Sketch Fridays #04 – Crimson Peak

Oct30
by on 30 October 2015
Sketch Fridays #03: Crimson Peak. Click for larger image.

Sketch Fridays #03: Crimson Peak. Click for larger image.

This week’s Sketch Friday is appropriately (and intentionally) timed for Halloween, but it is also fairly relevant to current cinema, specifically the new Guillermo Del Toro film, Crimson Peak.

As I said on a recent episode of my podcast, I’ve come to think of Del Toro as kind of the Quentin Tarantino of horror/fantasy. It’s about the reference, the creativity, and the scenario rather than really being a deep character study or upending expectations or trends. Despite sounding like something I would normally totally not be into, I am a devotee of (almost) all things Guillermo Del Toro.

I’ve written a bit about him already here on the site, and to reiterate what it is that draws me to him is his dedication to his craft. He knows he’s making a fairy tale movie, a kaiju/mecha movie, a comic book movie. However, that doesn’t stop him from treating each film like it’s the most important, deep movie to ever be made. Del Toro agonizes over the details and really follows through with the Symbolist ethos on letting the details tell more story than, in a sense, the movie itself. While I don’t have the dedication for that kind of attention, it has influenced my approach to Long John without a doubt.

Crimson Peak is Del Toro’s latest movie, and it’s a gothic Victorian ghost story.

To be honest––and this was intentional––the entire story is incredibly self-aware and really undercuts what surprises and horror it does have or, possibly, what could have been. While it has horrific ghosts throughout and a wonderful climax at the end, it is really a stitched-together amalgam of Charlotte Bronte and Edgar Allan Poe. It’s less The Woman in Black and more Jane Eyre, which in itself is a surprising twist for Del Toro who openly admits his love and preference for monsters.

As is the case with any Del Toro movie, what should be inspected most closely is the art direction. This is really what the movie is about. Because the movie is really light on locations, the director was able to sink his teeth into the main set: the house on Crimson Peak itself (mild spoiler, but you would have figured it out anyway). So effective is his direction and design in this movie that it actually lead to my favorite story about watching it.

When I was young, Josh and I would watch as many disgusting horror movies as we could find. However, when I was about 22 years old, I lost the taste for them. Now, I hate being scared, I don’t like the stress or the tension. Plus, Del Toro––as evidenced in movies like Pan’s Labyrinth or The Devil’s Backbone or Cronos––really likes to do visceral and powerful violent things on screen, for the shock value mostly. At the beginning of Crimson Peak, something super horrifying happens and, past that, I was kind of white-knuckling it because I knew he was going to try and get me again with some more unflinching violence at some point. To help distract myself in these situations, I always keep an eye on Nicole because I have determined (through deep-seeded patronizing logic, I’m sure) that she is more squeamish than myself; so I always brace myself to shield her from gross stuff.

When the characters arrive at Allerdale Hall (a crumbling mansion estate on the eponymous peak), it is a sight to behold because of how decrepit it is. In the main entrance, where a large staircase ascends from a beautifully tiled floor, it’s dark and leaves fall as the characters take in the view. The camera tilts up, following the leaves, to reveal a gigantic hole in the roof where a gentle shower of leaves dance in the pale sunlight.

At this moment, my periphery catches movement from Nicole. I glance at her to see her covering her mouth, her eyes widened. I read this as shock, horror, and disgust; so, I leapt into my self-described role of protector. I looked back at the screen and only saw the camera holding on the ceiling. I looked back at her and wondered what happened. Was there a detail in the shadows? A dripping ghoul following the protagonist? Screaming souls painted into the moldy wallpaper?

I leaned in and asked, “Are you okay?”

She opened her hand closest to me and whispered something.

I couldn’t hear her, so I leaned in and asked her to repeat.

“It’s so beautiful,” she said.

I was jealous of her in that moment, to be physically moved by carefully crafted, artful imagery. It was as if Del Toro’s intent reached out and squeezed her lungs, arresting her breath. It showed me how much further I still need to go in my artistic development.

My theater-going experience with Del Toro is really hit and miss, and I enjoy him much more on repeated viewings where I can really control my environment. But even though I didn’t know what to feel upon leaving the theater, Crimson Peak has been a movie that stuck with me all the way through this week, obviously (we saw the film opening weekend). I really enjoyed my time with the movie and will eagerly see it again when it arrives on home video, especially with his commentary added over the top. If you want to see incredible, lovingly crafted visuals, it will be your jam. If you want to have a tense, frightening period movie, you will enjoy yourself. If you want to see a master of his craft, see Crimson Peak.

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Sketch Fridays #03 – Long John Development Sketches

Oct24
by on 24 October 2015
Various preliminary sketches for chapter 1 designs. Click for larger version.

Various preliminary sketches for chapter 1 designs. Click for larger version.

A busy week (with a busy Friday) made this week’s Sketch Friday a bit tardy, but it is still here. It’s all well and good, because this week’s sketch is a bit of a copout, I’ll admit, though I hope it carries interest for some. These are some early design sketches from chapter 1 of Long John, focusing around the design of sheriff Spencer, whose development I’ve discussed before. These were done before I started drawing pages at all, but I knew the sheriff would be an important character early on, so I chipped away at his character slowly over time.

By this point, I had a pretty good handle on the style I was going to use for Long John, but I still wanted to play around with the boundaries I could push the style, hence the cartooniness of the Long John drawing.

I must have been drawing this while watching through Sanjuro, a 1962 Akira Kurosawa that was an ostensible sequel to his 1961 Yojimbo (arguably my favorite movie––I wrote about Kurosawa’s influence on the comic in the Primer.). I don’t enjoy Sanjuro as much as I do Yojimbo––it amps up the comedy quite a bit, despite having an amazing finale––but the Kurosawa kept the titular protagonist basically the same in the sequel. Both movies are interesting meditations on violence and how it’s used: as a tool, as emotion, as reaction, etc., and that’s an important aspect of Chapter 1 of Long John, I would argue.

In the interest of full disclosure, I probably wrote that line down because I wanted to steal it for the comic, which still sounds like a good idea. Keep an eye out for that in the future.

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In other news, with the help of Phil “Frumph” Hofer, I was able to get the website whipped back into shape, so there are some new tweaks, but it should, overall, work and look the same.

As for new pages, they are coming along, expect an update along those lines soon. However, I’ve been blindsided by how busy work has made me and it is quite a frustrating thing trying to balance the two. But Long John is moving forward albeit with much private cussing and further apologies on the horizon. Thank you again for sticking with me.

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Sketch Fridays #02 – Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Oct16
by on 16 October 2015
Big Boss & D-Dog from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Sketch Fridays #02: Big Boss & D-Dog from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (click for larger version)

It’s no secret that I play games and like to think hard about them on occasion.

I’ve been playing video games for longer than my current students have been alive, and realizing simple facts like that really give me pause about what I’ve gotten out of playing games––and thinking too hard about them, on occasion––for so long.

Given my upbringing––and this may come as a shock, given my occupation––I was not a reader. I didn’t regularly read books for fun until my twenties. Up until then, my literature were narrative-heavy games. I subsisted on role-playing games back when even they carried a stigma within the console game community (“Why would you play a game that you have to read?”). I like the stories well enough, but what these long, text-heavy games provided were diverse, interesting characters. While most of my impressionable years were made up of long-play RPGs, mostly those made by Squaresoft (as it was called at the time)––Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, etc.––in my late teens I was introduced to a character (though “lineage” may be a better word for it) for whom “complex” doesn’t even begin to describe.

With the release of Konami’s Metal Gear Solid for the Playstation, I was hooked right away. I had tangential acquaintance with the series (there were two official games released beforehand, with only a shoddy port of the first one coming to the Nintendo Entertainment System in the mid-’80s), but this basically was an chance to go into a series blind, with no expectations nor biases.

Metal Gear Solid is a series based, in one sense, on espionage and stealth. Every game has been a corker with regard to story, characters, and experience. The plots are tangled and tense and the set pieces are cinematically told, giving the player a strong sense that what they’re doing is important, and not only because the game tells them it is so, but because it feels grand in the truest sense of the word.

On the other hand, the games also bounce in and out of complete and utter absurdity, to the point of nearly breaking the narrative and, thusly, ruining the experience.

The newest release in the series (and, most likely, the last one because the series creator and director, Hideo Kojima, has left Konami, who owns the series) capitalizes on both of those aspects and amplifies them. The player controls “Big Boss” (alternatively “Venom Snake,” alternatively “Punished Snake”…you probably get a sense of why all of my characters have at least three names), a mercenary leading his own paramilitary force as it tries to do good across the globe despite all the things the evil governments (and shadow governments) are forcing him to do through ultimata and duplicity.

Introduced in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (even the title hints at the thematic friction), he is a good guy driving to the other side of the line, redefining in the process of what “good” and “bad” mean in the notoriously gray world of espionage and conspiracy. He is immensely sympathetic and interesting (in the new game, he is sparingly voiced by Keifer Sutherland, for what it’s worth). That all sounds great, and it is great.

And then you shoot a dude with your rocket hand.

Or make your horse poop on command.

Or put on a chicken hat because the mission becomes too difficult.

Or, when you punch someone with your prosthetic robot hand, it makes the $6m Man sound.

It’s as ridiculous as it is profound.

With this week’s Sketch Friday––though quick and messy––I really wanted to try to capture that imbalance. You can raise a dog and, eventually, take him with you into the field. D-Dog, or DD as he is called, is a valiant companion and adds some much-needed levity to the very serious game. Balance that with this absurd, but violent, robot arm and a balance is struck. The dog in an espionage-action-conspiracy game is absurd, but it’s grounding and lends a humanistic touch to what could be a very cold game. The robot hand is absurd in its own way, but represents that coldness and brutality that the character must perform to advance through the game.

It’s a fun game and I’m excited to finally see this series to its end after starting with it so long ago with the first release.

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Things are clearing up in my schedule for the first time, but for a short time. I will be drawing incessantly during this downtime, so you can expect some new pages soon, pushing toward the close of chapter 2! Thank you again for your patience.

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