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?

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:

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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:

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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!