When Monday comes, Karen Comes With It

Yes indeedy. Time for your weekly dose of Untruthiness:

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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:

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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:

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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.

Karen Don't Come

Sorry, Untrue Believers!

I'm out and about and slacking right on off in an international jet-set way, so no new page this week, I'm afraid.

Go watch the awesome Jean-Claude Van Damme movie JCVD instead. The Muscles from Brussels should make all his movies in French from now on. Apparently he could act all along. Just not in English.

New page next week. Promise!