time. I can't put my finger on why the obvious wealth on display in this movie didn't bug me, but it could be because everything was nice but also functional.

- I loved all the little Easter eggs, like:

the Ten Rings
Rhodes looking at the backup armour and saying, "Next time"
and of course, Nick Fury. (Note, too, the little scars around Fury's eyepatch, suggesting that, like the Ultimate version, he lost the eye to Wolverine). The dialogue in the Fury scene was stilted, but the sheer awesomeness of its inclusion overwhelmed everything else.

The movie included lots of these little comics moments, without having them be distracting.

Things I didn't like:

- It's good that they kept the Yinsen character (and name!) even in the new setting, but I didn't like that he was reduced from being a co-creator of the armour to being a gopher. I like the original idea that the first armour was a collaboration. It gives a reason why Stark hasn't build something like this before: he needed Yinsen's input.

- I understand that Middle Eastern terrorists are the new Soviets in movies, but the Arab stereotype created by American cinema is off-putting. Where Soviet villains were cool and calculating, Arabic bad guys are cowards and incompetents. When entering the cave where Iron Man awaits, the Arabic soldiers cower (understandably) and their leader shoves them ahead to preserve himself. The negative stereotyping in this movie isn't on the level of, say, a True Lies, but I was disappointed that they took this route at all.

- Terrence Howard, though likeable, didn't convince me as James Rhodes. I can buy Howard as many things, but, soft spoken as he is, not as a military colonel.

- After Stark's one mission to the Middle East, in which he kills about five or six guys, the problems in the region are never addressed again. There's some minor dialogue about him going out again, but in terms of the plot, the movie seems to dust its hands off and say, "Now that Iron Man blew up that tank, there's peace in the Middle East." I don't mind an action movie using shooting and explosions as a way of dealing with complex geo-political problems, I just wish they'd shown a more extensive operation than shooting six dudes.

All of these are minor complaints, and the fact that I watched a comic book movie and came away with only have one comic-related nitpick is bloody amazing. The movie is incredible, and I think I'll be seeing it again before it leaves theatres.

Lex Luthor. Dude. Get over it.

2008-04-28T12:28:00.002-07:00

Look in that little window down there:

Is that guy ever doing any real work? How that company manages to stay afloat, I'll never know.

(image via Comics.org)

Hancock, Chalk Circle, and T. Rex

2008-04-25T00:31:00.002-07:00

The number of movies coming out this year that I want to see is kind of ridiculous. Counting comic book movies alone, there's Iron Man, Hulk, Punisher: War Zone, The Dark Knight, Wanted, Hellboy 2, and Speed Racer (which is comic booky). On top of that, there's a new Indiana Jones and a new James Bond movie this year. Shockingly, they all look like movies I want to watch; I'm not getting the sinking feeling I got when I saw the trailers for Spider-Man 3 or X-Men 3.

It's all too much. Clearly, I'm in a coma and my brain is constructing a universe to keep me happy. I don't care; don't revive me.

One movie that fits into the group above, but hasn't been getting a lot of coverage is Will Smith's Hancock. The lack of marketing for this movie is surprising, considering it's a Will Smith, July long weekend movie. It's at the top of my list because I really like the trailer:

I like the humour, and I like the effects. It looks even better in a higher resolution. The music that's playing we first see Hancock hooked my attention, too. The song starts off as a kind of tinny guitar, before launching into a meatier riff. I went looking for it and found out that it's the one song, "20th Century Boy," but we're hearing versions by two bands. The tinny one is a cover by Chalk Circle, and the heavier one is the original, by T. Rex.

I found both versions on YouTube (because every video ever is on YouTube), and I've posted them below in the order you hear them in the trailer, with the cover version first and the original second. You don't need to listen to all of both songs, just hearing the contrast between the opening ten or twenty seconds of each is interesting.

See if you can guess the respective eras for each. Here's Chalk Circle:

And here's T. Rex:

Art Spiegelman on the CBC

2008-04-07T20:35:00.002-07:00

Here's a nice little interview with Art Spiegelman that CBC aired last night. It touches on Spiegelman's major projects and ideas, so if you pay attention to what he's doing there won't be much here that's new, but it's good to have it all in one place.

One part to note is when Spiegelman discusses the decision by the Canadian book chain, Indigo, to not carry the issue of Harper’s containing his article on the Danish cartoon controversy. Disappointingly, as Spiegelman criticizes Indigo for shying away from selling a magazine because it contained the offending images, CBC blurs those same images.

I’m no fan of the Danish cartoons, but I’m even less in favour of censorship. Peter David addressed the issue of censorship succinctly, saying that the answer to speech you don’t like is more free speech, not less. At the end of the clip, the hosts of the program acknowledge that their network is engaging in the very actions that Spiegelman is objecting to, but their admission seems more of a way to blunt criticism than anything else.

(link via Quintin)

Get some perspective

2008-03-24T20:57:00.002-07:00

Yeah, poor Carl. Oh wait, you've got a castle. Man up, you rich jerk, and try to think what it's like for us regular people who get chased out of a town. Self-involved jackass.

The Flash's New Catchphrase?

2008-03-04T17:53:00.008-08:00

When Mark Waid was writing The Flash, every issue introduced the Flash with the phrase, “My name is Wally West. I’m the Flash, the fastest man alive.” As far as superhero catchphrases go, it’s always struck me as a little bland, especially compared to the “Up, up, and away!” Superman gives as he leaps into action, or even Wolverine’s narrated “I’m the best there is at what I do, but what I do ain’t pretty,” delivered before, during, or after he slices up someone who happens to be in the wrong place at the very wrong time. I thought the Flash was stuck, until I stumbled across this panel in the “Secret of Barry Allen” trade paperback:
“See ya, Dick.” How perfect is that? It’s short and snappy - and edgy, the way all the kids today like it. Can’t you see that on mugs and t-shirts and movie posters? Most importantly, it works with the character. It’s the perfect catch phrase for a guy whose main power is running away from you. “See ya, dick,” as the bad guy chokes on his dust. Or when the Justice League needs him to go on that super-fast errand:

Superman: Flash, we need that isotope, now!
Flash: Sure thing! See ya, dicks! [ZOOMS AWAY]

Or maybe just as he delivers the finishing blow to an evil mastermind:

Bad Guy: It’s too late, Flash! No one can stop me now, not even you!
Flash: See ya, dick. [FLASH PUNCHES VILLAIN] SFX: POW!

That’s the best part of the new catchphrase: the versatility; he can use it anywhere. It's appropriate when the world is in danger, or when he hears his wife looking for him to clean the mess in the kitchen ("Uh-oh. See ya, dick"). There you go DC, it's like a license to start printing money. You're welcome. Just remember to send a little this way. I'll be the guy wearing this t-shirt:

100 Bullets: A Short Appreciation

2008-02-15T17:53:00.000-08:00

I was laid up in bed for most of December and January, which sucked, but it did give me an opportunity to catch up on my reading. I used some of the time to reread comics I’ve bought in recent years, something that I don’t get to do much anymore. It’s a shame, because second and third readings often offer up a lot of nuance and depth that I miss as I’m rushing through the first time. With 100 Bullets, for example, my first impression of the last three collections I read (Books 8, 9, and 10) was that the series had started to wander. The storytelling has always been cryptic and roundabout in reaching its goals, but the latest stories seemed aimless and convoluted.

When I read through the books again recently, however, I saw that I was way off base in my initial assessment. The stories are as tightly plotted as ever, and the writing is just as involving ten books in. I don’t know why I was so surprised; my estimation of 100 Bullets is always miles better after the second reading than the first. I’m not going to go into a detailed discussion here, but I did want to post a couple of pages that stood out to me on this read through.

Oddly enough, after arguing how terrific the story is, both pages I selected are nearly wordless, a better showcase of artist Eduardo Risso's talents, than writer Brian Azzarello's. Both pages, I think, are masterful examples of staging. The first is the tail end of a shootout on the street; pay attention more to the orange panels than the blue:
The second is this rich mustache guy barking at his goons to go whack someone, until he spots creepy old Agent Graves, who sends everyone scurrying just by being his creepy old self:

It's an all around great book, and you should be reading it. Just remember to read it more than once before you make up your mind on what you think about it.

Matt Da-mon!

2008-02-02T09:39:00.000-08:00

I swear I was going to post actual content today, but this is too funny not to put up. Sarah Silverman breaks some delicate news to Jimmy Kimmel:

Super-Friends

2008-01-30T14:25:00.000-08:00

This video made me laugh. It mashes up Friends and the Super Friends, which is one of those ideas that seems obvious after you hear it:

(via BoingBoing)

On cover bands

2007-12-02T03:30:00.001-08:00

Being at a bar with a mediocre cover band playing is like going to karaoke and never getting a turn.

Just an observation.

My India Trip: The Accident

2007-11-30T03:36:00.000-08:00

I got off the plane in New Delhi just before one o’ clock, local time. Between the two flights and the layover I’d already been traveling for twenty-three hours. I still had a seven hour bus ride to go, after an unspecified wait for the bus to even show up (the wait turned out to be another five hours). However, none of that mattered, because I was in Delhi. Everything was like I remembered: the impenetrable and incomprehensible mess of traffic on the streets, the air pollution so thick you can taste it, and the overwhelming sense of being somewhere very different from home.

And then I looked over and saw a Venom sticker on the back of this guy’s van:

Not so far away from home as it used to be, I guess.

I’ve been home for a week now, trying to shrug off the jet lag, trying to figure out what to write about. That last bit isn’t exactly true. While I was in India, I kept knocking around ideas for blog entries, like the persistence of the caste system as demonstrated by the servant culture, or cheap cars and the democratization of travel, or the damned air pollution so thick you can taste it. I had all these ideas swirling around in my head, and then we got into a big car accident.

This is the truck we ran into.

I don’t know if you’ve driven in a developing country before (and really I’ve only been to India, so I don’t know if driving is better in the rest of the developing world) but it’s kind of scary. As near as I can figure it, in India the rules of the road consist of:
1) No slowing down, drive as if your brake lines are severed
2) Pass other cars constantly
3) Honk all the time.
I wish I’d taken video so you could see how this works, but, needless to say, there’s a crap-your-pants moment about every seven seconds.

Now, I’ve done my share of reckless driving before and I’ve had some close calls, but driving in India is like someone took all those moments and put them on a mixtape, sped it up, looped it, added a bhangra beat, leaked it onto the internet, where it got downloaded by a BILLION people, who put it on repeat in their cars.

My uncle, who lives there, asked once if I wanted to try driving. I said that I didn’t think I had the proper judgement yet; that, as a passenger, sometimes I’d think there was plenty of time to pass, and my driver would pass, but just as often I’d think, “If we try to pass now, we’ll die,” and my driver would go for it then too. I was content in accepting that I didn’t get Indian driving, so I wasn’t going to worry about it.

All of this is to set the scene. On my sixth or seventh day there, we were driving back from the wedding and reception that I’d gone to India to attend. We were in one of those cheap cars that I mentioned above, a tiny white hatchback called the Maruti 800, which is marketed as the “people’s car.” Wikipedia tells me that more than half the cars in India are Marutis.

The wedding receptions in that part of India are held early in the day, so we were driving home at around six in the evening. The sun had just set, but we still had dusky light to see by. You know how they tell you that time is the worst for visibility? Well, turns out they’re not kidding. We were doing about 70/kph on a straight stretch of relatively empty highway. We were all chatting away, all looking forward, and none of us saw the truck parked on the road until it was about fifteen feet ahead of us.

I’m writing about this to share the experience, because it still feels so strange to me that I was in one of those big car accidents that you seen in the movies. My mom says that she and my aunt screamed before we hit, but I don’t remember any screams until after; we were all too surprised. They drive on the left over there, so my uncle swerved right. Doing so saved us, but we were still too close, and the left side of our car smashed into the truck.

Right before we hit I remember thinking, “That’s it, then.” And then the glass from the windshield and left side windows shattered and flew in at us. That’s when the screaming started. With what momentum we had left, my uncle coasted the car around to the front of the truck and parked.

You can the scrapes where we hit, and that's a piece of our fender lying to the side.

We had five people in the car: from left to right, in the front were my aunt and uncle, and in the back, my cousin, my mom, and me. I was completely untouched, and I turned my attention to my mom, to get her calmed down. I focused on her, not wanting to look in the front. None of us had been wearing seatbelts; the back had none, and with the lack of enforcement, front passengers never wear theirs. I was sure that my aunt must be lying on the hood - but she wasn’t. We’d been in an accident like the one in Adaptation when Chris Cooper pulls out of the driveway and gets smoked, but aside from sprains and minor cuts, we were all fine. The passengers on the left side, the side of the impact, got the worst of it, but even they weren’t that badly off. I remember thinking that if you had to get into a major accident, this was the way to do it.

We got out of the car and found that the truck driver had pulled over to take a leak by the side of the road. Other drivers pulled over to see how we were and to yell at the truck driver. We were in the countryside, so someone drove us up the road to some small shops, while someone else fetched a doctor for my aunt. Throughout everything, I felt detached, as if I was watching all these things happening to someone else. I don’t know if I was in shock, but I found myself getting irritated that all everyone around us could talk about was the accident. I wanted to say, “Yeah, it could’ve been terrible, but it wasn’t, so why don’t we talk about something else?” I might’ve actually said something like that.

However, over the next few days, I was reluctant to get into any cars, and when I did have to be driven somewhere I found myself pushing myself back into my seat every time we passed someone. I met someone from Chicago a few years ago who talked about the riots and shootings that happened after when the Bulls would win a championship, and he said, “Chicago’s the only place where you hope your team loses in the playoffs.” I felt like that, as I went from marvelling at how much nicer the roads were now than when I visited ten years ago, to hoping that our routes took us over broken down roads so we’d have to drive slower.

I got back to Canada okay, but the shine’s worn off of India for me. I’m reluctant to go back. The accident wasn’t the only thing, but I always trusted that even though some things seemed strange or wildly unsafe to me, I’d be okay, because the people around me knew what they were doing. Now I’m thinking that a ton of steel and glass doing seventy is a ton of steel and glass doing seventy, no matter where you are. Am I getting conservative in my old age? I wonder.

Reed Richards - Mr. Fantastic Jerk!

2007-11-09T18:16:00.000-08:00

Okay, at first glance you'd assume that this is one of those panels taken out of context to warp what's really happening in the scene. Surely, there's some perfectly logical reason why Mr. Fantastic, patriarch of comics' premiere superhero family, the Fantastic Four, is slapping his wife. Mr. Fantastic must be under some kind of mind control, or that's his evil twin, or he's trying to brush that red anemone off her cheek and she's got to shut up so it doesn't go in her mouth.

The interesting thing about this panel is that if you put it in its original context, it's just as bad:

In an even broader context, Susan Storm, the Invisible Girl, is being mind controlled, which explains the 80s hooker outfit but not the mullet. Mr. Fantastic has to snap her out of it, and his plan, as seen here, involves being a gigantic jerk. This being comics, his plan works, they defeat the villains, Mr. Fantastic bottles his nerd rage away again, and the Invisible Girl (now "Woman") doesn't file a restraining order. You'd think the smartest man in the world would be able to come up with a better solution for mind control than "I'll slap some sense into her," but I guess not. Oh casual misogyny in comics, where would the industry be without you?
__________________________________________________

I'm off to India for a few days, kids. Photos when I get back.

I've had bad bosses before, but geez...

2007-11-06T17:43:00.000-08:00

I ganked these from over at Scans Daily:

I was going to post just that second page, because I think it tells you everything you need to know to get what's going on, but the expression on Robin's face in the very first panel is too good not to share. That's a look that says, "Seriously-- What. The. Fuck." He doesn't say anything the entire time because he can't believe the level of bullshit that's going down.

And I'm guessing it's explained in the story, but why is Batman wearing a trench coat and a hat over his costume? It's a pretty awesome fashion decision, and I guess it speaks to the idea that a superhero's costume is their face, but it strikes me as impractical. Aside from the fact that wearing clothes over your clothes (and your cape) must be restrictive, why would you need a disguise on top of a disguise? Isn't that like wearing a ski mask and a wig? Or maybe a Santa outfit over your Halloween costume? The whole point of the Batman outfit is that it conceals your identity, if it's working you don't need any more than that.

Then again, maybe the fact that the hat and trench coat make no sense is intentional, a kind of shorthand to emphasize that he's gone >ahem< batshit crazy and that's why he's chained his partner to a cinderblock. If that's the case I guess we should count ourselves lucky that he doesn't also have lipstick smeared all over his face and a granny wig over that hat.

EDIT: Jason points out the obvious innuendo of Batman's "Down you go!" line. How did I miss that?

Will I keep buying: Casanova?

2007-11-03T17:48:00.000-07:00

I think I’m going to stop buying new comics. I know that sounds like crazy talk, given that I’m in the store every Wednesday and I look forward to buying comics all week, but for someone, let’s say, as “thrifty” as I am, being charged the higher Canadian price when our dollar is stronger right now is driving me crazy. What really gets on my nerves is that comic stores pay the American price for their stock, regardless of what the Canadian cover price is. In Toronto, following the lead of the Silver Snail, comic stores are selling comics at the U.S. cover price, but I don’t know of any stores out here that are doing the same.

Most comics publishers have been slow to alter Canadian cover prices, I figure, so as not to alienate comics retailers, preferring instead to alienate comics buyers. There’s a lot of talk about the effort needed to alter cover pricing, but if our currency had gone in the other direction, I’m sure the response from the big companies would have been much faster.

I’m not giving up comics, but I’m becoming even more selective in what I pick up, and I’m seeing what I can wait to pick up off of eBay or Amazon at a discount. Whenever I’m in the comic store now, the question I ask is, “Do I need this issue right today, or can I wait a few months until it’s collected?” Or, “Do I need to be buying this book at all?” I think a lot of comic buying is driven by the continuous run. You stick with a series long after you’ve stopped enjoying it, sheerly out of force of habit. (The same happens in relationships or with bad TV shows -cough - Smallville - cough -). All you need to drop a series is an excuse to break your uninterrupted streak, like, say, price gouging.

All these thoughts were running through my head last week, when I was in my comic store and I saw the latest issue of Casanova. When this series started up, I gave it a chance precisely because it was cheap. I’d never read anything by the writer, Matt Fraction, or the artist, Gabriel Ba, before, but the series was being published in the format pioneered by Warren Ellis’s Fell: 16 pages of story, 4 pages of text in the back, no ads, all for two bucks, and I wanted to support the experiment. I wound up liking the writing and loving the art, so I stuck with the book.

Recently, however, in addition to my money concerns, Gabriel Ba left the book and his twin brother, Fabio Moon, replaced him, with an art style I don’t like as much. For me, the biggest selling point of this book was always the art, and with all this comic price resentment brewing in me, I decided that this new issue was a make-or-break, and would determine whether I’d keep buying the series.

The issue, unfortunately, was awesome. The book is chock full of good bits, but this three panel sequence convinced me to keep buying:

Casanova is the coolest spy movie you've ever seen, but smarter. Except it's more than that. It's Steranko's Nick Fury by way of Grant Morrison – a comparison I’m not going to be able to make for long, because the more I read of Fraction's work the more I'm hearing a voice distinct from Morrison's- obsessed with the same sort of hypercool weirdness, but tinged more with scifi than, I don’t know, is it magic that Morrison’s into? Casanova is funny, it's clever, it's mean, and while it's all about surfaces there’s something going on underneath. The whole first issue is online here. You should read it.

Persepolis: the movie

2007-10-12T22:44:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks back, I was scanning the movies playing at the Vancouver International Film Festival and I saw the animated adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel, Persepolis, on the list.
Being a man of leisure at the moment (read: unemployed) I decided to catch a weekday showing so as to avoid any long lineups, because someone with nowhere to be hates nothing more than wasting time standing in a line. The first showing was Monday morning at ten, which sounded like a good idea until my alarm went off. I debated whether trading my bed for a drive into the city during rush hour to see an adaptation of a comic I only sort of liked was worth it, but I got myself up anyways. The deciding factor (no joke) was that Vancouver city workers are on strike right now so I can park for free and not get ticketed. People who know me will attest that I hate those parking fascists worse than anything.

I’m glad I did go, and not just because I got to stick it to the man. The movie is excellent. Like her graphic novels, the film depicts Satrapi’s childhood in late 70s/ early 80s Iran, her teenage years in Vienna, and her return to Tehran as an adult. The story offers an insider’s look into life in Iran during a time of tumultuous social change, and couples that with Satrapi’s search for personal identity as an adolescent. Her liberal, Western ideas put her in danger in the regressive conservatism of post-Revolutionary Iran, but her ethnic origins and distance from her family make her just as much of an outsider in Austria.
I generally dislike adaptations, and particularly direct adaptations, but the movie connected with me in a way the comics didn’t. The lead character, Marji, and the people around her are layered, human, and relatable. As in the comics, the standout character is Marji’s grandmother, who is both blunt and funny. The humour in the story comes across better in the film than in the comics, and I had several moments where I laughed out loud. At times I thought the movie was too "cute" or over the top, as in the “Eye of the Tiger” scene, but the audience around me loved it all.

The music used in movie added a dimension the comics couldn’t. From the “Eye of the Tiger” to Iggy Pop, music plays an important part in Marji’s rebellion and self-definition. One scene in the movie, where she dances at a punk concert, had the most believably animated dancing I think I’ve seen in a cartoon.

Going into the movie, I was curious about how the animation would look. The comic has a very two-dimensional look to it, with bold lines and lots of flat blacks, and I didn’t know how well that would translate into motion. The filmmakers do an excellent job, though, with a style that both tells the story clearly and is beautiful in places. The characters and their environments are simplified and graphic, even abstract sometimes. Some of the animation reminded me of older French cartoons, or the heavily stylized animation of the early 1950s, and some scenes were like nothing I’d seen before. The backgrounds used in the movie stayed with me for days afterwards, and the silhouette and smoke effects were done particularly well.

The movie is a little over an hour and a half long, but it felt much longer because of how much ground it covers. I mean that in a good way. I thought it was excellent and the crowd around me liked it even more than I did. It opens this Christmas in limited release, so if you see it playing near you, rush out and see it.

Letterman

2007-09-30T21:06:00.000-07:00

I know this is all over the place already, but I liked it so much I wanted to make sure you saw it.

Me and one of my roommates had an argument once about whether we were going to watch Letterman or Leno, and she noted that people who like one don't seem to like the other.

I remembered a George Foreman appearance on The Late Show years ago during which Foreman said that the guys at the airport had warned him about Letterman. Years before that, I'd heard a radio morning show where the hosts had somehow gotten David Letterman's home phone number and were offering a t-shirt or something if you phoned them and then managed to keep Letterman on the line for a minute. A guy called in, got put through to Letterman's house, and then had a five or ten minute conversation with him. I was late for class, but I sat in my car and listened to the whole thing because I could not believe how nice Letterman was being to this stranger and how the call just would not end. Even the radio hosts were reduced to giggling disbelievingly by the end. And just before the guy got off the phone, he says to Dave, "You know, my mom said you were going to tear me apart." And Letterman replies, "Mike, I only do that to people I know."

I like a talk show host that people need to be warned about. It doesn't happen much any more, but this interview recalls the classic Letterman - from his heyday hosting Late Night - when, if he thought his guest was an ass, he'd make them look like one. Just watch it already.

A three month recap

2007-09-21T17:06:00.000-07:00

I got back into Vancouver a month ago now, and I’ve been using the time since to recuperate. I’ve been off work since the end of June, but I’m only counting the last month as time off. The two month period before that was the most stressful time I can remember. From late June to late August, I:

Quit my job

Pencilled, inked, and coloured 37 full page illustrations for my friend Monika’s children’s book

Travelled to England, Wales, and Spain

Attended two Sikh weddings (harder than it sounds. When it’s family, there’s about five days of pre-wedding festivities. Lots of parties, very little sleeping. Think of it as celebration by ordeal)

Pencilled, inked, lettered, and directed the printing of the 12-page ashcan me and Des gave out when we--

Attended the Wizard World convention in Chicago

Packed everything I own into my car (Yes, this gets its own bullet. Try it sometime)

Drove from Toronto to Vancouver through the U.S. (That’s Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington).

On top of all that, between the travelling, weddings, going aways, coming homes, and my birthday, I count at least 45 days when I was drinking- not necessarily drunk, but at least drinking.

I’m pretty sure I gave myself internal injuries.
__________________________________________________
Impressions of Barcelona:

Buildings are shaped so that intersections are octagonal rather than square like they are here

A ridiculous percentage of the women are beautiful, all with tan skin and dark, dark hair. Hola guapa!

The city randomly smells like ass. You’ll be walking down a street, perfectly happy, and out of nowhere you’ll smell the stink of sewage. Me and my brother walked around Barcelona, sporadically calling out, “Ass!” to warn each other, always too late.

Oh, I just remembered I’ve got a good Barcelona story. I’ll share it in a later post.

__________________________________________________

Check out those dudes talking to Galactus on the right!

Impressions of Chicago and Wizard World:

The downtown area is really big, and much nicer than I expected, though I only saw a little of it as I zigzagged through the city after dropping Des off at the bus terminal

At the convention I saw Michael Madsen, the blond Cylon girl from Battlestar Galactica, and Lou Ferigno. I didn’t see many comics pros that I wanted to talk to. Overall, I think the big show in Toronto is better.

No one in Illinois wears a motorcycle helmet. The first guy I saw was merging onto the highway, and I thought, “That can’t be right.” But after that every single person I saw on a bike wasn’t wearing one either. With each one all I could think was, “You’re about to die. Yep, and so are you. And you with the passenger on the back, you’re both going to die.” I guess it’s like smoking, where you know it’s dangerous, but you’re doing it because it looks cool. And it does look fucking cool, racing around on a bike with your hair blowing around, but I’m taking it as a given that every motorcycle rider I saw in that state is dead.

Anyways, I think that’s enough of an update from now. More of the usual silliness to follow in short order.

Go West! That's what we're gonna do!

2007-08-10T00:00:00.001-07:00

I'm leaving. Tomorrow morning, I pack the last of my stuff into my car, drive out of Ontario, and in a few days, arrive back in Vancouver three years after I left, to the day. I've been wondering what I'm going to miss the most about Ontario. I've been here a while and I've been thinking that I've met some great people here, but man oh man, I could go on and on about that local library. It's fantastic!

However, in the past week the people really brought their A-game, and I've got to say that they've edged ahead of the library. The friends I've made here are some of the funniest, most intelligent, most welcoming people I ever thought I'd meet. Leaving would be much easier if you jerks had some flaws I could latch onto, but no, you've got to make this difficult. I'm leaving to go back to my family; I'm leaving because I've got a new nephew; but I'm leaving some good friends behind.

Other things I'll miss about Ontario? I'll miss this house that I live in, I'll miss the perpetually blue skies, I'll miss the adventure of exploring a city I don't know, I'll miss the strong comics community out here, and dammit, I'm going to miss the Hamilton Public Library. Seriously, they get so many graphic novels and comics TPBs there that even I can't read them all. I've read so many good comics because of that library. And their DVD collection! Don't get me started.

And you, I'd like to have seen you before I left; but we don't talk so much anymore. It's too bad; it would have been nice.

I always hesitated to leave before because I thought that once I did I'd never come back, but I see now that isn't true. I have plenty of things I don't like about you Ontario- what with your war machines and your ghetto scenes- but I'll be back, just try and keep me away.

Barcelona

2007-07-25T04:48:00.000-07:00

I'm tapping this out on a borrowed laptop, sitting in a small apartment in the sticky heat of Barcelona. I've been travelling with my brother and my cousin (which is kind of like being on the road with a couple of robots built for drinking) and today is the last of our five days here. My cousin - who lived here for several years, and is acting as our tour guide - seems to eat once every three days, meaning that we eat rarely as well, so I've been hungry and drunk for most of this trip. We flew here from Birmingham, England, where I went through five days of Sikh wedding festivities for another cousin's wedding, during which I was well fed and drunk. That's ten days of drinking too much, not sleeping enough, jumping through time zones and language locales. Add that all together and you have an equation that explains my current confused, tired, and semi-hallucinatory state.

Barcelona has been fun, though, and the city is beautiful. Yesterday, I said that I'd have a hard time living here, because the city is too intense, and my brother was surprised, saying that he found the place laid back. Thinking about what I'd said later, I realized my impressions came from the fact that something is always grabbing my attention, from a building's architecture, to an oddly placed alley, to a gorgeous girl on a scooter. Bacelona isn't bustling like London, or full of sculptures like Florence, but still there's something to look at everywhere.

I've got stories and photos to share once I get my head together. Right now I need to rest before we head out again.

Jerry Robinson at the Paradise Comicon

2007-06-17T12:43:00.000-07:00

I attended the Paradise Comicon in Toronto last week and got the chance to go to a bunch of workshops and talk to some interesting people. The highlight of the convention was a conversation I had with Jerry Robinson.
Jerry Robinson entered the comics industry when he was seventeen years old, in 1939. Looking for some work on the side while he went to college, he wound assisting Bob Kane on a new character named Batman. Unfortunately for his college plans, Robinson got into comic books just as the first major boom hit, and higher education fell by the wayside. Shortly after getting the job with Kane, Robinson was pencilling and inking Batman stories. In addition to refining Batman’s look, Robinson suggested “Robin” as the name for Batman’s sidekick and created the Joker.

Alongside Kane, Bill Finger, and later Dick Sprang, Robinson shaped Batman into the character we see today. However, Kane was a savvier businessman that most of his peers, and his deal with the publisher stated that he would receive sole credit for all Batman stories whether he worked on them or not (as well as financial compensation for the rest of his life), a rule that held well into the sixties. So, while Finger, Sprang, and Robinson contributed thousands of pages of Batman stories, their names never appeared on one.

Robinson worked on a number of other characters, taught cartooning at an art school in New York for ten years, and is listed (in the most recent reference I have) as having “received more industry awards than anyone working in the field.”*

I went to the convention and ran into a couple of my students there. I’ve been teaching classes on comics for the past few semesters, so I walked around with them and pointed out things in a teacherly way. “That’s Gail Simone, she’s going to be writing Wonder Woman. That’s Cary Nord, he draws Conan and they do this thing where they reproduce directly from his pencils so it looks painted. That’s-- Holy crap, that’s Jerry Robinson.” We’d done a lesson on Jerry Robinson, and when I explained that he was sitting right there no one really knew what to do. I wound up talking to him for about twenty minutes, and he talked about his own experiences teaching, and about travelling (he was the first Western cartoonist allowed to do work in the Soviet Union), and about working at DC in 1941 with Jack Kirby on one side of him and Joe Shuster on the other and Mort Meskin sitting over there and that was when my head exploded. The student I was with leaned over at one point and whispered, “This guy is history.” I eventually turned to go because I knew that sooner or later I was going to say something stupid in front of Jerry Robinson, but before I went he reached over and gave me a couple of these little prints he was selling. He signed one, saying, “Here, these are for your class.” I thanked him for his work in comics and I left. The whole experience was the best I’ve had at a convention, and possibly the best I’ve had in comics.

*The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told. Ed. Mike Gold. New York: DC Comics, 1988.

Move over, Daniel Craig

2007-05-15T19:50:00.000-07:00

Three words: Homeless James Bond.

Superman Retires

2007-04-30T20:43:00.001-07:00

Awesome:
Superman Retires

Bryan Talbot and the Monkey

2007-04-26T18:02:00.000-07:00

I got a chance to see Bryan Talbot speak last week as he stopped in Toronto to promote his new graphic novel, Alice in Sunderland. The book is about Talbot moving to Sunderland, England, and exploring the many connections the area has to Lewis Carroll, creator of Alice in Wonderland. Talbot spoke for about two hours, and much of that was a discussion about Carroll and his influences. During this part of his talk I was acutely aware of how hard and uncomfortable my chair was. If I knew anything about Carroll or Alice I'm sure I would have been more into it, but I was much more interested when he discussed his process in working on this book and other comics, particularly when he spoke about the mechanics of the comics page.

The best part of the talk was when he went into some of the individual stories that make up Alice in Sunderland. The book isn't one story, but dozens, all having to do with the area. At one point he told a story about how when Napoleon's armies were marching across Europe, people in Britain worried that England would be his next stop. As in World War I, Talbot explained, when stories went around that Germans ate babies, during Napoleon's time the English spoke of the French as being inhuman. Thus, when a French ship was destroyed off the coast of the port town of Hartlepool, and the local fishermen came across the French sailors' pet monkey in the wreckage (dressed up in a little military uniform, no less), they assumed they'd found a Frenchman. So they took him to the mast of a ship, and hung him.

Just in case you didn't catch that: they hung the monkey.

To this day, Talbot said, in the same way that people from Newcastle are called "Geordies" because they supported George II, people from Hartlepool are still called "Monkey-Hangers", because-- well, you know.

I wish the page from the book on which Talbot tells this story was online, so I could show you. It's quite well done, and while I wouldn't say it's worth picking up the book for that one page, it does sweeten the pot.

Oh, and here's a reference for the story, in case you think he's making the whole thing up.

Desktops

2007-04-18T20:56:00.000-07:00

I had this image from Marvel as my desktop for a couple of weeks, because, clearly, I like not being able to find my icons. During that time, I kept having a nagging feeling that I knew who this character in the second tier behind Iron Man was, but I couldn’t place him.
I take it he’s one of the new characters in the Initiative series, so I’m not supposed to know who he is, but still something about him kept poking my brain. Then, when I saw the book on the shelf last week, the realization hit me: it’s Frank Miller!
Look at him: aside from the obvious physical resemblance, he’s characteristically surly, and he’s cradling his fist like he’d like to punch someone, maybe al Quaeda or Wizard Magazine. Mystery solved. I hope he gets his own action figure, or maybe a video game.
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Current desktop (you care, admit it): Eric Powell’s The Goon laying a beatdown, a beautiful image of some brutal comic book violence.

The Understated Joke at the Last Second

2007-04-04T15:12:00.000-07:00

The first time I watched Office Space I almost missed the funniest part of the movie. The main character comes home after everything falls apart on him- his plan isn't going to work, he's alienated Jennifer Aniston. He flops down onto his couch and knocks on the wall he shares with his gregarious, good natured neighbour to invite him over for a beer. The neighbour says, "No thanks," and mumbles something. When we were watching, I waited a few seconds and asked my brother, "What did he say?" and he replied, "I dunno, rewind it." The second time through we hear the lead say, "You awake? You want to come over?" and the neighbour says, "No thanks. I don't want you fucking up my life, too." We laughed harder at that than anything else in the movie.

I like those kinds of jokes, the ones that don't call attention to themselves and are slipped in at the last moment. Arrested Development and The Office both do this kind of humour well. This trailer for the movie The Ex has a perfect example:
On the whole, the movie doesn't look particularly enticing, but the final scene in the trailer is hilarious, and Jason Bateman's last line puts the situation over the edge.

These next two clips are funny all the way through, but both have that last bit that raises the funniness one level higher. The first is a trailer for a New Zealandian (Zealandish?) movie called Eagle vs. Shark, which though Napoleon Dynamite-esque looks pretty funny:
This clip is from Peyton Manning's appearance on Saturday Night Live. Again pay attention to that last line:

The New Dynamic Duo

2007-03-30T21:00:00.000-07:00

Last week the team-up you’ve been waiting thirty years for happened. It’s the story the comics wouldn’t dare to tell, a pairing so audacious it could only happen on Hollywood Boulevard- out where Borat fought the guy from Laurel and Hardy, remember?

Pan-handling caped crusaders and the familiar faces of Star Wars and Sesame Street are giving police along Los Angeles' Hollywood Boulevard more trouble than the real criminals.

An inebriated Batman was arrested recently after he allegedly insisted on using a portable toilet that had been rented by local union workers who were picketing a business on the boulevard.

After the workers tried to usher him along, Batman got confrontational and enlisted the help of Chewbacca. The Los Angeles police department showed up soon after and arrested the dark avenger for disorderly conduct.

Move over Robin, Batman’s got a new partner, and he’s seven feet tall and stinks like wet dog. It makes sense when you think about it, they’re both bad boys doing good on the wrong side of the law. Kindred spirits, like a nerd version of Every Which Way But Loose (which isn’t to say that Every Which Way But Loose was cool-- well, this poster might’ve been, if that monkey wasn’t such goddamn ham).Back on the Boulevard:

Charlie Chaplin didn't say anything, but he did mimic the tipping of a flask.

Oh, you’ll get yours, Chaplin you fink. You don’t want to know what Batman does to stool pigeons. Anyways, I’m sure it was just a misunderstanding, right? Batman wouldn’t go looking for trouble…

According to Elmo, it just wasn't Batman's day.

"He said, 'Business is so bad, I'd rather get arrested than be out here today.' I swear to God he said this."

Okay, maybe he would. What’s worse is that he’s not the only superhero going through a rough patch:

LAPD officers posing as tourists also busted Mr. Incredible as well as a man dressed as the villain from the Scream movie franchise for excessive begging.

”Excessive begging”? That doesn’t paint a pretty picture. Hollywood is simultaneously depressing and entertaining; how do they manage that?

(Thanks K, for pointing me to the article! And go check out the Batman TV show sound effects page, where I ganked the "Kapow" from )

We gonna rock down to...

2007-03-05T19:32:00.000-08:00

Paulie H-Bomb earns his keep with yet another photo of something named after the real life Batman.
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In lieu of real life content, amuse yourself with this video showcasing what the soundtrack to the Captain America movie should've been. Not safe for work because of language.

(spotted over at BeaucoupKevin)

Spreading some love

2007-02-14T18:34:00.000-08:00

Big congrats to Des and Megan on the arrival of yet another member of team Reddick. Des appears determined to follow through on his promise to procreate his way into a band, with new boy Davin (heckuva name!) following hard on the heels of year old Cade. I'm viewing the new baby's name as two-thirds of a tribute; I don't care if it's not, that's how I'm taking it.

On to the silliness.
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For you, Valentine:

Don't make me crush you.
(by arosenlund)
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Roommate Carol let's me know she's stuck on me with this Valentine:
Because nothing shows affection like little peanut-butter and chocolate Spider-man heads.
There were six in the box, but one fell, sadly, before my choco-lust. Poor fellow, you'll be missed.
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And finally, if you haven't seen it already, some sublime ridiculousness:

The trailer is funny the first couple of times, but after the sixth or seventh viewing, it turns into some kind of bizarre poetry. It's provocative!

Say Uncle! Say it!

2007-02-10T15:09:00.000-08:00

I've got all sorts of great things happening around me lately and I just don't have time to tell you about them. The biggest one is that I became an uncle about three weeks ago. That's right, my sister had her kid (finally! We had to wait, like, months), and seeing as being a really good uncle means being a really bad influence, I'm already stockpiling firecrackers and researching where the good cockfights are in Vancouver. It's probably too early to tell, but I'm hoping the little squirt has inherited his uncle's kidney punch and his uncanny ability to make his aunts cry. But seriously, how does one go about finding a cockfight? It's still legal in parts of Southeast Asia, and Vancouver has a large Asian population. Where do you go when you've got a hankering for some of that old country fun? Janis, you must know. Ah well, finding out will take a while, but that's fine, I've got time. It'll be six, seven months before he'll be able to appreciate it anyways. I can tell already, being an uncle is going to be a lot of work, but, oh the rewards.

No soup for you!

2007-01-31T09:25:00.000-08:00

Driving to work a couple of weeks ago, Kevin spotted this sign, and now we've been seeing it everywhere. Kevin calls it the most counter-intuitive sign ever, and I have to agree. The weird thing is that it's always posted when you're going onto or coming off of the highway. We can't figure out what it means, other than that if you eat soup anywhere near the highway, then you're in big trouble.

Batman in Australia

2006-12-29T18:55:00.000-08:00

Broken Glass correspondent Paulie H-Bomb writes in from the wilds of New Zealand with this photo:He writes:

I took this photo for you in australia. You owe me a beer.

Like all of our correspondents here at BGMML, Paul asks to be paid only in alcohol, which in turn allows us to keep our operating costs low. Don't worry, you will get your beer my inebriated friend.

As for the photo, a little bit of internet research reveals that this "Batman Park" is not, as you might expect, a life size recreation of the Batcave complete with dinosaur, giant coin, and sarcastic manservant, rather, it is an actual park. It's named for the explorer John Batman (how's that for a handle), who, among other things, was one of the founders of the settlement that became Melbourne. The city of Melbourne was almost named Batmania, and the fact that it wasn't is one of the grave historical injustices that I will correct if I ever get a genie.

Looking up information on John Batman is entertaining because, like any sort of biography, he gets referred to by just his last name a lot, so you get passages like these ones from his Wikipedia entry:

In December 1825 or early 1826 Batman captured the notorious bushranger Matthew Brady.

and

Batman negotiated a treaty, now known as Batman's Treaty, with some local Aborigines to rent their land on an annual basis for a quantity of items such as knives and flour.

Historical Batman! He catches the bad guys and negotiates the treaties.

These quotes from this other site are even better:

With the 'Aboriginal Wars' of Tasmania, Batman became involved in the 'final solution' of forming a line across the island to drive certain of the the Aboriginals into a 'manageable' area. Although some of Batman's motivations may have been humane, the results were far from humane, and Batman's involvement with this dark episode in Australian history must influence our attitude towards him today. However, rather than than taking a simplistic approach to a complex situation, it is worth learning more about the issues involved from a book such as Batman and the Aborigines.

Ooh, Batman and the Aborigines, I heard that one's good. I think they used this Norm Breyfogle cover for the paperback.

His son drowned in the Yarra whilst fishing on the falls, so there was no male heir to carry on the Batman name.

No heir! Holy missing sidekick!

Batman had been diagnosed with syphilis in 1833 (was it contracted from his wife or elsewhere?) which progressively disfigured his face and left him unable to walk.

Holy rotting nose, Batman!

Fawkner was to remain Batman's nemesis and in the end Fawkner had much more influence on the development of Melbourne than did Batman.

Holy arch enemy!

The authorities declared that Batman's treaties were invalid, and that Batman was not legally renting the land.

Holy rent problems!

I'm an idiot, I'll stop.
(cover courtesy GCD)
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Speaking of Pauls, and of beers, I went for a drink with Paul B in Toronto a couple of weeks back. We hadn't hung out in a while, so we shot the shit, and talked the shit about everyone we know (except you). For me, the defining moment of the night came when the woman with the injured leg who'd been siting at the table to Paul's back got up and had her friend help her to another table, this one behind me. As she hopped and hobbled by, supported by her friend, Paul glances over and mutters, "Yeah, have another one, rummy," (or words to that effect).

This is why I love hanging out with Paul, because beneath that choirboy exterior he is the coldest, dirtiest, Magic playing bastard I know. Moreover, even though I know this about him, he still manages to shock me into laughter. And that is a great thing.

I was going to try and post tomorrow, but laughing at an injured person might be just the right note to end the year on.

I've been meaning to call you

2006-12-10T18:54:00.000-08:00

Uh, hey. So, I haven’t written in two months. Yeah, it’s been that long already. How’ve you been? Me? Oh, I’ve been busy. Working. Yeah, the same job I mentioned last time, the teaching. Hm? Yeah, it’s still good. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned, but I tend to get bored at jobs once I get a handle on what’s going on. But this place? There’s no routine; every day is different. Each semester so far I’ve taught a class I’ve never taught before, and last semester I had three classes that were new to me. The constant panic keeps me from losing interest. Things are still busy, but the blogger’s guilt was getting to be too much, so here I am. I know me showing up out of the blue like this is unexpected, so we'll leave it with a short post today. I’ll give you a day or two, and you can get used to the idea. And then we’ll try this again.
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In the meantime, just so I don’t leave you empty handed, here’s Simon Pegg about to kick an old lady in the head. If you haven’t seen it yet, go watch the trailer for his new movie, Hot Fuzz. It’s as much fun as kicking-- Right. Sorry.

Creative writing with Arnold Schwarzenegger

2006-10-09T09:06:00.000-07:00

Work has been crazy lately so I haven't had a lot of time to post, and that's not changing anytime soon. I'm teaching a few high school English classes, one of which is a creative writing course. In that one, at the beginning of every class, I have the students do ten minutes of free writing based on a starting point I give them. The idea, ostensibly, is to get them loosened up and for them to write in every class, but mainly I think I do it for my own amusement. Some of them write pretty funny stuff. In one class, I brought in this picture I love:
And I gave them the tagline:

Claudius killed Hamlet's father
and married his mother.
BIG mistake.

I wish posting students' work without their permission was somehow ethical, because some of the responses I got were genius.

The Schwarzenegger image is from a sequence in The Last Action Hero; I've hung onto a newspaper clipping of it for over a decade(!) now, so I'm glad I finally got to use it for something. If you haven't seen the movie, it's Arnold Schwarzenegger poking fun at his own image as the star of mindless action movies. One of the scenes features Schwarzenegger in an atrocious version of Hamlet. Someone has, of course, taken the Hamlet bits from the movie, recut them as a trailer for a Schwarzenegger Hamlet, and posted it on YouTube. (As Dane Cook says: "Every video ever is already on YouTube… Do this; here’s a little test. Go home, go to YouTube, go to the search engine, do this: punch your keyboard. Just punch it twice, hit search. There’s a video for that. ")
Watching the video, though, I see that my great tagline that I gave the students is actually in the movie, sort of. Guess I'm not as clever as I thought.

Canadian National Comic Book Expo - 2006

2006-09-07T12:06:00.000-07:00

After a month spent back home in Vancouver, I flew into Toronto last Thursday, just in time for the Canadian National Comic Book Expo. The programming on all three days looked interesting, but with my jet lag I could only muster up the will to go in for Saturday, which looked to be the most dense.

I wrote a few months back about going to the Paradise Comicon, and the novelty of attending a "big convention." I had no idea what I was talking about. The Paradise Con is big, sure, but only in terms of what I'm used to. Paradise has plenty of name guests, but the atmosphere is laid back, and you have plenty of room to walk around. The Fan Expo is a combination of five conventions: comics, horror, sci-fi, anime, and gaming (yes, Paul, I put it last). It's Nerd-a-palooza, held in a proper convention center, and with crowds like I've never seen. I mean that last bit literally, I've never seen a crowd like this, but we'll get to that in a minute.

If you squint, you can see the X-Men dancing

For me, the draw of conventions used to be the opportunity to pick up cheap comics or hard to find items, but I think I own everything I want that's in my price bracket (although if someone knows where I could find a reasonably priced copy of Batman: The Man who Laughs I wish they'd tell me. And, really, why does everyone have issues 1 to 3 of Point Blank and not 4 and 5? Did the two last ones even come out? And will I ever see a copy of The Fall again? I get it Ed Brubaker, I should buy your stuff when it first comes out instead of waiting for reviews. I've learned my lesson, stop punishing me).

Anyways, the real reason for me to go these days is guests and workshops and question and answer sessions. For Saturday, I'd planned on going in for the Geoff Johns workshop at noon, but, true to character, I got there late. I wandered around for a bit and made the Josh Middleton drawing workshop shortly after. Middleton was informative, and entertaining, and he drew some pretty pictures.

One of my favourite parts was his mini-rant about lack of anatomical knowledge among some artists, particularly artists the artists of the 90s. As he was drawing an arm he launched into a monologue, "You don't know how to draw a wrist so you draw a wristband. It's got a communicator, or a pouch. The pouch is the size of a stick of gum. What's it got in it? A single bullet, just in case?"

After the workshop, I wandered around the dealer tables on the floor for a bit before heading to the back to see if I knew any of the guests. One of the first tables was John Paul Leon's, and I managed to talk to him a bit without gushing too much. I mentioned a few books of his that I'd liked, and he said they'd printed too dark. He complained about the loss of control when handing over his work to a colorist, and I suggested he do something at Oni, since they're a mid-sized company publishing in black and white. He pondered the idea, so if that happens it was because of me. You heard it here first.

Around the other side of the table I talked to Tommy Lee Edwards, whose work I also like a lot. He has a really big head. He complained about DC not collecting the Question miniseries he did with Rick Veitch, talked about Marvel's eagerness to work with him, and told me about a project he's got coming up with Mark Millar, which hasn't been announced yet (shh, don't tell anyone). The whole time, I wondered how hard it must be for him to buy a hat. Not really, he was interesting, and he seemed like an alright guy. But he did have a big head.

I moved down the row of tables at the back wall, stopping to talk to people whose names I recognized, and moving past ones I didn't, until I stopped recognizing any names and realized I'd moved beyond the comics people. I kept moving until I saw three name signs that stopped me dead in my tracks:

That's right, Alice Cooper, Captain Kirk, and Mr. Spock. Three of my favourite fictional characters! And not one was there. Cooper was coming by later, while Shatner and Nimoy were due the next day, but regardless, I basked in the idea that they'd be in the spots I was looking at. I'm a loser, I don't care.

I continued walking down the line until I saw a lineup of fans snaking around the right side of a pillar. I walked around the left of the pillar to see who everyone was lining up for, and when I did, all thoughts of space captains and demon rockstars left my head.

Roddy Piper! One of my childhood icons! The man was even a cartoon character at one point! I wanted to tell him about a match in which he'd fought some no name guy with a big, Amish beard, and how the part when he'd thrown the guy against the ropes and on the bounceback grabbed him by his beard with both hands and thrown him across the ring was one of the greatest moments in wrestling history, up there with Hulk Hogan body slamming Andre the Giant in Wrestlemania III. Unfortunately, you needed to have a special (more expensive) pass to get to him, so I didn't get a chance. Instead I moved on.

The oddest thing about the way the guests were positioned was that you'd have a big name, and then an unrecognizable name, and then a big name. I don't know what the reasoning was, maybe so the big names' lines wouldn't run into each other. So you'd have the hot girl from Firefly,

and then a makeup artist or something, and then Princess Leia,

and then some dude, and then Doctor Crusher.

I felt bad for those makeup dudes. I'd look blankly at their name signs, and then my eyes would pop out of my head when I saw who was next to them.

The whole experience was surreal, and made all the more surreal by all the people in costume. You never know when you're going to turn around and run into Wolverine, or Deathstroke.

I know that photo sucks, but I was always being surprised and having to dig for my camera. Some of the costumes were great, like the Juggernaut guy who'd made big arms and everything, and some were not so great, like the fat guy dressed like Squall from Final Fantasy (dude, no). But the effect of all the costumes was to give the place a fun atmosphere. I wish I'd taken someone along, most of the time I was just smiling and laughing to myself. My favourite photo of the day was this shot of one girl dressed up as something taking a picture of four other girls dressed up as something.

It all just feeds into itself.

I ended the day with a workshop by Terry Dodson, which had too much talking and not enough drawing. I waited for useful content as long as I could but then left before the end. I raced to the parking lot where the attendant had been nice enough earlier to let me stay until 7:00 without paying extra. He was mad that I rolled out at 7:15, but gave me an angry wave-through. (Thanks, guy!) All in all, not a bad day.

"Got a haircut, got a silver tooth, gonna get myself arrested"

2006-08-24T12:03:00.000-07:00

I forgot to mention in my last entry, the end of Snakes on a Plane has a terrible music video in which Samuel L. Jackson appears and I think he’s reading the latest 100 Bullets paperback, Strychnine Lives. It just caught my eye, and I hadn't seen it mentioned anywhere else.
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I went in for my annual shearing yesterday, the yearly haircut where I go from rock star to cinema idol, except I’m keeping a beard right now, so the look wasn’t so much "rock star" as "messiah." Actually, when I first saw my brother upon getting back to Vancouver, he looked at the long hair and the beard and said, “What are you? Pirates of the Caribbean?” Funny guy. He’s getting smothered in his sleep.
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And finally, here’s a great take off on Grand Theft Auto in a Coke commercial. Coke may be evil, but they make entertaining commercials.
(Slightly higher quality version available at Google Video).

Snakes on a Mother%#^@ Plane, Mother%#^$!

2006-08-18T22:37:00.000-07:00

I just got back from seeing the movie, and despite thinking that the concept jumped the shark weeks before the film was even released (around the time the comic book adaptation was announced, oddly enough), I had a heck of a good time.
I'm not sure how to go about reviewing this movie. The plot is just as simple as the title suggests; with almost no time devoted to setup, mobsters put snakes on a plane and implausible mayhem ensues. If this synopsis sounds a) awesome, you will probably like the movie, or b) stupid, you should stay home and watch The Notebook again.

The director's previous work includes Final Destination 2, and here he again demonstrates his talent for making gruesome death seem hilarious. Also of note, I realized during the movie that I know the guy who plays the male flight attendant. I had a class with him in university, and I've seen him in commercials before, but this is the biggest part he’s had so far. I waited for the credits and saw that he goes by Bruce James now, using his middle name as his last, which is understandable, but also seems like a waste since his actual name is Bruce Lee.

I mention the connection mainly to point out that now I've got two degrees of separation to Samuel L. Jackson, motherfuckers! Booyah!

Since tonight was opening night here, before the show began one of the theatre employees went to the front and introduced the movie. As I'm sure happened in theatres all over the place, he delivered his spiel as if he were a flight attendant, informing us of the exits at the front and the back, the washrooms to the sides, and the oxygen masks that would drop from the ceiling in the event of cabin pressure loss. He closed by saying that the in-flight movie would be Snakes on a Plane, thereby missing the opportunity to tell us that the movie would be Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane. I think I may get a job at a theatre just for the next week so I can deliver that line.
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I forgot to mention that we saw Clerks II a few weeks back, and Rosario Dawson is hot. Sorry, we saw Clerks II a few weeks back, it was adequate, and Rosario Dawson is hot. While seeing the View Askew characters again was nice, and the dialogue was fun, the plot was surprisingly conventional, which is something I never thought I’d say about a movie with a donkey show in it. But Rosario Dawson, wow, how did I never spot that before?

Hotter than Calcutta

2006-08-02T17:56:00.000-07:00

I was wondering about the temperature yesterday, so I looked it up at the Weather Network site and saw this:

Thirty-four degrees isn't so bad, it's hot, but not unbearable. The real news is the temperature once you've taken the humidity into account, up there in the top right.

Forty-eight degrees celsius. That's hotter than Calcutta right now. I know because I looked that up too:

(I don't know why I use Calcutta as my benchmark for ridiculous hotness. Maybe it's because my ancestry is Indian, so I go with some kind cultural association, or maybe it's because I'm an ethnocentric bastard and I'm singling them out as the "other". Either way, we're hotter than they are right now.)

I played softball today (because I'm an idiot), and at the game my friend Andrew told us about being on the bus and overhearing a comment that he described as "completely offensive, yet entirely accurate." Someone behind him said, "This weather is so gay it's retarded." I shouldn't agree, but I can't bring myself to disagree either.

Anyways, it's a moot point as I'm going to be in Vancouver in seven hours, and the temperature there is just over half what it is here. The next post will be from there then.

To me

2006-07-28T06:44:00.000-07:00

So yesterday was my birthday, and I would have liked to have celebrated Joker-style:

...by tying all my enemies to exploding candles on a giant birthday cake with my face on it, but the number of candles on my cake now outstrips the number of enemies I can round up. Instead, I had to settle for drinks with friends. Thanks to everyone who made it out, and to those who couldn't, where the hell were you? Now leave me be while I go nurse this headache.

On Living Casually

2006-07-26T08:41:00.000-07:00

I haven’t been so good about updating for the past while, ever since I got a new job about a month ago. I got a new job and I still haven’t told you about my old “new job.” Let’s start with that, then.

After the eBay store I was working at shut down last December, I spent a couple of months looking for work before finding a job in February. I’ve mentioned the job in passing here before, but I’ve been vague, mainly because I couldn’t believe I was stuck there. The position was at an order desk, and I say “order desk” because it sounds vaguely better than “call centre.” I was taking orders from American customers (mostly cranky old ladies) calling with one of two catalogues, one selling bedding and the other one filled with the tackiest, most godawful crap you can imagine. We’ll come back to that in a bit.

Taking orders on the phone didn’t seem like it’d be too bad, but several conditions came together to make the job onerous. My favourite part of any job, particularly one of these McJobs, tends to be interacting with coworkers. Spending eight hours a day with a group of people, combined with the shared enemy that is the job creates a weird kind of closeness. At this place, however, conversations with the people I worked with were short and tense because you never knew when your phone was going to ring. The experience was like babysitting a ticking bomb; you’d always be cringing and praying it wouldn’t go off.

Even answering calls would have been okay, except for a couple of things. First, with the information we had to get from customers, our interactions were largely scripted, so we had little room for improvisation. I’d occasionally have a great conversation with a customer, but that would be the exception. What made this situation worse, though, was that we had to pitch a certain number of upsells in each phone call. Nothing drives a wedge between you and a person like when they figure out you’re trying to sell them something.

Even pitching once in a while would have been okay (“Hey, you’re buying pillowcases? We’ve got a special on pillows”), except for the fact that all the calls were recorded, and if you didn’t pitch in every call someone would come talk to you about it. In the late 1700s (stay with me here, I do have a point), an English philosopher named Jeremy Bentham came up with an idea for a prison called the Panopticon. This prison would be a circular building with all the cells in a ring around a central guard tower. The key feature of the prison was that the guards could see the prisoners, but not vice versa. The prisoners could never know when they were being watched, so they would have to assume that they were always being watched. As such, they would act properly even when no one was there. This idea comes up again in 1984- with the TVs in every house that watch you- among other places. At my job, the phone system that recorded every call was our Panopticon (Panauricon?). You never knew when a higher-up was listening, so you assumed they always were. When a phone call ended and you’d only pitched two upsells, you waited for the call from head office. The pressure was constant, and the best week I had at the job was when the recording program on my machine went down for five or six days.

The job was a true McJob in many ways, with the low pay, high turnover, and lack of any real power. We couldn’t do anything to help customers that had problems, which infuriated people who’d been on hold for twenty minutes. Those people combined with the customers who called and were assholes from the get-go for no reason at all (about two-thirds of them, I’d guess), inspired my co-worker Jason to say one day, “At night I dream of angry Americans calling me.” I told him that the line could be a song lyric.

On top of everything else, we were selling crap. The linen catalogue was fine, and I now know enough about thread counts and sheet sizes to impress even the most jaded passerby, but the other catalogue had nothing to redeem it. Imagine the tackiest, most useless examples of Western (and in particular American) excess that you can, then imagine them in hot pink, and then imagine a catalogue filled with similar items. I don’t have to imagine, because I’ve seen it. All the images in this post are items from the catalogue. Moreover, these aren’t even the worst ones in the book, these are just the worst ones I’ve had people buy from me. Every time I’d sit down to work, I’d think, “I am now part of the problem. I am helping to make the world worse.”

Not everything about the job was awful, and while it’s crappy to put this here at the bottom where everyone has stopped reading already, I did work with some funny people. Jason, for example, would make up songs about our predicament. This one was all about me:

(sung to the tune of “Happy Christmas (War is Over)”, by John Lennon)

So this is Davinder,
And what has he done?
He’s answering phone calls,
Not having much fun.
He's got lots of schooling,
So many years,
Now he stuck here at [name withheld]
Holding back tears.

And then the chorus with the children singing:

Poor Davinder
Answering phone calls

Boy that still cuts to the heart of me. Ouch.

We’d have funny phone calls sometimes too. A woman called in to Jason once and was surprised that he was person and not an automated response. She told him, in a hushed voice, “Jason, I thought you was a robot.”

The job sucked, but if I’d never worked there, I wouldn’t have heard that line.

(*Okay, I never sold that last one, with the pots, I just had to show you. Good Christ, that's awful. And someone's going to buy it.)

Media notes

2006-07-24T19:47:00.000-07:00

The most interesting news coming out of the San Diego Comic Convention this past weekend seems to be the announcement that Oni Press is going to be releasing an adaptation of Stephen Colbert's Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure.

The whole project raises some questions, like, how do you adapt a novel that doesn't exist? And, in terms of sales, is it a good idea to adapt a work that is intended to be awful? Either way, I'm interested in seeing the end result. Read excerpts from the fake novel here

Oddly enough, I think this news makes the Tek Jansen joke funnier, while I took the announcement of the Snakes on a Plane comic as evidence of that movie jumping the shark before even being released. I don't know why that is.
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I hate to get all People Magazine on you, but what is up with Clark Kent?

I don't know if this look is for a role, or if he really let himself go after not being able to play Superman in the new movie, but geez. They're going to have green screen his whole body to get him looking like this for the show again:

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Talking Smallville gives me an excuse to put up this little image I got from The Onion a while back.

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And finally, check out this LucasArts video of their new game physics engine. It's a good looking demo, and it shows once and for all, John, that the Jedi couldn't have been wiped out by a bunch of crappy storm troopers like they were in III; Darth Vader had to have led the extermination. Jerk.

--ahem--

Man, those Catholics really know how to hold a grudge

2006-07-11T22:04:00.000-07:00

I came home a week or two ago and found this attractive and informative booklet on our doorstep.

It was a thoughtful gift from the local Catholic league letting us know what those subversives at the Protestant church are up to. I’d thought that tensions between the two groups had cooled down a century or two ago, but clearly the cursed rebels are still a thorn in the Pope’s side.

I haven’t had a chance to read the booklet yet, but a quick scan of the table of contents gives a good indication of what the best chapter is going to be:

Hint: it’s the one with the Eternal Burning Torment.

As well, the title of that last chapter indicates that this may have been a targeted mailing, as the booklet is aimed at young people, and we're young-ish. Now, either we’re being staked out by the Catholic Army, or everyone around here got one. Frankly, I don’t know which option bugs me more. (Well, clearly the first one --but I’m not crazy about second one either).

Anyways, the Catholics have fired the first shot, but the Proddies are as yet silent. I'll let you know how the fight shapes up locally, and if we get any more flyers trying to sell us some God.

I just watched a Superman movie in the theatre, how great is that?

2006-06-28T23:14:00.000-07:00

And it was pretty good too. The film didn't grab me in the way that I hoped it would, but it still had plenty of moments where I thought, "Yes! Exactly!" So yeah, I liked it verymuch.

I will put up a real post with actual content in a couple of days.

I never have conversations like this with my Dad

2006-06-19T05:51:00.000-07:00

Sweeeeet

2006-06-17T19:06:00.000-07:00

This may be the greatest thing I own:

To anyone wondering whether I’ll change now that I wield the most powerful weapon in the universe, I say, of course not, other than occasionally getting out of tight jams by conjuring a giant, glowing- green boxing glove or two.

6.6.06

2006-06-06T08:40:00.000-07:00

(via The Grand Comics Database)

Things

2006-06-05T19:07:00.000-07:00

I spotted a couple of links from BoingBoing that I thought you should see. The first is the full text of Stephen Colbert's commencement address at Knox College a couple of days ago. Here's a sample:

But the best reason for me to come to speak at Knox College is that I attended Knox College. This is part of my personal history that you will rarely see reported. Partly because the press doesn’t do the proper research. But mostly because…it is not true! I just made it up, so this moment would be more poignant for all of us. How great would it be if I could actually come back here—if I was coming back to my alma mater to be honored like this. I could share with you all my happy memories that I spent here in...Galesburg, Illinois. Hanging out at the Seymour Hall, right? Seymour Hall?

The whole thing is funny, but if you're going to be a jerk and not read it all, here's the bit from the end that matters:

you are about to start the greatest improvisation of all. With no script. No idea what’s going to happen, often with people and places you have never seen before. And you are not in control. So say “yes.” And if you’re lucky, you’ll find people who will say “yes” back.

Now will saying “yes” get you in trouble at times? Will saying “yes” lead you to doing some foolish things? Yes it will. But don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying “yes” begins things. Saying “yes” is how things grow. Saying “yes” leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say “yes.”

And that’s The Word.

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The other item that caught my eye was this dude who was so offended by the way the Thing looked in the Fantastic Four movie that he made a Thing suit out of actual rock:
At his site he gives a walkthrough of how he put it together. The whole exercise makes me rethink my approach to media, seeing as my response to movies I don't like is usually to just bitch and moan. A bad movie has never inspired me to do a project.

On a side note, I don’t think I mentioned that I watched Fantastic Four a month or two back, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be. It was bad, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn't the harbinger of the apocalypse like I was expecting. The Human Torch and the Thing are both fun to watch, and, in places, the sheer awfulness of the movie is entertaining in itself. I can’t recommend going out and getting the movie, but if you do, go in thinking that it's going to be godawful, and you'll be pleasantly surprised.

X-Men: The Last Stand

2006-06-02T19:32:00.000-07:00

Saw the X-Men movie a few days ago and I thought it was adequate; better than the first, but not as good as the second. I’m not going to list through the plot holes that bugged me, because the real problem was that I never connected with the movie. I realized part way through that I would have found ways to excuse all the problems I was seeing had I been more engaged with the film. This move had a lot to live up to, and part of the reason it never clicked with me may have been because I think the second one was the best superhero movie ever made (it’s not my favourite superhero movie, but I think it’s the best one so far). The movie delivers what the trailer promises, and if you liked the trailer you'll probably like the movie. I was lukewarm on the one and wound up being lukewarm on the other.

That said, I agree with Mike over at Progressive Ruin who notes that the fact we got three X-Men movies that are watchable is miracle, anything more than that is just cake. I may post more detailed thoughts if/when I wind up seeing the movie again, probably when it reaches DVD.
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I don’t know how I managed to miss this Juggernaut video that everyone but me seems to have seen. The first half is funny, and although it gets less funny as it goes on, the delivery on the Juggernaut's last line kills me.

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Finally, in these two images artist John Byrne recreates a pivotal scene from the original story that inspired the Phoenix portions of the movie. The images are both the same drawing (by Byrne), inked by different people, the first by Byrne and the second by George Perez. The contrast between the two is an interesting look at how big a part inking plays in the look of comic art.

Alex Toth 1928 - 2006

2006-05-29T16:04:00.000-07:00

The big news over the weekend, in these circles at least, was the passing of Alex Toth at age 78. Toth was one of the gradually dwindling group of comics artists identified by words like "pioneer" and "legend."
I first became aware of Alex Toth in the letter column of Mike Allred's Madman #2. Toth wrote in to congratulate Allred on his first issue, and praised both the joy in the style and subject matter of the comic. He commended Allred for creating a comic like Madman in industry dominated by grim comics produced, he said, if I'm remembering correctly, by "malevolent wingnuts," or something to that effect. I wondered who this cranky old man was, and though i agreed with his statements, i was sure that such a sweeping denunciation included some comics i liked. Allred, however, had nothing but adulation for Toth, and listed him as one of his heroes.
As I dug around I found out two things: Toth was a cranky old man, but he was also enormously influential. For a good chunk of his career he worked as a concept designer at Hanna-Barbera, designing hundreds of characters, most notably perhaps The Superfriends. Without knowing it, I’d owned a book of Toth’s art for years and I thumbed through it regularly. Whether you read comics or not, you’ve seen Toth’s work.
In comics, Toth is regarded as an artist’s artist. Creators whose work looks nothing like Toth’s cite him as an influence, and envy his economy of line. I think Ty Templeton said once that anyone can draw an arm using fifty lines, the difficulty lies in draw it using one line. Toth was a master of doing more with less. His clean line style lent itself to animation, but even in his comics, he created credible scenes using only a few lines and well placed black areas. He was a proponent of storytelling above all else, and his notes show that he was always teaching and always learning. He left comics a better place for his having been there.

You can see more of Toth's work at this link, or at his official site. Go over to The Comics Reporter to read a proper eulogy.

Time magazine covers

2006-05-25T08:03:00.000-07:00

Time.com has an interesting and, quite frankly, really scary article up about climate change. The article explores the idea that global warming is occurring in a feedback loop, so as temperatures rise they’ll cause changes that will increase temperatures further. This snippet was one of the ones that stuck with me:

In Alaska, salmon populations are at risk as melting permafrost pours mud into rivers, burying the gravel the fish need for spawning. Small animals such as bushy-tailed wood rats, alpine chipmunks and piñon mice are being chased upslope by rising temperatures, following the path of the fleeing trees. And with sea ice vanishing, polar bears--prodigious swimmers but not inexhaustible ones--are starting to turn up drowned. "There will be no polar ice by 2060," says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. "Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out."

I find that image of drowned polar bears haunting. Read the rest of the article, it’s a downer, but it’s interesting.
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Before the website lets you read that article, it makes you sit through an advertisement encouraging you to get framed copies of your favourite Time covers, like the one from the week you were born, for instance. So because I’m a sheep, I looked up the one for my birthday:

It’s pretty funny, in a gaudy way, but not something I’d want to put up on my wall. Wanting to see more, I plugged in the only other two birthdays I know offhand, my sister’s and my brother’s. My sister’s cover isn’t anything to write home about:

My brother, though, as usual, winds up with the short end of the stick:

Supermedia

2006-05-23T08:22:00.000-07:00

The big news during the week I was offline was the release of the second Superman Returns trailer. If you've been living under a rock (like me), and haven't seen it, go check it out. The rest of us will admire the newly released one sheet poster while we wait for you to get back.

I like a few things about the trailer. First, I'm finally buying Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor. I think he's a great actor, but before this trailer I couldn't see him as that character. Spacey, here at least, has a good blend of menace and smugness. The best scene is the back and forth with Lois Lane, which sees Spacey switch from sadistically playful to furious. I like the mad arch villain theatricality Spacey is using, particularly since Luthor is one of the classic mad arch villains.

Speaking of Lois, I'm not as convinced by Kate Bosworth. She's lacking the brashness that is Lois's defining characteristic. Singer appears to be using her character to represent a modern world that is uncertain it needs a Superman, which is interesting, but I find Lois's resulting blandness worrisome. We'll see how she's played in the movie.

Overall, the trailer looks good, and my favourite shot is the close up of Superman from above as he flies over traffic, and the orchestral theme music makes anything seem better. My first thought after watching the trailer was that it wasn't a slam dunk, that I wasn't left chomping at the bit like after I saw the full length trailers for X-Men 2 or Kill Bill, that a chance existed that the movie could get it wrong.

That's what I thought, until I saw the new international trailer.

Now I'm chomping at the bit. And like I said before seeing the first Spider-man or Revenge fo the Sith, even if the movie stinks, at least we'll still have a killer trailer. (Yes, I noticed the typo in the second movie title. I've left it the way it is because I happen to think it's better title than the original).
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In all the excitement about the movie trailers, the trailer for the video game has gotten somewhat overlooked. It's pretty entertaining in its own right, so give that one a look too.

Pop culture roundup

2006-05-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

As regular readers here know, when I'm not watching Entertainment Tonight or reading People Magazine, I like to scour the interweb for even more information on my favourite dreamy celebs. So it was that I stumbled across this article about David Beckham's obsessive compulsive disorder, in which these two bits stood out:

Asked if he wanted to stop his obsessive behaviour, he said: "I would like to. I've tried and can't stop."
...

The England captain said that his wife, Victoria, calls him a "weirdo" because of his condition.
...

Mrs Beckham, who has revealed her husband's inner secrets before, recently told one interviewer: "He's got that obsessive compulsive thing where everything has to match. If you open our fridge, it's all co-ordinated down either side.

and:

Beckham said that his teammates at Real Madrid were unaware of his condition, but that players at his former club, Manchester United, would deliberately rearrange his clothes in hotel rooms or move magazines around to make them "wonky" to infuriate him.

Good thing he has a solid support system backing him up, otherwise living with something like that might be really difficult.
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I started to feel bad for Beckham there, but I remembered that he's fantastically wealthy and lives a lifestyle of such excess that I can't begin to imagine, and I went back to wanting to punch him in the neck (which I'd never do if we chanced to meet, because he'd beat the living fuck out of me. I'm all talk).
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That last bit reminded me of an interview of Bono I was listening to once where he talked about the differing attitudes towards success and wealth in the U.S. and Ireland. As best I remember it, he said that in America when someone sees a big house on a hill he says, "Someday I'm going to live in that house," and in Ireland when someone sees a big house on a hill he says, "Someday I'm going to get that bastard." I like that.
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Anyways, this clip at YouTube shows the trailer for the Titanic sequel that never was. It starts off funny and then turns into a movie that I think I'd like to watch.

(Note: I know it's weeks old, and everyone was linking to it ages ago, shut up, I don't care).

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Finally, Wes Anderson does a commercial for American Express, and it's so funny that I don't mind him selling out.

(Note: see previous note).

This is where we used to live

2006-05-13T10:21:00.000-07:00

The soundtrack for this entry is Don Edwards’ song “Coyotes.”
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A week of upheavals culminated last Monday with a move out of the house I’ve been in for the last year and a half and into a new one. My housemates all moved out in the weeks leading up to the end of the month, so in the last few days I had the place to myself. As I walked around the emptied house, I felt an unexpected sadness, a feeling that was particularly surprising considering how aggravating living there had been at times. It was the feeling of leaving somewhere that I knew I’d never return to, and in effect leaving all the memories tied into that place. I tend to be tactile in the way that I experience the world; I need to touch things to learn them. As a result, I tie memories to objects and to spots. Maybe everyone does, I don’t know.

Moving through the house, I remembered the conversations that occurred in the hallways, the stories that were shared in the kitchen. I passed the stairs where I routinely terrorized my roommates’ cat by chasing him. Looking at one chair, I realized I’d completed a degree while at this house, and that was the spot where I’d written a couple hundred pages in essays. I remembered barbecuing during snowstorms and sweltering in the humidity of an Ontario summer. I looked at the places where I’d laughed, the places where I drank, where I read, where I made out, and where I mourned. And now in moving out, I disconnect myself from all of that.

Despite everything, this was a good place to live. Goodbye, house.
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Chris Ware captures some of what I’m trying to say in this installment of his strip from The New York Times.

In reducing everything to numbers, however, I think he also gestures towards the futility inherent in trying to capture or chronicle human experience. Or something like that.

You can find a zip file with the rest of Ware's series over at Drawn!

Report from the Toronto Comicon

2006-04-30T21:25:00.000-07:00

I drove into Toronto yesterday for the annual Paradise Comicon, the same show I attended last year, but in a bigger venue this time. I got there late for the start of DC’s “One Year Later” panel, so I skipped it and wandered around. I’ve noticed that I always start cons with the same feeling of having made a mistake in coming, “What am I doing here? I don’t really have anything to buy. I could’ve taken that money and gone and seen a movie.” The first few tables I looked at didn’t do anything to allay that feeling, but I eventually started seeing good deals on things I wanted here and there. I picked up the new 100 Bullets paperback and some other odds and ends, but on the whole, it wasn’t a big con for buying, and in the end I only spent about fifty or sixty dollars, which is a relatively small amount considering I had a hundred dollars more than that in my pocket itching to get out.

The highlight of the convention was the number of creators I got to talk to. Most were from the DC stable and they started to trickle back in after the OYL panel ended. I started off by talking to J.G. Jones as he sketched, and he was among the most pleasant of the people I spoke to. He was soft spoken, with an accent I couldn’t place, and he was genuinely appreciative when I told him I liked his work. I mentioned a panel arrangement he’d drawn in The Hiketeia, and said that I liked the figure work in this panel in particular, and he lit up and we talked Wonder Woman.

I walked over to Michael Lark’s table and spent some time looking at some original art pages he had out. I talked to him a little about his technique and the work he’s doing on Daredevil right now, but he seemed involved in his commissions, so I moved on.

I saw Dave Johnson gather his stuff and leave his table and I remembered that he was part of a panel on cover art that was starting soon, so I headed to that. The panel also featured Arthur Suydam, J.G. Jones, and Mike Mayhew. While some of the questions were interesting, Mayhew talked a lot and overwhelmed the other panelists. For much of the panel I wished he’d let the others talk, but then towards the end I asked an unnecessarily complicated and directionless question (as I manage to do at every panel I attend) and while the other panelists were quiet Mayhew was all over it, and then I was thankful for him being there. As well, the moderator asked him at one point about when he swiped the king of Spain’s photo to draw Magneto, and that led to a funny recounting, so it wasn’t all bad.

Back on the floor, I got Brian Azzarello to sign my new 100 Bullets book, and I talked to him a little about the series. I’m not particularly big on signatures, but it’s a great way to start up a conversation with someone when they’re behind a table. Azzarello was standoffish at first, but warmed up as we talked about the various books. I told him that I liked “The Counterfifth Detective” the best out of the books I’d read, and he joked that he may have overwritten that one. I also got Trish Mulvihill to sign the book on Brian’s suggestion, but like an idiot I missed the opportunity to pick her brain on colouring, an aspect of comics I’ve only recently begun to pay real attention to.

Walking by the ACTOR booth I saw George Perez, but he was busy with other people, so I didn’t get a chance talk to him. I spoke a little with Dave Johnson as I got him to sign my 100 Bullets book, before heading over to Greg Rucka’s table. I came in on the middle of a discussion on U.S. foreign policy, during which I got to talk with him about Queen & Country and the bits I liked most when I read A Gentleman’s Game recently. I got him to sign my favourite issue of Gotham Central, and on his suggestion I passed it over to Michael Lark who signed it and then defaced the cover. I’ll show you what I mean when I get my scanner back up. Thanks for nothing, Lark.

My favourite person to speak to, by far, was Jimmy Palmiotti, who is just as affable and good natured as his image suggests. I’d taken a few photocopies of the story me and Des are getting published with me, but I didn’t see much of an opportunity to show them to anyone, so when I saw Jimmy I thought I’d ask him for some tips on inking. He went through the pages almost panel by panel and told me what was working and what I could improve. The advice he gave was useful and honest, and though he joked the whole time, everything he said was substantial. It was the most human conversation I’ve had at one of these things. He finished by saying, “This is good work, not Marvel or DC good, but you’re only going to get better.”

The only real disappointment of the day came at the end when I went to see Darwyn Cooke, and got to his table just in time to see him packing up his stuff to leave. I took one final round of the floor, debated on buying a few more trades, and then left. I enjoyed the con more this year than last, mainly for the good conversations I had, both with the big names, and with some of the people putting stuff out independently, as well. The crowds seemed smaller this year, and the pros were more accessible than last. Virtually no one that I talked to had a lineup, and with those that did, if I wandered and came back the line would be gone. Vancouver doesn't get big conventions like this, but having experienced these two now, I might make my way down to Seattle for Emerald City if I'm on the west coast next year.

The telephone, the H-bomb, and some thoughts on Murderball

2006-04-25T08:24:00.000-07:00

While I wrote a few days ago about possibly losing my internet access this week, the observant reader will notice that I am still online. I managed to work something out with my departing roommate to keep the cable on until the end of the month. My second departing roommate, on the other hand, who was responsible for the phone bill, neglected to follow through on a similar request, and so I am without a telephone until next week. Anyone wanting to talk will have to come to my house, or resort to the carrier pigeon network I set up earlier this year. To all those who mocked me, who's the idiot now, jerks?

(I know that this item doesn't concern the majority of you reading, but it did give me the chance to post those great Nextwave panels).
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I finally got to read the second volume in Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series, and while I was hoping to pick up the third book from Mr. O’Malley himself later this week at the Toronto Comicon, the release appears to have been delayed until the end of May, so I’ll comment more once I’ve read that installment. To save you the suspense, the rest of the world is right on this one, the books are very good and you should pick them up. Everyone I’ve loaned them to has enjoyed them as well. In the meantime, here's one of my favourite pages from the one I just read:

I like this page because it features a character who is clearly a thinly veiled version of my friend Paul H, also sometimes called H-bomb*. Aside from minor differences like sexual orientation and lack of glasses, this character is obviously Paul, all the way from his beard, to his understated delivery, to his beard. You may scoff, but Paul spent last year living pretty close to Toronto, and I have no doubt that he was stalked by Bryan Lee O'Malley and included in this book.

*By "sometimes" I mean just this one time, right here.
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We watched the documentary Murderball a couple of weeks ago, and while it’s not as good as the rave reviews suggest, it is worth a couple of hours of your time. The movie follows the U.S. national wheelchair rugby team through a few tournaments, and explores the players’ lives in the process. Despite being named after the sport’s nickname, the movie features surprisingly little game footage, somewhere around nine minutes in total. Moreover, the footage that the filmmakers include is cut so rapidly that one never gets a sense of the game, leaving the impression that the game may not be especially exciting to watch.

However, the lack of gameplay scenes comes out of the fact that the movie isn’t so much about the sport as about the effect the sport has on the lives of the players. The team members are all quadriplegics, and they describe the difficulties of first two years after losing full physical functioning. They all indicate that the sport restored a sense of efficacy to their lives. The sound bite from the film that stands out is, “I’ve done more in a chair than I ever did out of one.”

The movie’s focus, in large part, is in showing how effective these men are, and in effect, how masculine. The filmmakers strive to show that the players lead normal lives, and their definition of normality is tied into their definition of masculinity. The movie’s concern with masculinity manifests in numerous discussions of the players’ sex lives, scenes of male bonding, and with a focus on the film’s poster boy (literally) Mark Zupan, with his shaved head, beard, and tattoos. Most tellingly, in the end of movie montage, the captions let us know what all the players are up to now, and almost every one has to do with them finding a girl. In the filmmakers' eyes, getting married and settling down is the final evidence that these men fit in. The issues behind such a viewpoint extend beyond the movie, and I won't go into them here, but I do note that the attempts to portray the players as rebels contradict the filmmakers' desire to slot them into normal social roles.

The most interesting aspect of the movie, for me, was the treatment of Joe Soares, a former U.S. player who responds to getting cut from the national team by going to coach Team Canada. In many respects, Soares is an elder statesman of the game, but the other players respond to his defection with open venom and accuse him of betraying his country. Moreover, the filmmakers frame Soares in such a way as to make him as loathsome as possible. From the way they shoot him, to the way they cut his conversations, to the details they include about his personal life, the filmmakers make Soares into an irrational, unlikable antagonist. Their efforts to make the audience hate Soares are so ham-handed that at one point in the movie (while Joe is barking at his kid to stop goofing off, I think) I turned to the others and said, “This is character assassination.” One of the subplots in the movie is the rekindling of a friendship between the aforementioned Zupan and his best friend, Chris Igoe, whose drunk driving led to Zupan’s partial paralysis. In subsequent interviews, Igoe says that he initially resisted being in the movie because he was afraid of being cast in an unfavourable light, but agreed to appear after discussing what the filmmakers had put together and seeing that Soares was clearly going to be the bad guy in the movie.*

What I found interesting about the deliberate villainizing of Soares wasn’t the obviousness, or the fact that it was done, but that I may not have spotted it if he had gone to coach a team other than Canada. If he had gone to coach Team Australia, I may have hated him too. The film is the standard American narrative of the somewhat bad boy Americans who play by their own rules against the impersonal foreigners, a narrative I buy into every time I watch one of those movies. In this instance, however, the foreigners were us. As a Canadian, I viewed Team Canada as the heroes of the movie, even though I recognized that they were clearly being presented as the robot-like, monolithic opposition. I said to the others at one point, “In this movie, we’re the Russians,” and we imagined audiences muttering, “Dirty Reds.”

Watching this movie was a new experience because I was so clearly not the intended audience, but only by a chance of geography. In the climactic showdown, (highlight for SPOILERS) when the U.S. loses to Canada, we were euphoric. The U.S. players were on screen crying, but the scene loses its emotional punch because the end wasn’t a loss for us, but a win. Being part of the antagonistic group in a film got me wondering how Russian viewers felt when watching Ivan Drago get pummelled, or Arabic viewers when watching True Lies, or German viewers watching any movie ever made. Most movies need antagonists, but what happens when you’re the bad guy?

* "I didn't have any idea about how I was going to be portrayed," says Igoe, speaking as the guy who put his pal in a wheelchair at 18. "Because of that, I was very, very, very reluctant to be involved in any of it. I obviously assume the worst, because I'm obviously very protective of what could have happened. This is something that's extremely intimate, one of the worst things in my life. But I didn't know who Joe was at this point. I didn't know that they had this other… antagonist, or someone else who could be the antagonist in this thing, so, when that was explained to me, I felt much better about being in it." (source: The Austin Chronicle)

I know where you can buy Rex Kwon Do's pants

2006-04-22T18:11:00.000-07:00

Constant readers here may have noticed that I've been reticent in giving details about my new job (said readers may also note my insistence in calling it a "new job" after two months of employment). I'm still not ready to spill the beans, but suffice it to say that as a result of this job I am now a part of the problem.

Compare:

(Second image via this page. First image: don't ask)

British accents, Sean Connery photos, and the monkey on my back

2006-04-13T13:19:00.000-07:00

Two of my roommates are moving out today and the cable is under one of their names, so unless I get things sorted, I'm going without the internet until I move into my new place at the end of the month. I've been telling people that in all likelihood I will die without being online for that long, but no one believes.

The other day me and John were talking on the phone about Layer Cake and in discussing the accents we had this exchange:

John: Some British accents really grate on me, like the one on that blonde girl in the movie, the one that used to be Jude Law's wife.
Davinder: Was she?
J: Yeah, her name's Selma Blair, I think.
D: I don't think that's it.
J: Maybe not; he cheated on her with the nanny.
D: Is it Sienna Miller?
J: Yeah, that's her name... Wait, did you just look that up?
D: Yeah
J: You're going to die without the internet.

John gets it.
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I got another illustration of my (over)reliance on the web this morning when I ran across an old James Bond promo photo at /film. I thought the image might make a cool desktop, but the image they had was too small, so I went looking for a bigger one. I found it in about ten seconds:

But then continued on to look at other search results, and I found more Sean Connery photos that I liked:

James Bond will stand on your desk...

...and then kill you with a hat. It's not just a license to kill, it's a license to humiliate and kill.

But just so Mr. Connery doesn't get a swelled head (he's a regular reader here), remember that he did this movie too:

In the end I spent about twenty minutes looking at Sean Connery photos, because that's how easily I get sidetracked. Losing the internet might be good for all the time that it gives me, but I'll be so behind by the time I get back on. If I'm not blogging next month it's because I've wasted away.

I hope Billy Joel is getting a piece of this

2006-04-03T08:27:00.000-07:00

Who says the right can't rock out? I saw this video at YouTube called "Bush was right," and I had to share. "France: wrong! Zell Miller: riiiight!" That's rock and roll, baby.

EDIT: So the stupid link has been broken for four days and I didn't notice. It's fixed now, but after watching the video you'll wish it was still broken. I was wondering why no one commented...

The speed of life

2006-04-01T21:13:00.000-08:00

(via The Grand Comic Book Database)
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I woke up yesterday and the house smelled like fish. Sometimes I wish I could put cameras up around this place so I could see what goes on when I’m not looking.
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I haven’t updated in a while, mainly because my schedule has been kicking my ass. Most of my time is, of course, being taken up by my crappy new full time job. The job (which I'll go into detail about in a future post) has a pretty relentless pace too, so I don't have as much time to muse on things to post here. Clearing off debts and paying bills on time is immensely satisfying, but I’m getting nostalgic for the freedom of unemployment.

Side note: I’ve been mentioning to others recently that I think the five day work week is central to the perpetuation of the capitalist system. Two days off is just enough to recharge you for another week; you need three days of rest before you can start thinking about revolution. I’ve decided that I’d be happy with a job that paid a little extra and let me work only four days a week.

Side note to that side note: last week I applied for a position that paid about I’m making now, but only required five hours of work, five days a week. I sent the application off and began dreaming about what I’d do with all my spare time. The next morning, my inbox already had a reply from the company in it. I thought it would be an automated response, but when I opened it I found a four paragraph letter from their HR person detailing all the reasons I was unqualified for the position and telling me to feel free to apply again once I’d bought a clue. While I appreciate the personalized touch, I think I’d have been happier not knowing.

Back to the main topic: my schedule has also been a mess because of car troubles this week. I came out to the garage on Monday and found my passenger side window smashed in, which was a real kick in the nuts to start my day. I called around for a ride but eventually wound up taking the bus to work and getting there late. I probably could have gotten in on time, but I took about twenty minutes to feel sorry for myself before I left home. I spent the rest of the week waiting for the insurance company to call back, taking the bus to work, and walking the 5k home in the evenings to save on transit fares. I was beginning to kind of enjoy the trek home in the dark, but I eventually went and got the damned window repaired on my own.

The other thing eating up my time this week was a drawing submission I did to a magazine. In an email exchange, the magazine people suggested I do an image that fit their subject matter, something with a break-dancer perhaps. I took the idea and as per my usual method I spent a couple of days researching, a couple of days doing rough concepts, a couple of days avoiding the whole thing, and then and buckling down for a day to knock out an illustration that looks like it should’ve taken me an hour. Drawing is problem solving, and the solution always looks easy when it’s done.

All of that is done now (well, except the job), so I’m back to trawling the web for nonsense. Somewhat more regular updates will follow.

Thoughts on V for Vendetta

2006-03-21T09:20:00.000-08:00

This is a great cover:
Just saying.

(via The Grand Comic Book Database)
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I've linked to this before, but once again, here's Warren Ellis on Deadman. It's funny, and it's only about a minute long. Go listen.
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We saw V for Vendetta this weekend, and it was okay. I normally need to see adaptations twice if I've read the original work, as the first viewing is taken up with noting similarities and discrepancies between the movie and the source text. I was bored by The Shawshank Redemption the first time I saw it, but made a complete turnaround the second time through.

That said, I did like the performances in V. Hugo Weaving does a good job as the title character, appropriately menacing in places and human in others. That the audience feels any empathy at all for him is an accomplishment, given that he is behind a mask the whole time. Natalie Portman is good from about the middle on. Unlike the comic, she's reasonably together in the beginning of the movie, so her character's transformation isn't as dramatic as in the original story. I liked the use of non-Hollywood faces for the rest of the actors, which gave the movie an air of being made in Britain.

I wish the rest of the movie's aesthetic had followed suit as well. I was hoping for that particular sort of dystopic hopelessness that British cinema does so well. I did like some of the film's aesthetic choices, like the way the streets are clean, but empty; which I imagine is a commentary on fascism, in that it brings order at the cost of humanity. However, I never got a sense of why the public wouldn't like the state of things. If you're white, straight, and don't like to stay out late, the movie's Britain doesn't seem like that bad a place to live.

The Wachowskis are clearly on a mission to relate the story to events in the present day U.S., and as a result the effects of a government given power by fear aren't pushed far enough. The problem with the whole movie is that it seems a somewhat shallow retelling of the original. While the original text often questions the morality of V's actions, he is a less ambiguous character here, and is less interesting for it. All discussion of and references to anarchy are gone, as are the subtle plot threads that connect the whole. Further, the ham handedness of the movie, as in the controversial (among us) final scenes with the masks, is distracting.

My main criticism of V for Vendetta is that V's TV address is changed and made much more literal than metaphorical. The essence is there, but the whole thing seems dumbed down. I don't know if the original address would work if acted out, but I was bothered by its alteration.

Overall, the movie is acceptable but reads like a Coles Notes version of the original. I may feel differently, though, after the next time I see it.

Reconnected

2006-03-15T19:00:00.000-08:00

The backlight on my monitor went out a week and a half ago, so I was computer-less until yesterday. As a result I couldn't post any updates and I had to check my email at the library like a peasant. Luckily, the monitor was under warranty and the company, BenQ, fixed it with no hassle and sent it back by FedEx yesterday.

(On a side note, I spotted the FedEx guy showing up as I was driving away to go to work, and I jumped out of my car (after I stopped, don't worry) and ran over. I told him that the package was for me and, disturbingly, he handed it over without asking for any sort of proof other than a signature. Thinking back, I'm glad I got to him before one of my shady neighbours did).

Later, when I got home from work, I spent a few hours catching up on what I'd missed in the time I'd been disconnected from the world, and then wound up going to sleep an hour earlier than usual because I was so brain tired. Today kind of feels like the day after Halloween, where I'm sluggish because I've eaten too much candy. All this is to say that I'll post something more substantial tomorrow.

With sexy results

2006-03-05T11:42:00.000-08:00

I haven't updated for a few days, so apologies to anyone who's been stopping by here to look for the usual nonsense. I got a job and it's draining my soul. I'd forgotten how much work is involved in working. When I get home in the evenings, I still scan job listings and send out resumes, but after that I'm too beat to compose coherent thoughts, hence the lack of updates. I'm wondering if things will get better once I get used to the job, but at the same time the job isn't one that I think I want to get used to. More on that in an upcoming entry.
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I'm sure you've probably already seen PostSecret, after all Technorati lists it as the fourth most popular blog on the web. If you haven't, where've you been? Random people write a secret on a postcard and mail it in anonymously. That's it. The results are sad, funny, touching, disturbing, and painfully honest. A new batch goes up every Sunday, go take a look.
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I put up a link a while ago to a Sony commercial that I liked, that one with the bouncing balls. Now someone has made a parody, except with-- well, you just have to see it. Go here.

(via BoingBoing)
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Another Brokeback Mountain trailer remix parody thing, this time using a surprising pairing from Star Wars.
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The Simpsons intro in live action. Nothing more to say about that, except they did a nice job. Also, in the comments someone says that the clip was produced to be the intro for an upcoming episode.
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And finally, from this week's Saturday Night Live, I think, Natalie Portman goes Eminem, with sexy results. The sketch isn't quite as good as the Chronicles of Narnia rap, but it's very entertaining nonetheless.

Mirror image

2006-02-24T15:14:00.000-08:00

Despite deciding a few weeks ago that buying comics while unemployed was irresponsible, I went to the comic store last week. What�s worse, I picked up the all the stuff that I�d skipped from the previous week, so even my initial self control was wasted.

Moving right by my poor impulse control, something in one of the books jumped out at me and I wanted to share. This is a two page spread from the last issue of Y: The Last Man, the picture on the left is an ad and the one on the right is a story page:

Is the placement of the two images coincidence? An editor with a sense of humour? A commentary on the relationship between sex and death? Probably just the first one, but I thought it worth pointing out.

Bad character design

2006-02-19T16:04:00.000-08:00

How does the guy on the left go to the bathroom? Perhaps he's so devoted to killing that even hygiene is secondary. On the other hand (ha!), maybe his poorly thought out surgical enhancement is the reason he's so angry all the time. "With my new hands, I'll be unstoppable. Wait... how do I take the lid off this jar?" What I find particularly strange is that I think I own the comic where that character was introduced over a decade ago, and the question of his day to day activities never occurred to me until I saw this image.

Regardless, his career choice as evil assassin is pretty much set with those mits, kind of like the guy in this Hitman story:

(For some reason, lately, everything reminds me of a Garth Ennis comic)

A comic shop tour of Vancouver

2006-02-14T13:01:00.000-08:00

I started this blog one year ago today. My first post was a valentine to comics in the form of a list of 100 things I love about comics (all the cool kids were doing it), and in many ways this blog itself continues to be a love letter to comics. I’m celebrating my first year of blogging and kicking off my second by taking you on a virtual tour of Vancouver and showing you the shops that fed my habit. Have you ever heard of the “ghost tours” some cities have where they take you to all the haunted sites? This is like that except with comics.
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The first comic store I ever visited was called Camelot Comics. I found out about them when their business card fell out of a library book I was about to sign out. The card had an image of a dragon flying in a ring, with its head by its tail. The imagery was appropriately ouroboros-like, because this store was the beginning and the end for me. The idea of a store that stocked nothing but comics blew my mind, and finding the card in such a random way gave the moment an Arthurian/ Willy Wonka type feel. Needless to say, seeing a store packed full of comics was even better than I’d imagined, and as soon as I walked through the doors I was done for.

Camelot Comics closed a few years later, and in the years since we also lost Gotham, Fourth Dimension, and Foot’s (later called RC Pitstop). What follows is a rundown of the stores open in and around Vancouver today.
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We’ll begin our magical mystery tour in downtown Vancouver and work our way outwards. The first stop is Golden Age Collectibles, near the busy shopping corner of Granville and Robson, what I’d call the heart of downtown. My friend Pat owns this store, and they’ve been in the same location over twenty-five years, since 1979. Almost. When I visited Vancouver in October, Janis told me that the store had moved a few doors down. I didn’t believe her, because, quite frankly, Janis is a pathological liar, and I figured that she’d just gotten mixed up while in a drug addled haze. For once, however, she turned out to be telling the truth, as earlier this year the store had up and moved four doors over.

Of all the stores I’ve been to, I think Golden Age is the most civilian friendly. This is the place I take non-regular comics readers to trick them into reading comics. The store is well laid out, accessible, and displays comics in ways that will appeal to the novice, while still having an extensive enough stock for the lunatic compulsive, such as myself. The new location is slightly smaller than the old one, but has even more of a cool, bookstore kind of feel to it now. Golden Age is the Chapters or the Barnes & Noble of comic shops. The store is modern and well lit, and the staff are friendly and professional. (Moreover, this is the only store on the list that has multiple women working there). While the back issue selection is limited, you can find anything new here.
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The next stop is the Elfsar Collection, a newer store that opened just a few years ago.

This shop is located in Vancouver’s trendy Yaletown neighbourhood, which is a refurbished warehouse district that now houses expensive boutiques and restaurants. I’ve only been in the Elfsar Collection a few times, so my impressions are limited, but the store is well organized and modern, and the staff have been friendly and welcoming on each visit. The store carries plenty of comics, but they’ve also got imported art books, lots of DVDs, and a gallery of original art.

I like visiting there, but I wonder how long they’ll be able to stay in such an expensive neighbourhood that gets so little foot traffic. The store also needs to do something with their exterior, as none of the window displays draw attention. The first time I came here I walked by the place several times without noticing it. If someone who’s looking for the store can’t find it I don’t know if a casual passerby would give it a second glance.
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ABC Book and Comic Emporium is the final store before we leave downtown.

This shop is on the same street as Golden Age, but down in the slightly seedier end, right before the bridge out of town. These guys moved from across the street a few years ago, and in the new location most of the main floor is taken up with used books, and hence the feel is that of an old used book store. New comics are located on the main floor too, as are several shelves so packed with hardcovers, tpbs, and books about comics that my head hurts whenever I try to scan what’s there.

If you go down the stairs and into the basement, you find the store’s extensive back issue collection. They’re currently having a 50% off sale on back issues. My friend Pat at Golden Age said once that he only holds sales once a year (New Year’s Day) because if you do it more frequently people hold off on buying things in anticipation of the next sale. He may have been right, because ABC’s 50% off back issue sales used to be semi-annual, but the current one is entering its sixth or seventh year.
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Leaving downtown now, just across the Burrard Street bridge and to the right on West 4th, we find the aptly named Comicshop.

The Kitsilano neighbourhood is young, urban, and professional, and West 4th is yet another shopping district, crammed with clothing stores and restaurants. Along with Golden Age Collectibles, The Comicshop is one of the twin pillars of Vancouver comics retail; these two are the big kids. Both are inviting to all sorts of comics readers, but while Golden Age, in its sleekness, leans more towards drawing in casual buyers, The Comicshop is the addict’s heaven. The best way I can think to describe the feel is that when you walk into The Comicshop, you can smell the newsprint, and it is good.

The Comicshop has three floors: gaming stuff in the basement (I believe. I’ve never been down there); a lobby-like main floor, with an entrance, a load of pop art and comics related books, and toys; and sweet, sweet comics upstairs. The comics floor has an ample supply of back issues, a good selection of new stuff, multiple shelves of indy comics, numerous comics magazines, and all of it is just right. They have a monthly (?) newsletter, and a good semi-annual sale (April and October).
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The next stop is Rx Comics, and they’ve got the potion that can cure your disease. >Ahem<

This place is also somewhat new, the guy inside said they’ve been here on Main Street for about three years. I’ve only been here the one time, so I can’t say much about them, but they do have a welcoming set up. Located amidst used bookstores, vintage clothing shops, and counterculture outlets, this store seems to cater to an alternative/ underground crowd. The material on their shelves suggests the same, as while they carry the usual books from the big four, they’ve also got an ample supply of mini comics and independent books that I’d never seen before. The guy was friendly, and they’ve got this great sign out front.

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Heading up Main Street, we come to Lucky’s.

I’d never been to this store before, or ever heard of it, but my friend Zoe took me here on my last trip to Vancouver. The shop is tiny, but they use what little space they have to stock loads of independent and alternative comics and art books. This place is where I’d come to find my Chris Ware. Upon entering, you see that the front wall is covered with a series of little framed drawings, and apparently different artists are showcased over time. Zoe’s boyfriend George, who is an artist, frequents the shop, and I’d imagine that the clientele is similarly artist types in the know. Lucky’s gets a special mention on my list because on my visit I scored a cheap copy of the Shuck tpb I’d been hunting for years. (In a supreme case of irony, when I looked up the Shuck link to slot into the previous sentence I found that the whole series is now available for free online).
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Leaving Vancouver now, we head into the suburbs and find the Tazmanian Comic Connection, named of course after the Tasmanian Devil.

Taz is a high quality comic store located on the fringes of civilization on Hastings Street in North Burnaby. I began visiting here regularly when I worked at the unnamed software giant down the street. The owner is gregarious and friendly and he learned my name the second time I visited and five years later still remembers. Shamefully, I never learned his and now I feel too embarrassed to ask. They’ve got good deals and an excellent selection of new, old, toys, statues, cards, and whatever you might want. Unfortunately, this excellent comic store is tainted by the fact that an ex- lives right up the street (she was the devil too, if you get my drift). Let us leave here and never speak of this place again.
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Going south into New Westminster, we come to Talkin’ Illustrations. This comics store was the second one I ever visited and the place where I rode out the boom of the late 80s and early 90s. Back then, Talkin’ Illustrations was the cock of the walk, with signings and release events galore. At this store I met Todd McFarlane, Eric Larsen, Chris Warner, Javier Saltares, and list of others whose names get progressively less impressive as I go on. The early 90s were heady days; we were living large, buying multiple copies, and snorting coke off of hookers’-- well, you get the idea. A friend of mine still carries a grudge from that time because he feels that the owner of this store took advantage of the fact that we were kids and incited us to buy multiple copies of comics that were eventually worthless. I’m not angry, though, because when I look at this shop that is a shell of its former glory I know that he’s gotten his.
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And finally, we finish up in the city of Surrey at Triple Play Collectibles.

This store is my local comic shop, and they’re currently in their third location (which isn’t to say that they’re a chain, they’ve just moved twice). The new location is a little out of the way, so I worry about whether they’re getting enough casual customers, but they seem to be doing okay. This store is everything I want in a local comic shop. They have a large selection of monthlies, including all but the most obscure comics, and they get in anything I order with a minimum of fuss. Anything. (It wasn’t for me, alright?). I like going here too because it’s a place where everybody knows my name, and I like to be where I can see our troubles are all the same. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. Okay I’m done.
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So that’s Vancouver, or at least all the important parts. I did miss a few stores, like Comic Land on Rupert (which has the best awning in the business), Greyhaven out in White Rock, and that place in Port Moody, but seriously, what do think, I’m made of driving? I’ll get to those next time I’m back home.

Thanks for reading.

Friendly fire

2006-02-13T10:35:00.000-08:00

Remember Hitman, Garth Ennis’s superhero action comedy book? Do you remember the issues that had Section Eight, the group of reject superheroes? And one of the guys on the team was named Friendly Fire? Here’s the scene where he get recruited, in case you don’t:

And remember how his powers were that he could shoot blasts out of his hands, but he could only hit team-mates? Here he is in action:

Remember? Now, wouldn’t it be funny if he was Vice President of the United States?
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The interweb is abuzz with the news that VP Cheney wounded another hunter while shooting at a bird. I wasn't going to comment, but I ran across two sites this morning that I thought I'd pass on.

The first is an animation of the Vice President called "Cheney's got a gun" with the corresponding Aerosmith song playing in the background. The animation is crap and there isn't much of a joke once you get past the Janie = Cheney thing, but it made me laugh when I heard it.

The other chuckle came from Al Franken's response over at The Huffington Post:

Over the weekend, Vice President Dick Cheney shot a man in Texas. Asked why he shot the man, the Vice President said, "Just to watch him die."

There's one more funny bit in it, and it's only half a page long, so go take a look.
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I wasn't going to say anything about what happened because the whole thing seems to be kind of a non-event (aside from the guy getting shot). It's not like Cheney shot the guy on purpose; accidents happen and fortunately the other guy is alright. The situation would be different if the guy had died or if Cheney had been hunting him in a The Most Dangerous Game type scenario; then I could understand getting worked up about it.* As it is, the entire incident is unfortunate and it's lucky nobody was killed. If anything, the other guy comes away with some cool scars and gets to tell his grandkids about the time grandpa got shot in the face by the Vice President and then walked away.

What bugs me is the pre-emptive reaction on the Right. As a rule, I don't like to talk about or acknowledge her, but right wing wack job Michelle Malkin said something yesterday that bugged me on a couple of levels (as opposed to the usual five or six levels):

The Dems will exploit this accident to smear Cheney as incapable of being trusted, weak of mind, etc. The resignation rumors will fly again. And the biography of a man who has served this country so well and so honorably for so many years will be overshadowed by a single, ill-fated hunting mishap.

***

Reader C.T. writes: "I'd rather hunt with Dick Cheney than ride with Ted Kennedy ."

As usual, Malkin is devoid of any sense of irony in regards to her own writing, as she puts that top statement next to the bottom one without blinking.

What really bugs me here is the hypocrisy of her “Republicans are so hard done by” sentiments. Imagining the colossal shit storm that would have erupted if Al Gore had shot someone by accident during Clinton’s second term drains away my sympathies pretty quickly. The Right would have peed themselves in anticipation upon hearing the news, and never mind resignation, Pat Robertson probably would have called for Gore to be executed.

Malkin’s opinion piece is more than just casual hypocrisy, though. Instead of waiting for a reaction from the left she acts like the reaction is a given: “The Dems will exploit”, “rumors will fly”, Cheney’s biography “will be overshadowed”. In the minds of Malkin’s readers, the Democrats are already taking advantage of the shooting to tear Cheney down. No one will ever call her out if the Democrats react differently, and if even one commentator does take Cheney to task, Malkin’s assertions are validated. Malkin thrives on taking fringe elements and isolated actions and using them to represent the whole. In this respect, calling her nuts, as I did above, helps her out by distracting from how dangerous and crafted her rhetoric is.
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* As usual, this reminds me of an Onion article.

A big "Eff You"

2006-02-10T14:21:00.000-08:00

Preacher readers may remember the scene with the character who responds to getting kicked out of NASA's astronaut program by crafting a giant sign in the desert for astronauts to read from orbit. If not, here's a refresher:

Now, life imitates Ennis, as Google Maps spots a 40-metre profanity from space.

You DO NOT talk about Fight Club

2006-02-09T10:52:00.000-08:00

But if you want to sing about it, go right ahead. The Indian movie industry has a long history of remaking foreign films into domestic blockbusters, and past examples include Reservoir Dogs, The Rock, and King Kong(!). I've even blogged before about the Bollywood remake of Superman.

The latest movie to get the South Asian treatment is Fight Club. I'm guessing, based on the trailers behind that link and on past experience, that all subtext and social commentary will be replaced by over the top fight scenes and multiple musical numbers. And really, that seems like a fair trade.
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Past experience also suggests that the Indian Fight Club will have a somewhat more conventional love story than the Hollywood version, but if you can't wait, here's a trailer that recuts the English movie to look like a romantic comedy.
(via BoingBoing)
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Only slightly less ridiculous (from an old article at The Onion): The First Rule Of The Quilting Society Is You Don't Talk About The Quilting Society.

As with a lot of stuff at the Onion, the title is pretty much the whole joke, so I don't really think you need to follow that link and read the whole article.
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And finally, Phil Noto draws Tyler Durden:

Images and links

2006-02-07T10:27:00.000-08:00

When the X-Men 3 trailer debuted a couple of months ago, some of the shots seemed familiar, but I couldn't figure out where I'd seen them before. Recently something clicked in my head and I dug up this image:

Which bears a striking resemblance to this shot from the movie:

I don't think the second one is necessarily a lift of the first, but the similarities are striking.
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Spiderwords has a couple of Neil Gaiman poems up. Both are good, although I liked the first one, "The Day the Saucers Came", a little better than the second. Go read them, even if normally you don't read poems. Just do it.

(via BoingBoing)
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And while you're clicking around, go watch this animated United Airlines commercial. It's the one on the far right, called "Dragon." It's short and you'll like it, I promise.

(via Drawn!)
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Something else I spotted on Drawn!, a link to two video clips showing animated water. It's a lot more impressive than it sounds, go watch.
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And finally, to steal from The Daily Show, here's your daily moment of zen:

President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale.

- U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on eavesdropping.

Crooks and Liars has the video clip.

Superbowl ads and a couple of other clips

2006-02-05T20:18:00.000-08:00

Just got back from a Superbowl party at my friend Paul #3's place. The game was alright, but the commercials were an added treat this year. The Canadian broadcast doesn't carry the commercials that U.S. audiences get to see, but somehow Paul3's ginormous TV had all the good ads. I didn't talk to Paul, so I don't know for sure why we saw the American broadcast, but I think it was because of the fact that for such a glorious TV set to not receive the unaltered broadcast would be a crime against nature, so the universe itself rearranged the way TV signals work for the duration of the game so we could watch the proper version. But I'm just speculating.

The crowd at the house was noisy throughout the game, offering lots of back seat quarterbacking and jeering at bad calls, but during the commercials, the room quieted to see what advertisers paid $2.5 million apiece to show us. One of the best commercials of the night was Mastercard's MacGyver spot, and when I got home I found that IFilm has already put the rest of the commercials up. Most of the ads weren't anything special, but from the ones on the page you should take time to watch (in order of entertainment value)
Sprint: Locker Room
Ameriquest Mortgage Co: That Killed Him
and Budweiser: Superfan.

To a lesser extent, I also liked
Degree: Stunt City
Bud Light: On the Roof
and Michelob Ultra: Touch Football
Although that last one would be much better without the cop out ending.
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While we're talking internet clips, if you haven't seen these two already, watch Brokeback to the Future, which recuts Back to the Future III to suggest a romance between Marty and Doc, and this Sleepless in Seattle trailer, which remixes the movie to look like a thriller.

Unmasked!

2006-02-03T11:43:00.000-08:00

Last spring, over at Without Me You're Only You, Des posted this photo of himself and Le Visage Rouge from his trip to the comic museum in Brussels:

When confronted by suggestions that he and Le Visage Rouge might be the same person, Des carefully avoided answering the question. I'm sure he thought no one noticed his evasiveness. Well, I noticed, and now, through tireless detective work and with the help of my trusty Photoshop, I've managed to (literally) produce the evidence for what I've long suspected.

Evade that, Des. As I've yearned to say if I ever encounter Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance: "The jig is up!" Now the world knows your dirty little secret.

Belly laugh

2006-02-02T15:44:00.000-08:00

Not having a job is really starting to suck. I am so unemployed that yesterday I didn't buy new comics. I'm sure that has very little meaning for the non-comics reading civillians reading this, but the Wednesday regulars should know how dire your circumstances have to be for you not to hit the store on new comic day. That's where I am. I was going to head to the store, and then I decided on the way there that considering my finances and the utter lack of interest companies are displaying in hiring me, that buying comics this week would be irresponsible. So no new comics.

I'm so depressed.
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In defiance of circumstances, today's entry is about laughing.

I scanned this from the inside of an Earth, Wind, and Fire record cover at work (back when I had a... well, you know). I've decided that from now on I'm going to laugh like that guy in the blue.

Better yet, I want someone to say something so funny that I have to laugh that big.
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Here's a link to a poster parodying Ringu, the Japanese horror movie that The Ring was based on.
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And finally, after way too long digging in the archives, I recently managed to find my favourite Tom Tomorrow strip. Enjoy:

In-jokes delivered through classic comic panels

2006-01-30T13:47:00.000-08:00

This one's for John:

(Jack Kirby, OMAC #5)
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And this one, too:

Just a reminder not to judge, buddy.
(John Buscema, Avengers #58)
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And finally, a present for Kathryn:

(Carmine Infantino, Spider-Woman #2)

I'm going to make it so you never sleep again

2006-01-26T10:57:00.000-08:00

McSweeney's, as you may or may not know, has an Open Letters feature, in which readers can submit "Open letters to people or entities who are unlikely to respond." They have an extensive archive of hilarious letters to a variety of recipients, such as My 22-Year-Old Self, My Ability to Lose Interest in Things Easily, the Current Boyfriend of the Girl I'm in Love With, and many more. They even have An Open Letter to the Human Resources Department of the Superfriends from a science PhD at the University of British Columbia, but it's not that funny (scientists from UBC generally aren't).

Anyways, I was reading through a couple of the newer letters recently, and I came across one called An Open Letter to My Husband's Pillow, in which a woman addresses the pillow her husband has kept since college. It's a funny letter and I was amused right up until I got to this part:

Again, I tolerated you. We agreed to disagree about the fact that you were a vile, stained creature fouling up my bed.

But then something happened. I ate lunch with a co-worker who had just seen a special on the local news about dust mites. Sure, I'd heard of them. Microscopic bugs that eat your dead skin, right? They were gross and all, but here's the fact that sent me over the edge: By the time a pillow is two years old, 20 percent of its weight is made up of dust mites and their droppings.

In other words, Pillow: you were full of shit.

Naturally, I was (am) horrified by that 20 percent number and I went and looked it up. Unfortunately, I found several sources that back up the claim (although some suggest it's only 10% (what a relief)), and what's worse, at that last link I learned this as well:

"We secrete about 100 liters of sweat into a bed over a year. We do not wash our quilts and pillows, so they are an ideal place to find fungi"

That's from an article charmingly titled "Your Pillows Are Full of Fungus."

The dust mite thing also reminded me of this horrific little sequence from a Squee comic:

My pillow's in the washing machine right now, no joke.

A couple of comics reviews

2006-01-24T15:30:00.000-08:00

I had a few thoughts I wanted to get out before this week's stuff shows up. Be warned, spoilers aplenty:

All Star Superman #2 - The big book last week was the second issue of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's run on DC's flagship character. This issue is a little quieter than the first, as it turns down the wonder a touch and adds some paranoia to the mix. Interestingly, the two issues so far have spent as much time, if not more, delving into the worlds inside the characters' heads as the wonder of the world outside. The first issue looked at Superman's reaction to his impending death, while this one focuses on Lois Lane's responses to learning Superman's secret identity.

How does a great investigative reporter react to having one of the biggest stories in the world handed to her? Here, it's by digging deeper, into both the story and her own reactions to it. In making Lois's initial response to Superman's confession be disbelief, Morrison references all those old Silver Age stories in which Lois's investigations into Superman's secret identity end with Superman making her look like an idiot. The fact that she thinks that Superman is setting her up for a joke is great, but also makes you think that hanging out with Superman must be a real pain in the ass, and you wonder how he has any friends.

After disbelief, Lois's reaction is disgust, as she thinks, "And you know what would be worse? What if he's telling the truth?" After all the years of hanging out with Clark Kent, she's repulsed by the idea that Superman might really be that dorky, even in the slightest way. As a friend of mine likes to say, "No one's that good an actor." This panel captures her disgust.

Her reaction seems shallow at first, but makes sense when you think about where she's coming from. She's Lois Lane, leading journalist, fashion plate, globetrotter. She dines with world leaders and collects Pulitzers. She's hot. She just wants someone in her own league, but she's caught wondering, "If you take away the superpowers, are you just left with a geek in a cape?"

A few pages earlier, as if to answer her question:

There he is, showing up to dinner in homemade Kryptonian D&D robes that he sewed himself. You have to wonder whether he's about to pull out a Kryptonian million sided die ("I'm +3 for strength, curiosity, and imagination, Lois"). I wrote that last sentence and looked up the panel to check the quote and I was surprised at how much the original line sounds like anRPG player listing off his stats to an uninterested audience.

I'm not sure if Morrison intended Superman to have geek undertones in this scene, and I when I first read it I thought that Quitely had failed in giving the robes the majestic quality the script likely called for. In the context of Lois's inner conflict throughout the issue, though, I have to wonder about Morrison's intentions here.

Anyways, the book is a great character study. Quitely's art is even better than last issue. My main criticism of him then was that drawing women remains his weak point, but he finally seems to have gotten that sorted out, as his Lois Lane in this issue actually resembles a proper human being. The only panel that fails in this issue (and it's kind of a critical one) is where Lois looks into the secret room. By the context, one can determine that the room was meant to be creepy, and the sewing machine should have looked like a torture device or something, but none of that really comes across.

Also, on Morrison's part, while the tour through the Fortress is meant to recall similar scenes from the Silver Age, it seems a little sparse comparatively. I kept wanting to see more of Morrison's inventiveness. In doing so, however, I suppose you risk the story becoming more about a catalogue of gadgets than the characters therein.

My nitpicks are minor, and this issue has me looking forward to more.

Green Lantern #7 - I was looking forward to this series when it started up, but the first few issues showed that the only reason I was sticking around was because of Carlos Pacheco’s art, and when he took issues off so did I. I believe this issue is Pacheco’s last, and I believe it’ll be mine as well. Pacheco’s art in this issue shines, as always, with characteristically dynamic figure work, innovative angles, and detailed backgrounds.

The story is serviceable: Mongul’s son comes to Earth to carry out his father’s plans of conquest, and Green Lantern charges in to stop him because of Mongul’s role in destroying Coast City. For some ridiculous reason he brings the powerless Green Arrow for backup to fight a villain that regularly takes on Superman. For his weapon of conquest, Geoff Johns has Mongul Jr. use the black mercy plants first seen in Alan Moore’s classic “For the Man who has Everything.” Including the plants is a nice nod to Moore’s story, but at the same time makes comparisons between the two stories inevitable, and Johns does not have the depth of game to compete. Both the dialogue and the plot failed to engage me.

Johns’s efforts to make the Corps seem like a police force by having them use police terminology strikes me as a great way to take a cosmic organization and make it seem mundane. The characters are flat, and for the most part their interaction seems forced. I’m troubled by a strikingly relevant exchange towards the beginning of the issue in which Green Lantern reveals that his ring records everything he does:

This is our hero? I'm troubled that the rabid, left wing liberal Green Arrow has nothing to say about Green Lantern's police state tendencies. Also, I’m wondering if Johns will have other characters address or counter the utter wrongness Green Lantern’s statement at some point. However, I’m bored enough with this title in general that I won’t be around to find out.

I picked up Planetary #24 last week, as well, but the issue was mainly a big infodump, so I don't have much to say about it. I read an interview with Bryan Hitch today at The Pulse in which he said that he's behind on pencilling The Ultimates, and I thought, "That's going to rile some feathers." But while people freak out whenever The Ultimates, or any number of other comics, ships late, every issue of Planetary gets treated like a present. I'm not leaning one way or the other, I just thought the difference was odd.

I don't approve of IQ tests unless they show I'm really smart

2006-01-21T09:36:00.000-08:00

I did this intelligence test yesterday and found out that I am one smart motherfucker. The site has a bunch of hoo-ha on it about Mensa and being a genius, but nothing on the site suggests that it's an official Mensa test, and I crossed the "genius" mark way too easily for me to put much weight on the results. It's a tough little test, and it makes you think. Go try it and see if you can beat this, bitches:

(I got 24 of them right, but in the interests of fairness I'm not counting the one that I had to look up the spelling for.)
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This person made a list of their top 65 music videos of 2005, and included most for download. I didn't watch more than a couple (even I don't have that much time) but the person making the list describes their top video, "Glosoli" by Sigur Ros, as "a life-changing experience 'on par with losing your virginity or seeing Garden State for the first time'". I wouldn't quite go that far (although I am wondering whether I blinked at the wrong time and missed something important in Garden State), but the video is kind of entertaining.
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And finally, something I read in a guide for job interviews:
No tranquilizers? Next you'll be telling me that downing that fifth of Jack beforehand is a bad idea too. Thanks for the tip, but why don't I stick with my methods and you go with yours?

News flash!

2006-01-17T16:51:00.000-08:00

This just in: 24 is a really entertaining TV show! You heard it here first.

I blame the lack of updates here over the past couple of days on the fact that I've been watching DVDs of the first season. Every episode ends with a goddamn cliffhanger, which means I never watch just one show in a sitting. I've watched nine episodes since the day before yesterday, and I still have a few open hours before I go to bed tonight. I can't imagine what the experience of having to wait a whole week to find out what happens next must have been like for people watching first airings. I've been giving people Y the Last Man to read lately, and no one appreciates how much impact the cliffhangers in the first ten issues had when you knew the next issue wasn't out for a month. At the same time, though, I think having to wait adds something to the experience of the story, and collecting the story changes that experience.
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I also blame my lack of blog updates on how I've arranged my day. On my list of things to do I always put "blogging" right under "job hunting." However, I am usually so demoralized by the process of looking through job postings that I want to just go to sleep.

As I was looking through job listings today, I came across one for a "Bending press operator" at a metal fabrication plant. If I'm not mistaken, you might also call that position a "Bender."

Needless to say, I didn't apply. Everyone knows that job's going to be taken over by robots soon.
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Between sessions of job hunting and watching 24, I came across this trailer for the upcoming adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. The movie is directed by Richard Linklater in the same animation over live actors style that he used in Waking Life. The trailer has been out for ages, and I know I've seen it before, but for some reason it really struck a chord with me when I watched it today. Go take a look.
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And finally, while I'm talking about Philip K. Dick, here is a link to a six page story by Robert Crumb called "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick." It's an interesting piece in which Crumb provides images to go along with Dick's words from an interview. Take a look if you're a fan of the two men.

(via BoingBoing)

Links to other people's creativity

2006-01-14T16:19:00.002-08:00

That "draw Batgirl" meme I mentioned yesterday has been going crazy. When I first looked at it, they had maybe two or three dozen Batgirl drawings up. They're now pushing what looks to be about six hundred.

Two things I like about this meme are that despite mention on plenty of outside websites, the participants (so far) are almost entirely on Livejournal, making the meme seem like a community event, and that people are participating regardless of artistic ability. Everyone's just having fun with it.

I've looked at all of them that are up so far, and these links lead to three more good ones: 1, 2, 3.
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I mentioned Nora Ephron yesterday, which reminded me later of this video clip, which I originally saw described as "The Shining as directed by Nora Ephron." It's funny, and slightly twisted.
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I don't know if I've ever posted this before, but I stumbled across another old link I had to the trailer for that Seinfeld documentary Comedian. This is one of my favourite trailers for one of my favourite movies. I must have watched this trailer twenty or thirty times just in the first few weeks when it went online, and it still makes me laugh. The movie is great too, with all sorts of interesting ideas on art and being an artist. I may talk about the film another day, for now, just enjoy the trailer.
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And finally, here's a link to a short 3D animated film of a monk engaged in some of that crazy kung fu action I was talking about yesterday. The short is called Supermoine and it's ridiculously violent, but it that funny way. Worth a watch.

(via Drawn!)