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!