Smiley Christmas

Happy Holidays!

Here's your latest page of Untrue Tales:

Keep Smiling page 4

So I ran right out and saw James Cameron's Avatar this weekend.



















Pretty disappointing, sorry to say. I'd seen the 20 minute preview a few months ago and left that feeling fairly unimpressed, but I'd been heartened by the overwhelmingly great reviews it got upon release. i really don't know that the reviewers were thinking. Sure, it's real pretty to look at, but I really had the feeling that I'd seen it all before. The plot is lifted wholesale from Dances With Wolves. You can see every plot point coming from a mile away. There's a cool chase where the hero flees from nasty CGI creatures, each one, bigger and more fearsome than the one before. But then I already saw that in Star Trek. There's a cool battle sequence with robot armor. But I already saw that in District 9. As a bonus, there's an incredibly heavy-handed Iraq-war analogy that is so groaningly obvious it loses any impact it might have had. The sci-fi metaphor thing was handled with far more subtlety in, again, District 9. The 3D was cool, but I didn't really get a sense of it being a great leap forward from Beowulf. I will say that the Navi animation was really well done, and their faces were incredibly expressive, but it doesn't really do much for me when the characters themselves are all cardboard cutouts in service of a dusty second-hand plot. Steven Lang has a nice turn as the villainous Military commander though. And Sigourney Weaver seems to have somehow stopped aging. Anyways, it was kind of a bummer. A technological achievement, I'm sure, but somewhere along the way Cameron forgot to come up with a compelling story to go along with all his cool CGI creatures. Oh well.

Read another two-dollar street-seller special this week, The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins.



















I'd read recommendations of the movie based on the novel from both George Pelecanos and Ed Brubaker, a couple of writers whom I adore, so when I saw the book on the street I snatched it right up. It's a cool, fast read. Great dialogue and a nasty little plot about gun dealers and bank robbers. Not an ounce of fat on it, just lean mean and right to the point. Worth picking up if you come across a copy. Now I'll have to track down the film.

Here's a merry xmasshole for ya:

























That's it for me. Hope everybody has a good ol' holiday and a happy new year!

Keeping on Keeping Smiling

It's snowing in Oslo and another page of Untrue Tales is up:

Keep Smiling page 3

This week I read Stephen King's latest - Under The Dome.
























This is good stuff. King's best in a long while. King is my favorite author and almost never fails to be massively entertaining (except maybe for Gerald's Game, that one never really did it for me), but with Under the Dome he's working near his peak. This one's probably in my top ten favorites of King's books, up there with Desperation and The Shining although not quite scaling the delirious heights of IT, The Talisman or The Stand (my favorite book of all time). Of his recent stuff, I really liked Cell and Duma Key but Lisey's Story was a bit of a letdown as it seemed like King was treading old ground with that one. Interstingly (to me at least), I thought Lisey's Story would have been a better book if King had actually excised all the supernatural stuff which just seemed like another riff on Rose Madder (which I liked).

But back to Under the Dome; the title is right on the nose - the plot concerns a small town in Maine that is suddenly and inexplicably encased in a transparent forcefield that follows all the town's borders, cutting it off from the outside world. What follows is a spin on Lord of the Flies as the town's second selectman Big Jim Rennie manipulates the fears of the populace to conslidate power. Rennie is a great villain, truly a guy you love to hate. Terrible things happen, most of which can be laid squarely at Big Jim's feet. King does a masterful job of setting up the situation and characters like a big apocalyptic chess board and I found myself writhing on the couch in horrid anticipation as inevitable doom mvoes inexorably foreward. Lots of good folks to root for and plenty of bad guys to fear in this one. And King sure isn't getting sentimental in his later years. A lot of very bad things happen to a lot of good people here, and as per usual King makes you really care about his characters before he ruthlessly cuts them down. A really great, entertaining book.

On the movie front, against my better judgment I went ahead and saw 2012, the latest disaster spectacle from Roland Emmerich.
























As it turns out, I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, it is magnificently stupid, but since I was expecting that going in, the ridiculousness of John Cusack outracing earthquakes and volcanoes in various limousines, buses and small planes was more entertaining than annoying. And the effects are truly spectacular. The destruction of Los Angeles was particularly breathtaking. Cusack is a pretty reliable actor and makes an engaging hero here. I'd actually say this might be Emmerich's best film as it manages to stay generally entertaining throughout the running time. Usually I find that his film's have a great set-up (the first hour of Independence Day is terrific) but collapse under massive stupidity and cliche in the second half (again Indepence Day). 2012 is pure stupid right from the beginning, so as long as you check your brain at the door and have a taste for spectacular end of the world destruction it's a grand old time at the movies.

Finally, here's a sketch from a little something I'm kicking around these days:



















Have a good one!

December Smile

Ah, December. The last month of the year. Last month of the decade even. Dang, but that time do fly....

Here's the latest page of Untrue Tales for ya:

Keep Smiling page 2

This week I read The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.























This one won the pulitzer prize not too long ago which is generally a pretty good indicator of quality. And I'd say this is a quality book, although not one that had a tremendous emotional impact on me. The title character is a grossly overweight, role-playing, sci-fi reading and writing nerd from New Jersey by way of the Dominican republic. It starts off as a story about Oscar's fruitless quest to lose his virginity but morphs into a tale of his tragic family history and their roots in the Dominican Republic under the oppressive regime of the dictator Trujillo. The stuff about life under Trujillo in the DR is pretty interesting (and pretty horrible) and Diaz has an engaging writer's voice - very casual with constant references to Marvel Comics, Tolkien and sci-fi trivia. But when it comes down to it, Oscar himself isn't all that engaging and his life ends up being something less than wondrous. I was a bit disappointed. This never really grabbed me in the same way as, say, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, or Middlesex, or A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It's worth a read though, just for the insight into a place and people that I hadn't heard much about before.

On the movie front, I finally saw Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut with Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a theatre director whose life falls apart while he documents it in an ever expanding play.























This is seriously strange, deep and heavy stuff about life and the choices one makes and where they lead. Here they lead to a lot of depressing shit. Now I generally love me some Charlie Kaufmann. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of my all-time favorites along with Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Groovy, mind-bending films that are unlike anything else out there. This one is in the same wheelhouse, but it's much heavier and much darker and requires a lot more from the audience. More than I've got to give, really. The gist of things is, Hoffman is having problems with his wife who doesn't have much respect for him as an artist, so he decides to put on an autobiographical play about the human condition with himself and everyone he knows as characters - a cast list that constantly expands. He has a guy that plays him in the play and an actress that he has an affair with that plays herself and an assistant that he has another affair with that he then casts with another actress while the assistant has an affair with the guy that's playing Hoffman in the play. Then Hoffman gets burned out so he hires Dianne Weist to play him directing the play so he can take a break and play the cleaning woman. Also, one character gets a great deal on the house because it's on fire a little bit and lives there for years while the house burns. It's that kind of movie. I found the whole thing extremely interesting and kind of boring at the same time. I had the constant feeling that I was missing something. That big ideas were going over my head. I'm the kind of guy that mostly skates on the surface of things. I'm not all that deep and I don't really like to think too hard. After watching the movie, I had to go read a bunch of reviews to see what other people thought was going on. The reviews were pretty much equally divided into two camps - those that thought it was a brilliant masterpiece and those that thought it was a pretentious pile of shit. I can sympathize with both sides. I didn't really get the movie, but I don't think Kaufmann is just being a blowhard and disappearing up his own ass. I just think his ideas might be a bit too deep and heavy for the average bear. Me included. It just didn't work on the level I like to be entertained on. Can't really recommend this one except for serious Kaufmann aficionados who're looking for a challenge. It's a long slog and will likely make you depressed as fuck. My girl gave up after about 45 minutes. It'll be interesting to see what he comes up with next.

On a lighter note, I just read the latest Jack of Fables trade in the bath - The Big Book of War.
























I love this series. It's a fun, lightweight companion to Fables and the writers do a great job of keeping Jack likable despite the fact that he's pretty much a gigantic, self-absorbed asshat in every way. Big fun for Fables fans. If you're not reading either of these series, you're missing out. Start with Fables, and once you're hooked, move on over to Jack.

Sketchy:
























Bye for now!

Smile Time

Last day of November. Perfect time to kick of a new Untrue Tale, wouldn't you say?

This is kind of a dark one, so stock up on the Prozac and remember to....

Keep Smiling

This week I picked up the collection of James Robinson's Complete Wildcats.
























This is mostly of interest to me for the early Travis Charest artwork in the first few issues collected. It's interesting to see his humble beginnings as an Image artist in the Jim Lee/Whilce Portacio vein. That cover's by him. You can hardly tell, huh? The art here is very Image-y indeed but you can certainly see hints of the greatness to come. As a stand-alone collection the book is pretty hit or miss. There's hardly a complete story to be found. Lots of cliffhangers that are wrapped up in crossovers that aren't part of this collection. Kind of makes me want to track down Wildstorm Rising and Fire from Heaven for that matter since that ties in to the Alan Moore run that precipitated me picking up this collection in the first place. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure those are long out of print (and I'm not sure if Fire from Heaven was ever even collected). Anyway, I found it interesting and the stories included were perfectly fine, but I can't really recommend it since it doesn't really hang together as a whole. Some very nice art by Barry Windsor-Smith for one issue though. If you're really hankering for some Wildcats action, I do recommend the Alan Moore collection since it tells a complete story. Wildly uneven art though. The Charest stuff in the beginning kind of spoils you for the pretty pedestrian art that follows. I'm thinking I might have to pick up the Alan Moore Wild Worlds Collection that collects up a bunch of his Wildstorm odds and ends. Even though I hear it mostly kind of sucks.

Saw a couple of movies this week. Terminator Salvation was an utter piece of crap. Astonishingly bad really. I'd heard it got pretty poor reviews, but so did Terminator 3 and I still managed to get some solid enjoyment out of that one. But this one was really just joyless. Christian Bale shouts his way through a completely charisma-free performance. And the story makes no sense from top to bottom. The only bright spots are a 30 second cameo from CGI Arnold and a nice turn by Chekov as Kyle Reese. He almost seems to channel Michael Biehn in a couple scenes. I read an interesting article as to just why the movie turned out so bad. It boils down to McG being so desperate to land Christian Bale that he's willing to tie the script into ridiculous knots so Bale can play John Connor - a character that barely appears in the original screenplay. Then, rather than starting from scratch with a new script focusing on Connor, apparently they started shooting the original idea and just added more John Connor scenes on the fly while scaling back the screentime of Kyle Reese and the other Terminator guy who were supposed to be the main focus. It's an interesting article. You can read the whole thing here.

The other thing I saw was Zombieland. I would call it pretty good. It starts off spectacularly then kind of peters out after awhile. Woody Harrelson is great. That kid that acts an awful lot like Michael Cera is fine. The girls lean more toward annoying than cute. And there's a pretty cool cameo that you've probably already heard about. Worth a rental at any rate.

Okay, here's a sketch.
























Seeya next week....

All Cleaned Up

Good day!

The big wrap up:

Karen Comes Clean page 18

That about does it for Karen this go 'round. Hope you liked her. She may pop up again down the road.

Brand new tale starts up next Sunday without delay. Bleak it is. Dark it be. And furry.

So I finished up Richard Price's latest this week - Lush Life.
























It's fantastic. Ostensibly a crime novel, it's more a snapshot of life among the mix of hipsters, immigrants and poor blacks and latinos of New York's lower east side. Every character is vividly drawn. Price gets in the heads of the cops, the victims, the perpetrators, the bystanders and the families of all involved in the shooting of a young bartender downtown. Price writes dialogue like no other and the city itself is maybe the most interesting character in a book full of compellingly flawed individuals. Not to be missed.

Took the lady to see the new Coen bros A Serious Man.
























We both liked it. A tad slow and epically frustrating, but that's kind of the point. It's about a Jewish guy in 60's Michigan who leads a Job-like existence. You watch the guy squirm as the miseries stack up and you squirm and twist in your seat right along with him. Those Coen guys know just what their doing and they tease the audience with a catharsis that never comes. It's funny and tragic and ultimately unsatisfying, but like I said, that's the whole point. Not a pleasant evening at the cinema really, but a worthwhile one. Also, the Coen's go for another of those non-ending endings like in No Country for Old Men. It kind of fits here, but it also kinda feels like it's starting to become a thing. Next movie I would like a proper ending please.

Gotta ton of stuff going on these days. Lots of projects bouncing around in various stages of completion. A few I'm really quite excited about. Chimps, chameleons, convicts, clones, cthulu, cops with attitude and creatures of the night. I guess I must have a yen for things that begin with "C".

Sketch o' the week:























Have it good!

Almost Clean

Good Monday. Nearly at the wrap-up of the latest Untrue Tale. Here's the second to last bit of bidness:

Karen Comes Clean page 17

Still working on a couple of books. One in particular that's reeeeeally good. Review next week.

Saw a few movies this week. The Johnny Depp/Christian Bale Public Enemies put me right to sleep. Whoda thunk John Dillinger could be sooooo boring? What a snooze.

The Brothers Bloom, with the guy with the nose from The Pianist and that other guy from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind who isn't Jim Carrey, was a pretty good if rather predictable con-man piece. WOrth a rental I'd say.

Best of the week was Funny People, the latest Judd Apatow thing with Adam Sandler.
























I think I recall this one getting pretty tepid reviews but I quite liked it. I like Sandler. And I like him even just a little bit more when he gets to be somewhat serious. This is no Punchdrunk Love (which is genius on rye and if you haven't seen it well you should run right out and watch it) but it's still darn entertaining. Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzmann and Apatow's wife and the girl from Parks and Recreation who isn't the chick from Saturday Night Live or Quincy Jones' daughter are also in it. And they're all dandy. Eric Bana also pops up and finally gets to use his Australian accent. Not as uproariously hilarious as 40 Year Old Virgin or Knocked Up, Funny People is still pretty funny. Recommended.

Okay I'm out.

Sketchy:
























Bye!

Not quite Clean yet

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

Here's your weekly dose of Untrue Tales:

Karen Comes Clean page 16

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:

Karen Comes Clean page 15

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?

Karen Comes Clean page 14

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:

Karen Comes Clean page 13

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:

Karen Comes Clean page 12

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!

Mondays Keep Coming

My how that time does fly. A new Monday. A new month. Where did the summer go? Ay yi yi.

Yep, it's October and we're rolling along with another new page of Untrue Tales:

Karen Comes Clean page 11

Busy weekend. Parties on Friday and Saturday. Got a number of projects in the works in various stages of completion. Banging away at scripts and layouts and assembling sets as it were. But I managed to squeeze in some book-reading time and polished off another fine read before the weekend drew to a close.

I've been picking up the novels of George Pelecanos off the street from those guys that sell paperbacks for two bucks a pop whenever I stumble across them. This latest is Soul Circus, the third (I think) book in Pelecanos' Derek Strange series.
























I'd previously read Hell to Pay and Hard Revolution which were both damn good (especially Hard Revolution), despite the fact that Pelecanos really gives his novels awful titles. Hard Revolution sounds like it should be starring Jean Claude Van Damme or Steven Seagal for chrissakes. Also, I don't generally like crime series that feature the same protagonist book after book. They usually get a little stale after two or three. Luckily, this hasn't been the case with the Derek Strange series. Strange is an ex-cop in Washington D.C. who runs a P.I. agency with his partner, Terry Quinn, another former police officer. Strange is black and Quinn is white and there's a lot of interesting interaction between the two, comparing and contrasting their personalities, working methods and personal lives. These two are a couple of really well-drawn compelling characters. Pelecanos is great with the street lingo too, and really gets in the heads of the menagerie of gangsters, cops and private citizens that are all caught up in the web of drug crime and gun violence that plagues the city.

So I'm reading the book and it's pretty good. It's what I've come to expect from Pelecanos. But I'm thinking, yeah, this is good stuff, but I'm three books in and it is starting to feel a tad repetitious. Strange is cool and reserved and honorable. Likes his soul music and his Payday bars. Quinn is hotheaded and sensitive about being the token white guy. Blah blah blah. Then some crazy shit happens and turns everything on its ear. You know what I like? The twist. The unexpected. Pelecanos delivers the goods. I might have to track down the rest of the Derek Strange books now. Even if I have to pay more than two dollars.

Okay, here's a sketch:


























Have a good one!

When Monday comes, Karen Comes With It

Yes indeedy. Time for your weekly dose of Untruthiness:

Karen Comes Clean page 10

Had a perfectly lovely weekend. Lambs were slaughtered. Buckets of gin and tonic were consumed. Men were men and girls were giggly.

Even found time to finish up a couple of books.

I'd mentioned earlier that I've been reading more novels in Norwegian, trying to brush up on the ol' language skills. I struggled with Jo Nesbø's Flaggermusmannen (that's The Batman for the scandie-deificent) for awhile until I finally had to give it up. It was just too lame and boring. Even though it's called Batman. I hear that later books in his Harry Hole series take a big jump in quality, so I may skip ahead and try one of the newer ones down the road. But Batman sucked ass.

Not to be discouraged, I moved on to Stieg Larsson's Menn Som Hater Kvinner which translates to Men Who Hate Women but they changed the english title to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo for some reason.























I guess they were afraid people would mistake it for a self-help book. Larsson's Swedish, but Norwegian and Swedish are practically the same language, give or take a few letters and a bunch of words, so close enough. Anyway, this one's a real winner. Teriffic, complex characters and a twisty, turny serial killer story that spans decades, from the 1960s to the present day. It starts off slow but builds into a real barnburner. Good stuff. Read it in English if your Swedish is rusty.

Also polished off Stephen King's latest short story collection Just After Sunset.























Highly entertaining stuff as per usual from King. Maybe not as stellar as earlier collections like Night Shift and Skeleton Crew, but still definitely worth a read if you like your stories short and spooky. Highlights are The Gingerbread Girl about a lady that likes to jog and her serial killing neighbor and A Very Tight Place about a guy who gets locked in a port-a-potty. The best story though is probably N. One of those epistolary things that King is so found of, about a dude with OCD trying to prevent Lovecraftian creatures from spilling over into our world. Immensley creepy. I also watched the motion-comic adaptation of N by Marc Guggenheim and Alex Maleev. I'd classify this mostly as an interesting oddity. It sounds like King himself did one of the voices but I'm not entirely sure. The art is pretty cool (I'm generally a big fan of Maleev), but tips a little too far into photo-montage for my tastes. Also, the weird indescribable creatures are a lot scarier when left to the imagination than when visualized as big gobliny guys by Maleev.














Could've used a little more of that abstractifying I've been going on about! Worth a peek though.

Finally, here's a little fan-art I did for the always dependably entertaining Night Owls by the Timony Twins.
















Oh, why can't Ernie and Mindy see that they're MADE for eachother?

Have a good week!

More Karen, More Babblin'

Ah, Monday again. Oof.

So here's another page of Untrue Tales:

Karen Comes Clean page 9

So I had a fairly lazy weekend laying around reading comics and watching movies.

I went ahead and read Asterios Polyp as I was threatening to do last week.























It was pretty great, I admit. Books like these make me feel slightly dumb though. Kinda like the main character makes everybody he meets feel. I think there's more to this book than my intellectual laziness can handle. There's all sorts of symbolism and shit that requires a level of thinking that's slightly beyond my reach. Mazzucchelli once again takes his art to a new level of cartoony abstraction, but it's all very much in service to his theme and his story. It certainly works in the context of what he's doing. There's humor here. There's heartbreak. There's examination of the Big Questions. I suspect that this book is Art with a capital A. It's not a difficult read though. There's plenty to enjoy and admire right there on the surface. And probably a whole lot more in the subtext if one cares to delve deeper. Not me though. I generally stick to the shallows.

Reading it, I couldn't help but wonder what it'd be like if Mazz had drawn it in his more figurative style from back in the day. Mostly, I think it wouldn't have worked as well. The abstraction and caricature is pretty key to the whole package. Interesting stuff. This is something I'll no doubt return to quite a few times for rereading and examination.

Personally, I look to comics for more escapist entertainment than dissection of big issues. My all-time favorites tend to be the genre stuff. Superheroes. Crime. Horror. I like a thrill. I like a pretty picture. Is Asterios Polyp a better book than Batman Year One? Probably. But Mazz's Batman and Daredevil stuff will always be closer to my heart.

Still Asterios Polyp is well worth reading. Monday morning is probably not the optimal time to be considering its larger merits. I'm actually not precisely awake yet.

On the flip side, I also read my newly purchased collection of All-Star Batman and Robin having previously picked these up as singles.
























I kinda thought these would read better as a collection, but they really don't. This is a really weird book. I still kinda like it, but I find myself continually scratching my head about what Miller's up to here. The whole tone of the book is bizarre with the constant repetitive captions and extremely over-the-top dialogue. Plenty of odd moments that pull you out of the story. For instance, why is Black Canary tending bar in her full-on Black Canary outfit, including mask? Pretty pictures by Jim Lee, but the art suffers from occasional stiffness upon closer examination. Oh well. It's still intriguing enough to keep me reading, but this thing doesn't even approach the craft of Year One.

So in conclusion, Asterios Polyp is better than All-Star Batman and Robin. I know. It's a shocker.

Moving on, the most fun I had all weekend was at District 9.
























I won't go on too much about it here, since so much has been written about it elsewhere, but suffice it to say it lives up to the hype. Best science fiction film in ten years. Maybe the best since Blade Runner. I loved it.

After watching it, I was inspired to go back and watch the mother of modern sci-fi movies, Alien.























Boy, does it hold up well. Hard to believe it came out in 1979. It really doesn't seem dated at all. Watching it, I tried to remember what it was like watching it for the first time. That must've been some scary shit. There really hadn't been anything like it before. Weird to see Sigourney Weaver looking so crazy young even though she was already 30 at the time. Looks more like 19. All the acting and dialogue is first rate here. What a fucking classic.

I had so much fun rewatching Alien that I kept right on going and checked out Aliens too. Fun to notice that Cameron opens the film with the final shot of Ripley in the suspended animation capsule from the original. This movie is still all kinds of great too. Some clunky dialogue among the marines but it's all overshadowed by the sheer narcotic awesomeness of Bill Paxton's line-readings. That dude is the MVP of the movie. It's all good though. Interesting to notice all the touchstones that Cameron revisits from the first film, covering all the bases but giving everything a new twist and ramping up the stakes. These two movies really have become the template for all the (must be) hundreds of creature feature flicks where a monster picks off a ragtag bunch of characters one by one.

Fun stuff. Now go see District 9 if you haven't yet. It's almost as good as the first two Alien flicks.

I think I'll go watch Blade Runner again now...

Ooops, almost forgot! Here's a sketch:























Bye now!

Frank Miller Doesn't Like Me

First things first - a new Untrue Tales page is up:

Karen Comes Clean page 8

So I just got back from a perfectly lovely trip to New York City. Had a nice meeting with the Zuda guys, drank a few beers with two-thirds of Team Hammer and the Timony twins and half of their better halves.

Plus I came home with a stack of books as long as my arm.

One such book is EISNER/MILLER, a fascinating conversation with two of the giants in the comic book field, Frank Miller and Will Eisner.























Highly recommended reading for anyone fooling around in the comic biz or really anyone just interested in some of the thinking behind two giants of the industry. I read it on the plane ride home.

Anybody whose spent any time reading my stuff is probably aware that I'm a pretty huge Miller fan. His work has had tremendous influence on my own noodlings here on the fringes of the comic book world. Reading the book, I was a kind of surprised by what comes across as Miller's contempt for the superhero readership (of which I count myself a card-carrying member). One really gets the feeling that he regards the majority of superhero fans as a collection of whiners who can't stand the idea of anyone messing with their childhood icons.

He seems to be mostly referring to the reception that The Dark Knight Strikes Again received as not being as good as The Dark Knight Returns because it wasn't just the same old thing over again.
























I'm more in the camp that thinks the problem with DKSA wasn't that it was different, just that it wasn't as good. I think it really suffered from the computer coloring and the fact that the ending didn't make much sense (to me at least). The original Dark Knight was successful in large part because it was completely different from the Batman comics of the time. It completely changed the way Batman was perceived and presented from that point on. The sequel was just sort of... odd. I still find it fascinating though, even if only as a failed experiment. Every so often I read it again, just to see if my opinion will change. Upon repeated readings, mostly what bothers me is the color. I don't really know if it's the case or not, but it seems like Lynn Varley was just learning how to use the computer as a coloring tool and DKSA was a test case. It looks like somebody just fumbling around with Photoshop filters. Ah well, this is an old argument for everybody so I won't keep rehashing it any longer here. I think I'll go read it again.

That's my fascination with Miller. I'll even read the things I don't like over and over in the hope that I missed something the first few times.

I have been enjoying All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder. It took a few issues for me to get into it. At first it really seemed like Miller had completely lost his mind. But if you just sit back and go with the crazy it's a pretty fun book. In the context of his comments in EISNER/MILLER it seems pretty obvious that ASBRBW is just Miller enjoying himself by poking superhero fanboys with a sharp stick while enticing them with the carrot of Jim Lee's art. I like it though. I think the parody works better with Lee's traditional superhero artwork rather than Miller's own increasingly simplified cartooning.


















That brings up another interesting thing that Miller talks about in the book - how he's become more interested in simplified cartoonish images rather than the kind of Neal Adams-inspired illustrative linework that marked his earlier work.

I rather miss the more detailed stuff. For my tastes, Miller's art reached it's pinnacle in the first Sin City book where it balanced on the edge of intricate linework and abstraction.
























Since then, it's evolved more and more into broad simplification and has lost some of the beauty of the linework without really gaining that much energy.

























I kind of feel the same way about David Mazucchelli's stuff. He is probably my all-time favorite artist and I think he reached his absolute peak right around Batman Year One and Big Man from Rubber Blanket - that perfect balance between detail and abstraction.






















For me, City of Glass tipped a bit too far over into simplification.






















This is all completely subjective personal taste of course. And Asterios Polyp is in that fat stack of books I brought home with me, so maybe I'll think that's just as brilliant as everybody else does.

I should mention, that I am a big fan of the more cartoony and stylized artwork in many cases. Kyle Baker is a big hero of mine and I absolutely adore his cartooning.
























Darwyn Cooke is another favorite.




















His work took a little time to grow on me, but I love it more every time I look at it.

I find the question of balance between detail and simplification, between realistic and cartoony images extremely interesting. In my own artwork, I find it more difficult to draw in a cartoony style and achieve a result that I'm happy with. I'm striving for (and mostly failing to achieve so far) more of an economy of line. It seems like this is something that a lot of artists move toward as their individual drawing styles evolve. At first glance it might seem like a time-saver - less detail equals less drawing - but the more I get into it, the more I appreciate the aesthetics of a spare line rather than a million hatches and squiggly details. It's that balance, that fine balance that the best artists achieve. At this point, I've got a long way to go. But I'm having fun getting there.

Okay, there's my ruminations on EISNER/MILLER and some of the stuff it made me think about. Mostly though, it just makes me feel like DRAWING.

Have a heckuva week.