A San Diego ComicCon update magazines arrived in the mail recently (okay, it was a few weeks ago, but you know how I am...) and as I was flipping past the various Watchmen related fanboy crap that appeals to me in no way at all, I found an Interview with one of the scheduled guests that actually piqued my interest in the 2009 con (beyond seeing the few artists/writers I've come to know and appreciate over the years - Laurie B and Mike Kunkel, among others).
Stephan Pastis's comic strip, Pearls Before Swine, has been in the local newspaper for a few years now, but I had never seen Richard Thompson's strip, Cul De Sac, before reading this article. And to be honest, even though Pearls Before Swine is a clever and often satirically funny strip, it's not really one of my top ten favorites. It's far better than most of the rest, but it's just lacking that hook to win my love (as have Dilbert, Pickles, Get Fuzzy and a few others). I wish Cul De Sac was in the local paper because it saeems to have all the elements that would move it into my top five, but...well, it's not available. So no love.
And just what is so grear about these guys and their work? I'm assuming that few will take the time to read the six pages above, so just read these strips (from the article) and then try to tell me that you don't find them brilliant.
Then again, maybe they're not as great as I think. But even if you aren't impressed, I am. And I'm very much looking forward to seeing both of these guys in about four months.
And speaking of people I looked forward to seeing at the San Digo ComicCon, here's a Thieves & Kings sketch that Mark Oakley drew for me at the 2002 or 2003 ComicCon - I forget which, it's been soooo long since he made the trip. The few years he made the trip to San Diego are among my favorite convention memories.
I'm probably the last kid on the block to have heard about Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (I was actually told about it two weeks ago, but only got around to checking it out this past weekend). For any of my fellow not-in-the-know compatriots, here's the rundown of Dr Horrible:
Dr Horrible is just like any other slightly weird, secretly pining for the girl of his dreams, super-villain-wannabe kind of guy who records his thoughts and activities in a video blog. He's played to perfection by Neil Patrick Harris, who has a surprisingly good singing voice. The girl of Doogie's dreams, Penny, is played by an actress who seems vaguely familiar, but not enough-so that I remember her from anything specific, named Felicia Day. There's a lot of singing, day-dream sequences (it reminds me of both Pushing Daisies and Flight of the Conchords) and madcap superhero/super-villain competitiveness. I won't spill anything else specific about the show, except to say that Doogie's singing and the music remind me a lot of Danny Elfman. And I bought the Dr Horrible Season 1 DVD (with a paltry 3 episodes) on Amazon right after I finished watching the episodes on Youtube.
If you're too lazy to go to Youtube and search for the episodes, you can see them here (obtained from Youtube - my DVD is still in transit).
Act 1, Part 1 of 2
Act 1, Part 2 of 2
Act 1, Part 2 of 2
Act 1, Part 2 of 2
Act 3, Part 1 of 2
Act 3, Part 2 of 2
There's also another clip with the closing credits and more awesome music from the soundtrack, as well as the last part of the Act 3, Part 2 video action...
The Finale
The Guild
In my efforts to find out more about Dr Horrible, I also discovered another web-only endeavor called The Guild, written by and starring Penny from Dr Horrible, Felicia Day.
This series is about a "guild" of players playing an unnamed MMORPG (Felicia is, or was until she broke the addiction, a WoW player) who take the leap and decide to meet IRL. All the guild members (with the exception of Felicia's character) were lying about nearly everything, so the meeting is a pretty big jolt. There's much more to the series, but that's the gist.
Warning: there is some profanity in these, so it's probably worthy of at least a strong PG-13, if not an R.
If you're too lazy to go to Youtube and search for the season 1 episodes, you can see them here (obtained from Youtube - season 2 is only available through the Official site.)
I mentioned the comic adaptation of L Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in November, when I picked up the sketchbook. Now, three issues and five months later, I'm mentionng it again.
As I mentioned then, I've never read any of the 14 Oz books that Baum wrote, so I don't really know how closely this adaptation mirros the original story, but there are a lot of events in these stories that I don't remember in the film (the kingdom of mice, the scarecrow's origin, the scarecrow trapped on a pole in the river and saved by a sympathetic crane, etc). And this adaptation isn't quite the "mad dash to the Wizard" that I remember from the film. It's more like the Sci-Fi channel's slower-paced character-developing attempt to recreate the story with Tin Man (without the sci-fi elements or Zooey Deschanel).
Here are the covers and a few interior pages from the first three issues of the series (issue #4 should be out this Wednesday).
It's really good stuff - very suitable for adults and children.
Sandman: The Dream Hunters
And speaking of good stuff, I've been meaning to mention the Neil Gaiman comic, Sandman: The Dream Hunters, for several months, but i just never quite got around to it. There's still one issue to go, so it might just get another mention when I see how everything gets wrapped up. (If I get around to it, that is.)
Well, he had me fooled.
For the past year when friends asked me what project I was working on, I would say I'm adapting Neil Gaiman's The Dream Hunters an ancient japanese fairy tale that Neil adapted from the original into the Sandman universe and very cleverly too, the way he wove Cain and Abel and the three witches into the fabric of his "retold" tale. A seamless transition, I said. It was only a few weeks ago I learned, along with practically everyone else, that Neil's story was entirely of his own invention, its faux pedigree a whimsical part of the whole.
This is a project that has felt charmed to me from the start. From the time I first read Neil's first rough draft of the story ten years ago, I knew immediately I wanted to make this story "mine." At that time Neil and I had only collaborated on two projects: Sandman #50 and his short story "One Life; Furnished in Early Moorcock." I've spent much of my career doing adaptations of classic literature (Kipling, Oscar Wilde, etc.) and operas (The Magic Flute, The Ring of the Nibelung, Salome) but have always said, particularly on being given the original script to Sandman 50, that if I was offered scripts of this caliber every day I'd never need to do another adaptation. True, since Neil had already written The Dream Hunters as a short story, what I was doing was technically an adaptation, but it was an adaptation of a living writer. A different situation. A little more nerve-racking, though Neil has never been anything but an encouraging and enthusiastic partner. A Dream (ouch) to work with.
In its settings - an ancient and imaginary japan complete with talking animals, demons and spirits both pleasant and malign amid natural settings that ranged from the loveliest gardens to the wildest of supernatural thunderstorms - The Dream Hunters played to all my three major influences: Asian art (particularly japanese woodblock prints), European Art Nouveau (especially the graphics of Alphonse Mucha), and reaching all the way back to my childhood, the lush linearity of the earliest Disney masterpieces. Though that may sound contradictory - "lush and linear" - it represents imagemaking that is at once visually rich, even profligate, in its settings and effects combined with animation's stringent demand that every line serve a purpose. Nothing wasted. That economy of line is the common denominator of all three of these influences and an important part of the visual heritage of cartooning. For me, at least.
One of the happiest aspects of this experience, though, was the daily pleasure of receiving Lovern Kindzierski's e-mailed jpegs of the coloring. Early on, we decided to approximate the color palette of japanese woodblock prints of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries - colorful yet muted - using the frequently overexploited possibilities of computer coloring to produce effects no more extreme than those that might have been used on the original woodblock prints. As he has on every project we've collaborated on for the past seventeen years, Lovern's sensitive coloring hit all the right notes.
It's been almost exactly one year since I began The Dream Hunters, and it's been one of the happiest experiences of my working life. And it seems somehow fitting, given the nature of Sandman / Morpheus / Dream that what I thought I was adapting, an authentic ancient japanese fairy tale, was in fact an illusion entirely created by a modern western writer. So what have I been doing the past year?
"Dream or reality - Let others decide."
This is no exaggeration. If you didn't know any better (as I didn't, reading the first issue), you will be convinced that this is a authentic Japanese legend about a solitary monk cast in the role of Job (you know how these things work - all the big religions use the the same plot elements with a slightly different cast of characters).
The art of the interiors and the covers contributes to the "authentic" vibe you get from the book. Most of the panels are spartanly illustrated, yet drawn and colored as if they were straight out of the orient.
The second issue gets a little weird with witches that could have been lifted straight out of Macbeth (sorta...they're a little different).
But it's not really until the third issue that we see any real "Sandman" influence on the story/art.
I like how the Sandman character always looks so much like Neil.
Dreamhunters may be more of an acquired taste than Wizard of Oz, but their both worth a look for any real fan of sequential art storytelling.
