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2-28-2011
It is now the end of February. I short, sweet little month which has been full, full, full of activity. The Megamoth Studio classes are turning in their final submissions for this year's student anthology. The anthology this time around will be bigger and better than ever. I am particularly excited about having it printed and bound properly this time. No more Kinko's staple jobs for this year. The students are really stepping up the quality and size of their projects from years past as well. There will be announcements on this space as well as at Megamoth Studio once the things are printed, for those of you who want to check it out.
Preparations for the coming convention season have taken their usual toll on my studio time. I have some etching projects nearing completion and I hope to share them with you all soon. This week my offering is a drawing. I have tried doing a piece based on an old variant of the Beauty and the Beast folk tale called the Small Toothed Dog for quite some time now. This is my most recent, and my most successful venture:
2-19-2011
I finally finished reading The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. It belongs on a list of literature I decided to read because I enjoyed reading what it inspired. I read Shakespeare's King Lear because Akira Kurosawa's Ran was so inspiring. I read Moby Dick because Fone Bone went on and on about it in Jeff Smith's Bone. I read The Three Musketeers because Steven Brust's The Pheonix Guard was so delightful to read.
I saw movie versions of The Three Musketeers when I was little, which, combined with The Princess Bride, aided in causing me to run around waving sticks like swords for hours on end. I mostly remember the guys in blue were cool and the guys in red were bad and the bad guys were led by The Cardinal. (It was a long time ago...) Reading The Three Musketeers therefore held a number of surprises.
The Cardinal is less of a villain and more of a friend who happens to have plans counter to those of D'Artagnan and his brave friends. The chief villain is a pretty woman. This sets up an interesting situation with four skilled soldiers and their loyal lackeys all pitted against a single woman in deadly conflict. She almost wins, too. I guess that's food for people who want to discuss gender roles and historical context and all the rest.
The language and dueling over the smallest of insults was what I hoped to find, and it was certainly there. Brust's take on the genre has more magic and is slightly more over the top, but the original does not disappoint.
Here is a new drawing for you all. I don't really mean anything by it, but read it as you will.
2-5-2011
I read Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys volume 1 this week. It is a combination of nostalgic character study and large scale science fiction menace. The science fiction menace doesn't get a lot of attention in this volume, with the vast majority of pages being devoted to 20-something men remembering their childhood adventures together. I suppose it's about what I should have expected from the creator of Monster and Billy Bat. Urasawa plays a very long game in revealing anything more than a general idea of what the story is probably about. Actually, you don't even get much of even that in Billy Bat. It seems I will just have to read more of 20th Century Boys before I can make any real comment on the story. Urasawa makes a a good comic though, so I expect I will be able to comment on it at some point in the future.
In other reading, I recently enjoyed Jonathan Stroud's The Ring of Solomon. If you have not tried Stroud's Bartimaeus books yet, I highly recommend them. There are a lot of books that fall into the category of fantasy for young adults, especially since the advent of Harry Potter, but there are few that are as cleverly imagined, as amusingly written, or as emotionally satisfying as the original Bartimaeus trilogy. The Ring of Solomon maintains the smart, wry voice of the trilogy and the adventure is as imaginative and fun as ever, though it does not pack quite the same emotional/psychological punch as the trilogy.
Bartimaeus has also been made into a comic book. I have not read it yet, though I suppose it is inevitable. I will say my heart sank a bit at notion of a comic book version of these books. I find myself doubting the graphic novel treatment will retain the smart and subtle humor that makes the novels so enjoyable.
Perhaps I shall be proven wrong.
Here is an unrelated drawing for you to enjoy:
