The Week

Dec29
by on 29 December 2017

It’s the end of 2017 and, for a lot of people, it’s a time for reflection and promises going forward. This last week I was on the road for the holidays, but managed to fit in a few things worth talking about.

LISTENING

Nothing new this week, but rather a rediscovery of a playlist I made earlier this year while on a road trip through the southwest, a combination of two wonderful albums.

Source: Universal/Mercury (Wigmore), RCA (King)

  • Gravel & Wine by Gin Wigmore, Love Stuff by Elle King

I’m sure––because their singing voices can be considered similar––that these two musicians are sick to death of being either compared to each other or, at the least, paired, but these two albums work so well together that it’s hard to listen to them on their own anymore. Both have their own approach to dark, drunken roots-rock that complement the other while being wonderful collections of songs independently. However, Wigmore’s songs are more unhinged, more dangerous and raw, which can make listening to her album a bit of a draining, depressing experience (not really, but it could, technically). King’s album has a nice smattering of really good songs that are a bit safer than Wigmore’s, but the swagger is stronger and the diversity of music is a bit more engaging, but also in the mix are a few songs that are a bit too saccharine to the point where they feel a bit out of place. Picking out the best songs from each album and mixing them together in a playlist has been a gift that keeps on giving this year, and rediscovering it this weekend has invigorated me more than I expected. Below are a favorite song from each album.

WATCHING

  • The Last Alaskans

The Animal Planet/Discovery Channel series has been a recent discovery for my homestead. Its discovery came directly from my wife, Nicole, who found the series through an organic unfolding stemming back from a book she read called The Final Frontiersman, a book about the family of Heimo and Edna Korth, who live in the northernmost region of Alaska. Apparently––according to the introductory credits of the television show––it’s a region of the country where only a handful of families are, now, allowed to live. After 1980, Alaska ceased giving out cabin permits to new applicants, and the grandfathered families will have their permits expire after the death of their children.

The Korth family is one of only a few families allowed to live out there, and Nicole became consumed by these stories, which led us to The Last Alaskans. The show follows four of these families as they struggle to survive in the wildest of American wildernesses during the winter, which makes for a compelling watch. It’s a show painted with both compassion and criticism, but without ever falling to either cynicism nor romanticism, which makes it more compelling. If anything, it is a show about optimism airing beneath an umbrella of omnipresent despair, which perfectly paints the human condition, all presented with beautiful photography.

  • Star Wars: The Last Jedi

I finally got out to see the new Star Wars movie. I’m not the biggest Star Wars fan, but I find the movies entertaining enough. For all the controversy and divisive opinions surrounding the film, I quite enjoyed myself, though I can understand why it did not appeal to all crowds. It’s a ponderous movie, which is what I liked about it. It focused more on interaction than action, which I find boring anyway. I really enjoyed the tension portrayed between the two focus characters––Rey and Kylo Ren––and I really liked the arc of Luke Skywalker. I’m a character-focused guy––both in consumption of media and as a creator––so whatever flaws lay in the plot didn’t bother me because the attention they gave to these characters (at least, the characters I cared about) was overwhelmingly satisfying.

This week, on my podcast, A Podcast [ , ] For All Intents and Purposes, my podcast partner, Andrew, and I bring in an original-generation Star Wars fan, in the form of Jason Tudor, to talk about the new Star Wars and it’s a conversation that goes places.

LONG JOHN UPDATE

As said earlier, with all the travel this week, I haven’t been able to properly work on Long John this week, though I’m eager (and ready) to get to drawing. With that in mind, here is another sneak peek into the upcoming chapter. Next week, I’ll reveal the cover and title of Chapter 3, just to get things going.

The above image is a bit of a cheat, because I’ve used it as title images in a recent series of videos, but it’s definitely a panel from an upcoming page of Long John, Chapter 3. I can’t say it’s endemic of the entirety of Chapter 3, but I’ve been leaning more into what’s called spot blacks (meaning, all-black shadows) recently, if anything to make drawing more interesting and challenging.

Until next week, that was The Week.

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The Week

Dec22
by on 22 December 2017

This is the week where the winter break really kicks off for me because I finished all of my grading and can dive all the way into Long John for the better part of a month…until school starts back up again at the end of January.

LISTENING

Towards the end of grading, when focus seems to slip and patience wanes, even music wasn’t working for me. RainyMood is a white noise website that just has an endless loop of a rainstorm that will play behind anything else you put in front of it. Want to listen to classical music with the sound of rain peeking through? RainyMood.com is your jam. I discovered it years ago and I every time I return to it, it unfailingly calms me down. They have an app version for smart phones; what I wish was that they had an app version for my desktop; though, I guess, that would just be the website.

READING

When grading, my mind becomes a highly functional bag of mush. Even when I have an evening to dedicate to reading, or now, right after I’m done grading, if I sit down with a novel or a book that’s just words, I can’t bear to look at it. As my brain heals from the semester, I continue on with the literature that got me through the semester: comic books (i.e., books with words and pictures).

  • X-Men: Grand Design #1 by Ed Piskor

X-Men: Grand Design by Ed Piskor.

One of the understandable barriers for entry into reading comics is the deep history that a lot of the more popular books have. A potential reader can often be stopped in self-doubt before picking up a new Batman comic because, as soon as they see or hear that Batman has been around for 78 years, a lot of questions can start crowding the mind. What do I need to read to understand this issue? Do I have to start with #1 from 1939? How often do they change things? WHAT DO I NEED TO KNOW?!

The X-Men have been around since 1963 and their history is just as cloudy and problematic as any other book. What indie cartoonist, Ed Piskor, is doing with his limited series, X-Men: Grand Design, seems impossible. Taking the 54-year history of the X-Men, Piskor will try to have it all make sense over the course of six oversized issues. The simple truth about comics that have long lineages is that––no––you don’t have to read every single issue ever. Even with the trend of telling about 6-issue serialized stories, go ahead and pick up the book in front of you. What matters is that you have fun instead of necessarily understanding everything. What happened before doesn’t matter, you’re smart enough to figure out what you need to know. These schisms in narrative have a wide variety of reasons, from editorial demands to shifts in culture to simply ignoring what came before. For some reason, thankfully, Piskor is going to find a through line through every main X-Men story and tie everything to it. Not that it can’t be done, but most of my interest in this book lies in the “how” of it over the indie cred he’s bringing to the X-Men, which is cool, too.

  • Hillbilly Volume 2 by Eric Powell

Hillbilly by Eric Powell

I don’t really know how to describe Hillbilly. I came to the first collected volume with little knowledge of the premise. Instead, I bought it sight unseen because I love the art and enjoy the writing of its creator, Eric Powell, who wrote and drew the crudely hilarious, powerful, and beautiful (and often very, very gross, making it hard to recommend to people) comic series, The Goon, before this. Like The Goon, Hillbilly is an unexpectedly satisfying mashup of genres, in this case a seamless blending of fantasy and tall tale southern gothic. It’s clearly a dark Americana but there are no guns; instead, there are swords and axes and fantastical creatures outside of ramshackle log cabins. The following panel is the entire comic in a single image:

from Hillbilly, volume 1. art by Eric Powell. (click to enlarge)

And it (at least with my reading of Volume 1) really, really worked. I mentally filed issue #2 into my nebulous list of all-time favorite single issues of all comics ever. The comic is mysterious and episodic and seems, in a way, to suit Powell’s writing style even better than The Goon did. It caught me off-guard and, with this week’s release of Volume 2, I can’t wait to slog through that world again.

WATCHING

  • “The Death & Rebirth of Final Fantasy XIV“, parts 1, 2, and 3 by Noclip

I was a big Final Fantasy fan during the first leg of the series’ run, avidly and ravenously following the releases from its beginning on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) to its sixth installment on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) (however, at the time, only three of the six games had ever made it to North American shores). After Final Fantasy VII was released on Sony’s Playstation, my interest began waning as new games and genres became more attractive to me. I fell off after Final Fantasy XII, but I always am interested in what happens with the series and privately hope that each game does well, even if I have no intention of playing it.

All I knew about Final Fantasy XIV was that was the fourteenth game, duh, and that it was their second attempt at making an online-only game, specifically a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG; I swear, that’s the acronym for those unfamiliar with this world) like World of Warcraft. Not only had my interest left the series by the time Final Fantasy XIV first released, but I never play games online, so I was doubly uninterested in this game. However, I am interested in good writing, criticism, and journalism about gaming and I was familiar with the mind behind the YouTube channel, Noclip, Danny O’Dwyer.

An opinionated, brash, and thoughtful game critic, he split from a good corporate journalism gig to start a completely crowd-funded documentary YouTube channel about the gaming industry that would have the polish and journalistic veracity of any documentary made by a major studio. And, I must say, his promise been met with aplomb. He takes a look at the stories of the making of games big and small and, with “The Death & Rebirth of Final Fantasy XIV,” he gets about as big as you can get. He actually flew over to Japan and interviewed high-ranking people in the company that made the game, Square Enix, and the candor he was able to elicit from these executives and designers is almost unprecedented when it comes to Japanese game makers. In a nutshell, it’s a game that was originally released and completely failed. They took a risk, however, and while the game was still going online, completely made a brand new Final Fantasy XIV in the background and, when it was done, they torched the old one and imported all the players’ characters into the new one. What’s more is that they wrote in this into the story of the game as well. It resulted in becoming a very popular and well-received game, a tale of an expensive and risky turnaround that has never really been done before, in particular within the realm of MMORPGs.

So, I watched a two-hour documentary (over three parts) about a game I have never played and have no interest in and I loved it. If anything, that speaks to the quality of the work O’Dwyer’s venture has been putting on to the internet for free.

LONG JOHN UPDATE

No drawing happened this week between grading and focusing on other work that I needed to get done before doing some traveling for the holidays. However, I do plan to jump back on the horse, so to speak, to get the rest of the pages drawn and scanned, at least, by the end of the winter break. Since next week is the last Friday before the new year, I’ll do something big for you then (specifically, cover and title reveal). This week, however, I’ll drop another panel from the beginning of the book.

Long John reveals which direction the floor is.

Again, I’m ready to jump into the details about the page when I should be saving that for the actual page notes. I will say that Chapter 3 really feels like an end to the first act of Long John. In all honesty, Chapter 3 would be more accurate if it were numbered Chapter 2, Part 2 as Chapter 2 ended in a cliffhanger and Chapter 3 picks up from right where we left off (which is why I’m not having any issue showing off artwork from early in the book––we know where it’s headed). This chapter will be the first major change for the character of Long John Walker, the first step to becoming a new person after everything was taken away from him (hence the tag line, right? “Losing Every Thing Changes Everything”) and is partially designed to have a structure mirroring Chapter 2. Like I said last week, I am incredibly proud of this chapter in a variety of ways, with writing and structure being a big part of it. I worried that Chapter 2 felt like such a tonal shift and doesn’t have the swagger that Chapter 1 had, but admittedly that was kind of the point. I feel Chapter 3 delivers on the setup of Chapter 2 while sewing together all three of the chapters so far into a nice complete package.

Until next week, that was The Week.

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The Week

Dec15
by on 15 December 2017

Over the next month or so (as school is out, now), I’m going to be plugging away on Chapter 3. Because of that, I won’t have time (or, let’s be honest, energy/interest) in bringing back Sketch Fridays, but I’m going to start a new feature that, with hope, I can continue once school is back up and running as well.

The feature is simply titled “The Week” and will be a collection of things I’ve seen, read, or made for the internet. I’ll also provide production updates on Chapter 3 with sneak peeks at art and, of course, announcements. Perhaps it may even have a mini-rant on things. I want to keep the form open so I can consistently bring you some insight each week (and to pull me away from the drawing table for a bit).

Listening

  • Tori Amos, Native Invader

Every semester, I tend to find a new soundtrack to grading. I was a little worried this semester––not really worried, though––as I tended to be going back to a playlist of atmospheric instrumental soundtracks I had compile in the middle of the Spring 2017 semester. And then this gem of an album came along. I can’t speak for the lyrical content of the album; knowing Tori (my wife is a huge fan), it’s thoughtful and charged and passionate, but the overall tone and timbre of the album is one of jaunty melancholy and I can’t get enough of it. I’ve listened to it while grading the final portfolios to my classes and, now twelve times through the album, I still don’t find it distracting nor dissonant. I kind of can’t wait until I’m done grading so I can actually sit down with it and parse its content.

Source: Guy D’Alema/FOX

This is a jovial interview between the ostensible star of a show I absolutely love right now (partly because it’s based on the X-Men, partly because it’s actually some well-written melodrama) and the CEO of a comic book analysis website that I find very earnest and thoughtful, Justin Alba of Comicsverse. The interview is fun for a few reasons. First, it’s clear that the interviewer and the interviewee actually, personally, hit it off and it quickly follows its own path into unpredictable and comfortable territory that is far beyond the purview of normal press junket interviews. It’s great to hear an actor/actress let the guard down and get into the grit of their own motivation and profession. With that, second, even though the interview gets quite political, what it shows is the amount of work that can go into acting. Whatever your political leanings, it’s clear that Dumont found a personal and profound angle into her character––Magneto’s sometimes-daughter and mistress of magnetism, Lorna “Polaris” Dane––that shows what can happen when an actress absolutely *clicks* with her character. It’s part of why I absolutely love the show on its own; it’s clear the main actors are completely in character and––more importantly, for nerds like me––they found a way to not only represent these beloved characters (Polaris is a character who has been around since 1968, borne out of the political struggles of the time, as all of the X-Men are), but to also make them into the believable people fans like me have always felt them to be. It’s a delicate balancing act and this interview shows how much work it can take to make that happen and is a must-listen for nerds and/or X-Men fans. Watch The Gifted. It’s great.

Reading

Source: Variety

I have a lot of thoughts about this which I’ll be writing up over the weekend. Basically, for nerds like me, this purchase will bring the cinematic rights of the X-Men franchise to the hands of the owners of Marvel Comics, Disney. Marvel sold the filmic rights of the X-Men in the ’90s while the company was fighting off bankruptcy and, has since (very visibly) worked its way back to fiscal health and fans have been clamoring for the parent company to reacquire all Marvel comics cinematic licenses. Now, they have done so. I––in a bit of thoughtful, but seemingly contrarian, dissent––have some severe thoughts about bringing my favorite mutants into the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe. Stay tuned.

Writing

I wrote up a brief overview of the announcement by Marvel Comics about its first serialized audio drama podcast focusing on the X-Men character, Wolverine, in a noir drama that will prove to be interesting.

I wrote up a bit in the wake of the trailer for the Robert Rodriguez-directed, James Cameron-produced adaptation of Yukito Kishiro’s classic manga, Battle Angel Alita (Gunnm in Japan, the anime adaptation of which I am a huge fan) that covers the long road this adaptation has traveled and why I’m kind of excited about it.

Long John Progress

I’m well on my way through drawing Chapter 3. I’ll reveal more about that soon. I’ve got a title and a cover for the next chapter. I just want more under my belt before I widely reveal anything if only because I don’t want to make a big reveal and then have everybody wait for another year. However, it’s moving along swimmingly and, honestly, I’m so incredibly happy with how this chapter is turning out. For what was supposed to be a simple “action” chapter (a big gun fight is coming to you all), it is turning out to also be one of the most symbolic, profound, and personal chapters of the story and I can’t wait to share it with you. Here’s a look at the lines of the first page of Chapter 3.

Page 01 of Chapter 3 of Long John. Art by D. Bethel.

Without wasting all of my page notes on this preview, with this page I really looked to classical sculpture to inspire the melodrama I wanted this centerpiece to have which will be echoed throughout the chapter. As a wanna-be, almost Art History major, one of my most favorite artists ever is the Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini (seriously, do a Google image search of his work, it’s exquisite), and I definitely tried to capture his lines and folds in this pose. I am really quite proud of it!

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