Here's a shot of the great Charles Vess and me, several years ago. I confess I like it because it's about as thin as I ever was, except after my Nepal trek in 1983. Follow the link to Green Man Press and feast your eyes on art that not only will delight you, but help you remember that we're creatures of this Earth and ought to get out of our technological prison now and then. Enjoy the art, then shut down your computer and go outside!
VidFest Presentation
- This is a loosely chronological survey of my work from my teenage fanzine artwork to screenshots of The Matrix Online, for which I wrote story continuity over the first few years of its existence. SF illustration, movie storyboards, advertising art and plenty of Concrete and other comics work included. It was part of my talk with Mark Verheiden, then a Battlestar Galactica writer/producer, to Vidfest 2007 in Vancouver BC.
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January 26, 2006
January 24, 2006
Stan the Man
"Lee of Marvel Comics"
That was a clue in the Dec 14 New York Times crossword puzzle. I guess Stan has really made it, up there with luminaries like Alley Oop, Yoko Ono, Muhammad Ali and other helpful crosswords.
Recently I read Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon's book Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book.
It’s impressive. We are in a time when books about comics are written with high journalistic standards, historical insight, and the results of real digging.
(Also noteworthy: Steve Duin and Mike Richardson’s Comics: Between the Panels, an encyclopedic and opinionated tour of comics history that’s full of dish, and Gerard Jones’s superb Men of Tomorrow.)
The Raphael/Spurgeon book is a balanced, exhaustive treatment of Lee’s life and career. It is hard to love this cocky careerist, so the various setbacks Lee has suffered (the Atlas implosion, his frustrating decades in Hollywood, the StanLee.net debacle) are welcome in their humanizing effect. Had all gone swimmingly, it would’ve been hard to sympathize with him at all. But like all people who live long enough, he’s had his share of trouble, of disappointment and sadness.
One walks away thinking Lee’s Hollywood dream-chasing was misguided, a waste of his still-vital creative years…but the man did okay. A million-plus-a-year income, and he lived to do his cameos in the great Marvel films that finally got made (despite his floundering in the pitch rooms for all those years).
He also seems to have pretty good grounds for his lawsuits against Marvel, a contract for 10% of the proceeds Marvel receives for its movies…signed back in the days when Lee’s hustling seemed like their best chance of landing a deal, when Marvel couldn’t get arrested in Hollywood.
How things change.
The Spurgeon link is Tom's great comics news page. The Jones link is an interview on NPR's On the Media. Gerry does good interviews.
January 23, 2006
...and Finished
Because before and after pictures are always interesting. Click to enlarge.
January 22, 2006
Today's Inking
Work in progress, for what it's worth. It was hard to draw this sequence of disastrous spectacle without remembering Basil Wolverton's great 1959 drawings of the end of the world, according to Biblical prophecy. Click thumbnail to enlarge, and don't miss parts two and three of the Wolverton work.
January 18, 2006
Killer Smile
Today I'm writing the introduction to Killer Smile, my out-and-out suspense story. It's not my best, but, coming as it did in the boom of the early nineties, (and with a Previews cover as a tailwind) it's the best Concrete ever sold.
We're grouping stories by theme, so this volume has all my crime stories. There were more of them than I thought. I remember being struck with Arthur Scott's observation, in the comics apa we both belonged to (Apa-5): that by far the greatest share of human literature is about crime.
But that makes sense. Drama is all about people doing bad things, and then the corrective following.
That Art Scott link goes to his book on one of the greatest paperback illustrators, Robert McGinnis, which belongs in every illustration fan's library. What that guy could do with a little gouache and a photo of a pretty model...
Click to enlarge.
January 03, 2006
Good day
I'm feeling good. Put another edition of The Sentinel, the MXO in-game newspaper to bed (here's the previous edition), and worked on the design and written content of some little satellite storytelling vehicles which we hope will flesh out the story which, alas, has been unfolding at half the speed originally planned.
Better to fill the gaps with characterization and backstory and subplots than to curse the darkness, or something like that.
Here's a bizarre scene from the gameworld, with "flying cars" --
actually, an elevated roadway and other objects that neglected to
render. I found myself stuck in this spot, able to run only one meter
before being snapped back to it: XYZ coordinates 0,0,0. Quite a
bizarre glitch.
I wondered if my character would be marooned there forever (restarting the game didn't help), until I consulted the help menu and discovered the "/suicide" command. It sends one back to the loading area, with its choice of hardlines for reentering the Matrix.
If only real life had this sort of reset. Then again, we'd be cleaning up corpses at every stressful social function, and every final exam.
Click to enlarge.