Archive for December, 2009
I fell upon Clients from Hell and laughed my ass off. In my brief wisp of a freelance career, I’ve had a couple of run-ins like this. Recently it was some clown on deviantart that wanted a character drawing or something for an OSU related game. I wouldn’t do it on principal because I hate anything OSU football related. There’s no amount of money you could pay me to do something like that. Just as well, the kid sounded like either he was going to pay me with a taco or a dime bag. Sketchy.
Off topic, but I love the one bit about elance. I tried elance once when first starting out. I was always underbid because I charged a reasonable rate. When you’re designing a logo for a restaurant for $15, you’re undermining any chance to make a living wage in freelancing. (my bid was $200 on that gig) There are a lot of sites (like elance) on the web that not only take a cut of your fee but also charge you for access to the decent gigs. Ridiculous. Just because you’re starting out doesn’t mean that you charge less than a tank of gas to do a logo. Access to graphics programs (like Indesign) and the internet’s been a blessing and a curse for creatives like me. Sometimes the attitude seems like you’re just an extra filter in Photoshop for their wonky concept.
Just thought I’d post a page from my Ghostbusters one-shot, coming your way Valentine’s Day 2010, from IDW:
What I love about the way the book turned out is that despite the licensed property nature of the book, it’s got such a cool indie vibe to it, all thanks to Salgood Sam’s artwork, Bernie Mireault’s coloring, and Salgood’s hand lettering.
What’s that? Is your 80s sense tingling? Feel another Hollywood big budget “reimagining” of a goofy 80s property coming your way? Does it star Liam Neeson and Jessica Biel?
Well, you’re absolutely right.
And of course, there’s a comic book series to go along with it, courtesy of the folks at IDW:
I guess it’s a couple of different series, actually. And one of them is written by none other than Chuck Dixon.
Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?
(Special “Young Dara Chronicles” aside: when a naive, impressionable Young Dara arrived in the States at the age of 12, barely speaking any English, the first American TV show he ever saw was The A-Team. Needless to say, Young Dara thought it was the greatest television show ever! In fact, he learned a lot of his conversational English by watching TV, mostly The A-Team. It’s a wonder he doesn’t speak like Mr. T. Of course, he no longer thinks that The A-Team is good television, but he will always carry a soft spot in his heart for that greatest of all Stephen J. Cannell creations)
Megan Milliken, a University of Chicago Harris School masters student in public policy is conducting an online survey to help identify and understand characteristics of the comic book reader. If you’ve got about 10 minutes, you may want to give it a shot.
There are 2 different surveys, for those below 18 or over 18. Follow the links here.
Here’s some good news for you: Disney sees superhero dollars in Marvel unknowns
With the big guns locked up by rival movie studios, our new Mouse Overlords are going to give a push to some of the B-listers like Iron Fist.
OK, now I’m basically just screwing with Craig and Matt.
Here’s Comic Book Resources’ Top 100 Comic Book Storylines Master List.
I’ll get you started: The Kree/Skrull War comes in at No. 79, 11 places behind Knightfall.
A lot of my personal faves are on there — Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Morrison’s JLA, New Frontier — although I would have ranked them higher. Identity Crisis didn’t thrill me, but it least it ranked behind the original Crisis on Infinite Earths. Batman: Hush just perplexes me.
We skipped a few weeks, but WV makes its triumphant return this week with Superman vs. Predator:
Huh. Not quite sure what to say about this. I mean, as far as match-ups go, you’d think this would fall into the “one punch and it’s all over” category. But maybe that predator has a special kryptonite tri-laser I don’t know about. Or Superman had the flu that day.
First of all, I hope everyone had a great Christmas. I’m looking forward to 2010.
Some of you may have noticed a lack of posts from me recently. That’s because about a month ago my PC came down with a nasty bit of malware. This despite running an anti-virus program and 3 separate anti-malware applications. It took 2 days of trying everything under the sun, and even though I managed to remove the offending program, something was still hosed with my browser. So I decided to cut my losses and wipe out my hard drive and install a clean version of Windows (luckily I had a good backup on an external disk, so I didn’t lose anything).
Another 2-3 days of getting all my programs re-installed and configured, running multiple Windows updates (have to reboot after each one, ugh) and I finally had my system up and running. Meanwhile, I had a script due to IDW and I had already lost a week of productivity. All of this was followed by an ill-fated memory upgrade, a piece of crap BIOS that somehow mistook my speaker jack for the keyboard and wouldn’t let the computer boot up, a trip to Micro Center, and after all that aggravation: a crashed hard drive.
Needless to say, I was beyond mad at this point. In fact, when my PC refused to boot, I lost my cool and kicked the piece of shit so hard I thought I broke my toe. It hurt so bad I ended up going to the urgent care and had it x-rayed, to make sure it wasn’t broken.
Which all leads me to the point of this post: I’m through with fucking Microsoft and their god damn piece of shit worthless Windows operating system. I shouldn’t have to run 4-5 different anti-virus and anti-spyware programs which hog up system resources and make everything run slow. I shouldn’t get a nasty malware despite running 4-5 different anti-virus and anti-spyware programs. I shouldn’t have to wipe out my hard drive and start from scratch just because the ridiculously complex Windows registry has the tendrils of some malware so embedded in it that it’s impossible to clean. I shouldn’t have to spend a day trying to figure out what the fuck 3 short beeps followed by a long beep mean when the BIOS can’t pass its power-on self test (POST) because there are half a dozen different BIOS manufacturers, each with their own proprietary beep code super secret decoder ring. I shouldn’t have to visit component manufacturer sites to try and find driver updates to make sure part X plays well with program Z.
In short, I shouldn’t have to deal with the worthless, easily-exploited, bloated, piece of utter crap that is Microsoft Windows on the ass-tacular PC platform. Not when there’s a better alternative available.
So I’m now posting this message from my brand new 24″ iMac. The computer that took me all of 5 minutes to setup. The one that detected my wireless router instantly, instead of having to load drivers and go through setup wizards. The one that’s not so easily exploited. The one that I’ll be running one anti-virus program on, instead of 5.
It’s a thing of beauty.
So long Microsoft. I still have to use your shitty product at work, but at least when it breaks there, there’s a whole department of well-paid technicians responsible for fixing it. Me? I’m quite happy with my Mac at home.
OK, James Robinson’s JSA: The Golden Age was an epic-scale intro to modernity, with superheroes. His Starman was a fun-loving meditation on fatherhood, nostalgia and duty, with beautiful character moments and occasional bursts of plot.
But now, via Caleb, I read that he’s tearing off Roy Harper’s arm.
and having Dr. Light I try to rape Dr. Light II.
According to one estimate, the most powerful supercomputer in the world is not controlled by a government, university or corporation: it is the Storm botnet.
Connecting between 1 million and 10 million computers, “the Storm cluster has the equivalent of 1-10M (approximately) 2.8 GHz P4s with 1-10 petabytes of RAM.” Storm is a series of email viruses that takes control of host systems and uses them for a variety of nefarious purposes, such as sending out spam and stealing identities. No one knows who controls the system, but it may be Russian hackers.
Overblown? Beats me. But I do have to say, it would be a great basis for a comic book story.
The fastest legit computer is the Cray XT5-HE (dubbed “Jaguar”) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, according to supercomputer ranking site Top500.org.
The Ohio Supercomputer Center’s xSeries x3455 Cluster Opteron clocks in at No. 107 on the list, if you were curious.
No, not you. You’re cool. That’s the motto of ColumbusDIY, a local indie music forum. The idea is that Columbus becomes a cooler place to live as people keep creating.
In addition to our own nationally known artist, there are a number of other cool artsy things going on around town.
1. Local artist Megan Burkholder has set up shop in the old Experience Columbus building, right downtown. According to the Dispatch writeup, “The 32-year-old Merion Village resident is a little more than halfway through a monthlong residency in the lobby of an abandoned bank Downtown, where her work and personal life are on full display (at least from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., when the curtains close).”
I walked past this the other day and it was pretty cool.
2. Madlab Theater is moving to a new space, 150 percent bigger than its old one, on Third St. Here’s the Columbus Underground writeup. I always mean to see more shows at Madlab. I have never seen a bad show there.
3. CCAD students have set up fashion exhibits in several store windows downtown. The fashions are all made from magazines and newspapers, Project Runway-style. There seems to be some kind of movement to fill empty downtown storefronts with some kind of art, which I appreciate.
The ACT-I-VATE Experience from Carlos Molina on Vimeo.
When I talk about Act-I-Vate, sometimes *people draw a blank. It’s an interesting 30 minute doc on them. I don’t read a lot of webcomics but I do check out these guys from time to time. It spawned from Livejournal and outgrown the limitations of posting webcomics in a community blog (not set up for webcomics). Creators span from the well known indie types to some unknowns. It’s the best online webcomic anthology you’ll ever check out. Props go to Haspiel for name checking the (sadly defunct) Chemistry Set.
If anything, they flash a few pages of Haspiel’s art along with everything else. I love his sense of layout.
*people who actively read webcomics but don’t darken the doors of your local comic shop. It’s changing though as they keep things flowing along.
…cuz now Matt Kish got mentioned online in “The New Yorker.”
Check it. (Last line in the entry).
Now even esteemed colleague Tom Williams can hold his silence no longer.
Seriously though, this is more attention than my art, or anything I have ever done, has gotten in my entire life. It is seriously freaking me out. Not even a little, a lot. I’m happy about it, but it’s really terrifying.
When I first discovered comic book specialty stores back in the 80s, it opened me up to a whole new world of comics not dominated by superheroes. Of the many, many black-and-white indie books that I got into, Xenozoic Tales was, and will always be, one of my favorites. Written and illustrated by Mark Schultz, and published by Kitchen Sink, the series lasted 14 issues. It told the story of mechanic Jack Tenrec and scientist Hannah Dundee in a post-apocalyptic Earth. Aside from the presence of dinosaurs, one of my favorite aspects of the comic was the fact that unlike the hundreds of Mad Max “scorched Earth” variations on the theme, this was a world overrun by jungles and reclaimed by nature. Needles to say, there was also a strong environmental theme running through the book.
Of course, Schultz’s eye-meltingly gorgeous artwork also set it apart from anything else on the shelves:
According to Wikipedia, “under the more memorable title, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, the series spawned a cartoon series premiered on CBS, an arcade game from Capcom, a home video game from Rocket Science Games, action figures, trading cards, candy bars, and a Twilight 2000 system role-playing game.” I do remember seeing an episode or two of the cartoon, but it did nothing for me. The other products I’m not familiar with, although there’s one they forgot to list: Xenozoic Tales music CD (which I own and should probably review at some point on the blog…)
(Have a favorite series of your own? Or an artist? Character? Submit your own set of 7 covers by sending me small files (i.e. 72 dpi for the web) to ferret at ferretpress dot com and include “7 covers” in the subject line. Also, let me know if you have a blog or website you’d like me to link to.)
Our friend Horror Movie Ray (Ray Scott of Cincinnati) pops up with this: A zombie-themed Etta James music video.
You heard me.
Etta “Deada” James At Last Zombie Video from go lil Ray on Vimeo.