Not quite Clean yet

Here we are again. Another not-so-lovely November Monday.

Here's your weekly dose of Untrue Tales:

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Didn't finish any novels this week, but I did burn through the latest X-Factor collection. A Secret Invasion tie-in by Peter David and Larry Stroman.















I've been enjoying the David's latest iteration of X-Factor. It's the only X-book I read nowadays (other than Astonishing X-Men but I'm still waiting for the trade paperback of Ellis' run). I really tried to get into Brubaker and Fraction's stuff but it's really just left me cold despite my manlove for all things Brubaker. I think he does better with more street level stories than over-the-top superhero action. It's too bad, 'cause I really love the X-Men but I just haven't dug too many of the stories in recent years other than Morrison's and Whedon's stuff. Guess I'm turning into an old fart.

But back to X-Factor. I've really enjoyed this book. I enjoy David's characterization and the fact that X-Factor has operated mostly in its own little corner of the Marvel universe, telling stories without being too terribly affected by larger events while still acknowleding them and running with some of the interesting plot threads left over from House of M. However, it's suffered a bit of late by having some key characters like Rahne the werewolf shunted off into other books by editorial mandate. And this latest collection that ties in to Secret Invasion was just plain ol' crappy. I liked the larger Secret Invasion event, but this story seemed like your standard going through the motions tie-in. She-Hulk pops up, pretty much simply 'cause David writes that book too. And I really didn't care for Stroman's art. To my eyes it was just plain ugly. It really broke with the sort of noirish style that the book's artists have held to more or less up to this point. Oh well. I'll give X-Factor one more chance when the next collection comes out, but it might have run its course for me.

On the movie side, I saw a couple of good ones and one awful one.

Drag Me to Hell is Sam Raimi's return to the horror genre that kicked off his career and he doesn't disappoint.
























Seriously funny, seriously creepy, seriously gross. Alison Lohman does great work as the bank exec cursed by an old gypsy woman for foreclosing on her house. She is called upon to do some seriously gross stuff in the call of her actorly duties. Seems like every other scene some nasty goo or icky bug or toothless old woman's tongue is going into poor Alison's mouth. Ugh. Good scary stuff. You'll know where the whole thing is going pretty much from beginning to end, but it's a fun nasty ride anyhow. Stay far the fuck away if you're the least bit squeamish though. Goo galore.

(500) Days of Summer is a dandy romantic comedy that puts a nice little spin on the old conventions.
























The guy from Third Rock from the Sun is awkwardly charming. Zooey Deschanel is awfully cute. The movie skids back and forth through time and is vaguely reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind without really coming anywhere near the brilliance of that movie. It's perfectly fine though. Worth a rental to watch with a girl you like.

Sunday nights at my house is crappy romantic comedy night and this week my girl and I saw one of the crappiest: The Ugly Truth with the chick from Knocked Up and King Leonidas. This was really really terrible and makes you wonder if the actors were embarrassed to be in it. I vaguely recall the Grey's Anatomy chick complaining that Knocked Up portrayed women badly, but in this movie she plays such a complete shrewish bimbo that it boggles the mind. It's really the most unbelievably chauvinst caricature of an uptight neurotic career-gal that I've ever seen. Of course she has to learn how to loosen up from the King of Sparta playing a piggish shock jock who tells her she needs to spend more time "flicking her bean" and buys her vibrating underpants. The King needs to be more choosy in his movie choices. More Guy Richie less by-the-numbers "romance" please. Another weird thing about this movie - a bunch of fairly well known actors appear just to say one line or two of absolutely no importance and are then never seen again. Like the short guy from Entourage and the guy from that Aaron Sorkin show who's the brother of that guy who used to be on the Daily Show. Okay, maybe they're not that well-known, but still, what was it about this script that made all these people agree to be in this movie? 'Cause it's an ugly pile of shit. And that's the truth. Really, it's even worse than that awful bit of wordplay I just did there.

Okay, here's a sketch:
























And I'm out.

Clean November

And then it was November. Hope everybody had a hap-hap-happy Halloween. My plastic pumpkin was filled to the brim with the hangover of the century. It was quite a party.

Here's a new Untrue Tales page to kick off November:

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So, this week I read The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett.
























This was a goody. It's a classic private eye yarn featuring Nick and Nora Charles the crimefighting couple that would go on to be featured in a series of films although Hammet only wrote the one book about them (it was also the last book he wrote about anything, as it happens). Lots of snappy dialogue and cool characters and a very cool central mystery. It's interesting to read old-timey noir novels like this one from the thirties just for the evolution of language. It still feels pretty contemporary, but at one point Nora Charles has to ask her husband to explain what a "junkie" is. He tells her it's another word for "hophead" which clears everything up. It's also funny that Charles and his wife spend the lion's share of the short book waking up at noon and drinking their breakfast. They basically party their way through the mystery. Nick has a drink with practically every one he meets. But it's never presented as a problem. Nick doesn't even really seem particularly "hardboiled". He and his wife are just mostly merrily wasted through the whole thing. Funny.

Also finally saw Up this weekend. I wept like a schoolgirl through the first ten minutes where they show the life of the main guy with his wife. I'm a sentimental sucker for that kind of stuff.
The rest of the movie I thought was just okay. I liked everything well enough until they got to the jungle and the whole plot with the old explorer guy kicked into gear. I found all that chasing and running around kind of boring. I liked the one dog. I vastly preffered Wall-E and Monsters vs. Aliens to this one though.

Okeydokes, that's it for now. Here's a sketch:























Have a happy November!

Last Monday Before November

Man, did October just come sprinting through with it's ass on fire or what? It's nearly Halloween and I'm still having a hard time leting go of summer.

Whaddayagonnado?

How about a new page of the ol' Untrue?

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So I'm pretty wrapped up in yet another secret project that's got ahold of my heart and putting on the squeeze, so I didn't finish a book this week. Prolly next.

I did see a pretty good movie - the latest from Sam Mendes, Away We Go.



Pretty good movie pretty much sums it up. Jim Halpert stars as a nice guy with a nice pregnant girlfriend played by Maya something from Saturday Night Live. They're kinda worried they might be losers and they're kinda right. But they're also kinda charming. Who doesn't like Jim Halpert? So they go on a trip to visit different places they might wanna live and meet a bunch of other kinda losers, some charming, some not. Maggie Gyllenhaal shows up as one of the less than charming losers in the funniest scenes of the film. Who doesn't like Maggie Gyllenhaal? Also, the guy that plays Jim Halpert on the Office knockoff Parks and Recreation plays Jim Halpert's brother in this movie which amused me. I didn't realize it 'til the end credits but Away We Go was written by Dave Eggers and his wife Vendela Vida (what a great name). I really liked Eggers' book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I found his second book You Shall Know Our Velocity so boring that I couldn't finish it. I haven't read his third book What is the What 'cause y'know, the second book. I might read it now though. It got pretty good reviews. And Dave and the missus wrote a pretty good movie.


Here's a sketch:


















Have a happy ol' Halloween what's comin'!

13 Mondays

Yessirreee! Thirteen Mondays worth of Karen! Here's your lucky rhyming number:

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Finished up another good book this weekend - High Adventure by Donald Westlake.

This is another one of those two dollar beauties picked up off the street in New York. Man, I love those sidewalk booksellers.



















I'd never heard of this one, but Westlake never lets me down and that holds true here as well. This is a great comic adventure about one Kirby Galway, a ne'er do well con man and pilot who lives in Belize and makes his living off selling fake Mayan artifacts and flying bales of pot to Florida in his battered airplane. Kirby is a charming scoundrel in the Indiana Jones mold and he's got a great foil in the character of Innocent St. Michael who is anything but. He's the local bigwig and fixer who's got his hands in every honeypot and a taste for the ladies. He and Kirby have a laidback relationship of trying to one up each other and pulling the wool over each other's eyes until an archaeologist named Valerie Green shows up in Belize and throws a wrench into everybody's plans. Much hilarity ensues. Tons of great secondary characters too.

High Adventure is a lightweight breezy read that never fails to be massively entertaining. Highly recommended. Especially if you're on a beach.

On the movie side, I watched the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 which was surprisingly crappy. I usually like Tony Scott films, especially the ones with Denzel Washington, but this one was just plain dumb and unbelievable. John Travolta's big plan never made any sense, his character didn't make any sense and there was no way in hell they were ever gonna get away with it. Denzel Washington's character hardly had a reason for being there until the end when he acts ridiculously out of character for the sake of him actually doing something. Massive disappointment.

Finally, here's a sketch of a guy who I hope you'll be seeing more of. Although he won't necessarily look just like this:























Stay tuned....

Monday Cleaning

Here comes the Clean:

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And another fine weekend is laid to rest. Man, I sure do love weekends. This one was both relaxing and productive. Banged out a new script that I'm pretty pleased with. Spent a little time with Joe Ezsterhaus and his mammoth ego, reading Hollywood Animal. Pretty entertaining thus far. Also, I drank beer and ate a positively glorious chorizo sandwich.

I also polished off the collection of Black Summer by Warren Ellis and Juan Jose Ryp.



I'm a big Ellis fan and he really delivers the goods on this one. It's about a rogue superhuman operative who decides to assassinate George W. Bush 'cause he doesn't like his policies. You gotta love a premise like that even if it's a bit dated in the age of Obama. Since this is an Avatar book and Ellis can pretty much write whatever he wants, the superguy goes ahead and takes out President W, which as you might imagine causes a pretty big fuss. The rest of the story focuses mainly on superguy's ex-superbuddies and the government's attempts to eradicate them before they eradicate everybody else. Much graphic carnage ensues. It's very reminiscent of The Authority and you could even sort of imagine it as a kind of Authority: The End if you switched out the main characters with Midnighter and the rest of the gang.

The whole thing is actually a bit less simplistic than it sounds. Ellis puts across some interesting ideas here. Mostly though it's just a fun explosion of superfolks killing each other in the name of twisted ethics and self-interest.

Ryp does a bang-up job on the art. He's obviously highly influenced by Geof Darrow, but so what? We don't get nearly enough comics from Darrow and Ryp's stuff is gorgeous. He's a master of exploding heads.

Anyway, Black Summer is good ultraviolent fun and highly recommended to fans of Ellis' superhero work like The Authority.

On the movie front, I watched Whatever Works, Woody Allen's latest meditation on his favorite subject - hot young chicks who are inexplicably attracted to cranky old neurotic dudes. It was mildly entertaining. Larry David is Woody's stand-in as old neurotic dude for this go-around. Now I like Larry David, but boy howdy, the guy is no actor. He's all one note in this movie. He pretty much just goes around shouting at everybody. For whatever reason, that works in Curb Your Enthusiasm, but not so much here. Still, it was allright. Patricia Clarkson has a nice turn as Evan Rachel Wood's kooky southern Mom. Wood herself is button cute as per usual, but goes way over the top, probably in an attempt to keep up with Larry David's shouting. Eh, it wasn't so bad for a lazy Sunday evening.

I'll also shamefacedly admit to sitting all the way through My Life in Ruins. The woman made me watch it. This is the new one from the chick from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Which I hated. I hated this new one too. So will you. Even the woman hated it. But we kind of enjoyed hating it. Richard Dreyfuss is also in this movie. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

So there's my weekend.

Here's an unrelated sketch:























Go on and have yourself a dandy week now, hear?

Bookedy Books

Snatched this from that ol' cuddly bear mpd57.
I love me some lists.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) *Star the books you LOVE.
3) Italicize those those that you tried to read, but couldn’t finish out of boredom or frustration.
4) Post this list on your own blog and show the world how well read you are (without it having much consequence)

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien*
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible – (various)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell*
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien*
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams*
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina- Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden*
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving*
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck*
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams*
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory- Roald Dahl*
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugonts

42! That's the answer to life, the universe and everything!

Zudaween - featuring Doc Monster!

So the new Zuda contest is up. Reeeeally tough month. Lot's of good writing and great art.

Really digging A Polar Nightmare. Amancay's art rocks the house. Dude gets better and better with every page he draws. And Pluck is pretty sweet stuff too, well-written and drawn... but it really could've used some color.

When it comes down to it, head and horn-rims above all else is Dave Flora's Doc Monster, delivering the goods in both words and pictures. Great retro pulp vibe. Beautiful lines and color. Keen pulpy narration. It hits me right in the sweet spot.


















I like it so much I even did up a little piece of fan art.


















Go Doc!