gang of fools

You’re wondering what the hell this has to do with “remember.” Well, it’s an old picture that I’ve been tweaking the last couple weeks, and it looks kind of old to me. And she’s a mermaid, which is kind of… Nevermind. I just felt like uploading this picture, and didn’t have time to follow the brief. Get off my back. Stop looking at me like that.

A lot of people think the BPelt multifill plugin is useless. I think it’s perfectly useful as long as you’re not actually trying to color with it.

There’s probably a way to do this without the Pshop plugin, which I’d like to figure out. Because, as a Windows user, I’m always slightly paranoid about the tecnopocalypse, and I worry that at some point someone will ask me to pull off a similar trick without the plugin. Which is weird. Plumbers don’t worry that they’ll be asked to lay pipe without a wrench.

I’ve decided that I will get over my reticence at sitting in front of my slow ass computer, trying to make it do things, because the other option is to fill my tiny little room with piles of crap– half of it toxic– and I JUST GOT RID OF THE DAMN THINGS. So– Painter allows me to play with all sorts of, well, digital approximations of textures and colors– without the heavy cash and space investment. Which is fine, as my interest has always been in print, not “fine art.” Once it’s printed up in a magazine or run on a website, you don’t really know or care how it was made, as long as it looks good.

Of course, because I am insecure, I get these days (usually long, wasted Saturdays) where I panic because I don’t know how to paint, and I figure I’ll teach myself. RIGHT NOW! When I should be sleeping. Or throwing rocks at the neighbor kids.

This is what Painter thinks a GIANT light blue pencil and a much smaller blue pastel look like on smooth blue paper. And who are we to say Painter is wrong?

I often come off as a pessimist (I like to think of myself as more of a cynic), but I actually love human beings. Not individual people– you all suck– but the species as a whole. One of the things that’s so great about us is our undying capacity to humiliate other species.

_{“Ewe’d be mad not to take your little lambs!”}

Over at The Engine, Warren Ellis asked people to re-imagine Buck Rogers. I went for the obvious pun because it is a congenital condition. I’ve learned to live with it and so should you. Click the picture to go to the thread where other, far more talented people are doing the same. In fact, punch their pokey search engine a bit– other threads will turn up; there’s a goddamn religion gone up around Supergirl (who don’t like teenagers in tennis skirts?)

Hm. I’m going to have to put some attention into this. That didn’t come out half-terrible.

_{Click to go to the Engine’s remake/remodel thread.}

At the climax of his battle with the Goblin King, Carnacki finds himself flung through time, landing in present-day Blighty with a hang-over and a still-fashionable wardrobe. Jacking a Treo and iPod from oblivious morning commuters, he continues with his life’s work: cam-phone panty shots, the care and catching ghosts.

I am absotively not a comics blogger, but this post by Sean T. Collins re: Alan Moore’s “clockwork-precise plotting” got me thinking. Just because I think about structure all the time, and it’s easier when you’ve got something to kick against, I suppose. About Watchmen, Sean writes:

I think it’s awesome that there’s a completely symmetrical of issue of Watchmen, but it has sweet fuck-all to do with the way the world actually works.

And he’s not wrong, I guess, except that I can very easily argue the opposite. First, though, let’s not lose sight of the differences between a comic written and drawn by one never-changing pair of artists, and a tv show (Sean compares Watchmen with Sopranos); the latter will have a metric ton of writers and directors by the time the series ends. Also, as an open-ended series, the makers of that show were contractually obligated to keep coming up with new ways to keep it going. It’s a very different exercise when you know you’ve got 12 months to get in and get out.

But, more to his point– the very act of storytelling is an imposition of artificial pattern on “messy” life. It’s the face in the clouds, the Christ in the pudding. We constantly see patterns in and draw parallels between our lives. Maybe a symmetrical comic has less to do with the way the world works than it has to do with how we work in the world?

And also, I think Sean imagines Moore to be a bit more– stolid? mechanical?– than he may be. He’s certainly calculating, but if his memory of the book’s genesis is to be believed, Moore’s Watchmen was actually a lot more organic than it comes off. Maybe the problem is that Moore is too mannered, too “writerly,” as Sean puts it. I’d have to agree. Not only does Moore write for effect, he writes for effect in every damn panel. Watchmen does read like Moore, at some point, was trying to write a great book, rather than just write a book that might turn out to be pretty good. And even though you can produce masterful work like that, it can also be grating. Who reads Ulysses for the hell of it?

But it is interesting to compare with someone like, say, Chris Ware. Ware writes and draws at the same time, creating the story as he goes from panel to panel, and page to page. His diagrammatic and precise cartooning seems to fly in the face of this technique. His almost mechanical drawing allows him to be a more improvisational writer.

See? This is why I stopped reading comics blogs. Now I’m going to have to sit down and figure out who in comics are the bakers (measuring ingredients out in precise amounts) and who are the chefs (throwing flavors together with abandon). It’s not like I had anything else to do…

I really do hope this kid is okay, but I can’t deny how much this makes me laugh:

It’s true: if I slip on a banana peel, it’s a tragedy, you fall down a manhole, it’s a comedy.

_{Found via East Village Idiot}

Whitmore45.jpg via flickr.

I’d actually forgotten how much I love 50’s illustration (though this style runs from the late 40’s through the mid 60’s, I think).

What I love most about 50’s popular culture is how disconnected it is from any world I know. It’s truly alien to me, coming from some strange world where war and hunger and oppression just don’t exist. It’s like fantasy, without the dragons…

East vs West via flickr.

If you were socio-politically aware during Ronald Regan’s America, you may recall “Japan-bashing.” One more swing of the Yellow Peril pendulum. That was largely based on opposition to Japan’s economic policies, seen as unfair in a global-capital sense. Some people would say that was based on racism. I reserve final judgement.

Maybe I’m reading too much into things, but I feel like we’re swinging that way again, only the focus now seems to be on China. A fun path to liver failure would be this drinking game: listen to talk radio, and take a shot every time another story mentions how China’s growing economy threatens the world, and, oh yeah, America too.

And I listen to NPR for fuck’s sake, not Rush Limbaugh. Right now, the emphasis is on environment, how China’s increased use of dirty coal is going to feed into pollution and global warming. Now, okay, that’s fair, but America has absolutely lost the moral authority to demand that some other country start adhering to tough environmental standards.

I fear that, even subconsciously, we’re gearing up for some sort of fight (probably not in the military sense) with China. Maybe there’s nothing to really worry about– nothing all that terrible came out of the 80’s antagonism with Japan. But the argument back then wasn’t that the Japanese were a real threat, just that they weren’t playing fair. But the groundwork being laid now, in these increasingly xenophobic times, feels shrill. It’s boring. We should figure out a new way to deal with people.

The reaction to the textured stuff, via the BPelt Multifill plugin I’ve been using, was very positive, so I’ve been playing with it. So here’s I did this East Vs. West picture. Click the thumbnails for larger versions.

First I sketched out an idea. Then I put together the figures in Poser, which is useful because it makes it faster to experiment with perspectives, framing, etc. Then I take a screen-cap and paste into Pshop.

In Pshop, I trace with a brush, then print that out and lightbox that onto bristol board. Then I can use that plugin– which is supposed to lay flat colors into separated fields of white. What happens when you use it on textured paper is that the colors go totally random. At this stage, I make way too many versions to show them all here, but a few look like this:

And of course I ink the pencils as well, then run variations of that plugin on the ink.

At one point, one of the variations was of little value, other than the hand:

And there’s a crap load of duplicates, and changing blending modes and layer order to come up with the final. The stars were added because I wasn’t sure if it came across that the girl was Chinese, and the stars of both US and Chinese flags seemed too sensible a connection to pass up.

I probably should have made the whip follow the arc of the stars on the Chinese flag, to solidify the connection, but the stars were a much later addition.

The only thing that worries me (something’s go to) is how clients would react to this: not quite knowing exactly what you’re going to get. I feel I’m in much more control of this technique in the year I’ve been playing with it, but the chaotic approach means every picture’s going to be substantially different, no matter what you do.

They’re interviewing Cowboy Junkies on the radio as I write this. Hey, Shannon…

From The Ultimates, v2 #13

_{copyright 2007 Marvel Comics; click to biggify}

In less depressing comics discoveries I’ve made tonight, Doug TenNapel can draw his ass off.

_{copyright 2007 Doug TenNapel; you may also click for biggification– maybe just take that as read.}

Eight pages a day. Christ.

Stephen Frug’s Attempts to write about 100 Great Comics Pages.

Note, he’s not doing the 100 greatest pages, just 100 of ‘em that he really digs. And the writing’s pretty smart.

_click!
Bear in mind, he’s the kind of guy who’ll include the Codex Seraphinianus, so some of ye purists might want to avert your eyes.

Revolution (part 1) via flickr.

By flickr photog Tous les noms sont déjà pris… pfff….

Pantha via flickr.

Remake/Remodel #9 at the Engine, Princess Pantha.

I figure the typical “jungle girl” character is about the fascination of the Other, yeah? The white chick in deepest, darkest, scariest Africa.

So, who better to navigate the wilds of post-Apocalyptic Hollywood than an African supermodel, stranded here when her plane is shot down trying to escape LAX.

Dressed in wild dalmation furs and D&G baby seal boots, she remains in Los Angeles to hunt a mythical prey: a cab driver willing to take her to South Central.

_{via MSNBC via Eric at TalkAboutComics}

Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal spends a month in a room in Chicago’s Flatfile Gallery, with a webcam and a paintball gun you can use to shoot him. He says his PTSD– from being victimized under Hussein– is returning. Way to go, world!

_{click for biggin’}

Ooh. Christ. What a pretty movie.

_biggify

As has been suggested, it ain’t the smartest flick ever made, but what are you going to do?

I’d forgotten about this movie, and was reminded of it while digging around through BLDGBLOG, which, I also discover, has an interview with Walter Murch, who talks about all kinds of stuff besides editing (AKA: the best part of filmmaking).

They apparently ran some contests in conjunction with Deviantart; one each for a poster, short story and comic. This strikes me as somewhat clever, not because it’s never been done, but because the film is so much about it’s own design. If the story were really engaging– or maybe if there were more stunts and shoot-outs (damn French can’t do anything right)– they might have generated a kind of cult around the thing. It just screams for fanfic. That there isn’t any (as far as I’ve seen) is a kind of failure, I think.