Paul Chadwick's Weblog

Force Like A Fist

I'm a Wachowski Brothers partisan.  Forced to examine the Matrix films in detail for writing the game, I came to appreciate the depth of their thinking, the internal logic, and the pains taken to create something exceptional. 

It was unnerving to learn they would next tackle (with director James McTeigue) V for Vendetta as their next film.  Though they started on the project years ago, 9/11 changed the climate completely, and a film about a hero bomber suddenly seemed like, well, suicide.

That was then.  Now we know the underbelly of the war on terror...the 'special renditions,' secret prisons, the torture with elaborate legal justifications, the imprisonment without charges or trial, the data-mining of Americans, the wiretapping of domestic calls, the lies that sold the war.

It isn't time to bomb parliament (we have elections), but the fantasy of doing so is less incomprehensible than it once was.  SF always takes present trends and pushes them to  extremes.

It's sure to be lacerated in the culture wars, but it's a relief to learn that no less a cultural light than James Wolcott says that doesn't matter.  The movie works.  It works great.

V for Vendetta is fun, dangerous fun, percussive with brutality and laced with ironic ambiguity and satirical slapstick (a Benny Hill homage, no less!).

...[what] gives the movie its rebel power is the moral seriousness that drives the action, emotion, and allegory. That’s what I didn’t expect from the Wachowski brothers (The Matrix), this angry, summoning Tom Paine moral dispatch that puts our pundits, politicians, and cable news hosts to shame. V for Vendetta instills force into the very essence of four-letter words like hate, love, and (especially) fear, and releases that force like a fist.

Yee-haw. 

Depths Review

Dorian Peace reviews Depths on his intriguingly named weblog Second Suitor.  The weblog generally is a good guide to highly readable comics, explained by a polished and well-informed writer. 

R.I.P. Octavia Butler

A few years ago I was the artist guest of Foolscap, a small Seattle-area con geared to readers rather than film or TV or gaming.  Octavia Butler, the celebrated SF novelist, was the author guest of honor.  I hadn't read her before, and was surprised and intrigued to find her stories mostly disinterested in SF matters of technology and its effects, and full of suffering.  And I mean suffering: torture, rape, deprivation -- her protagonists and sympathetic characters endure a lot.

A gentle, softspoken woman, modest despite her MacArthur "genius" grant, she gave the sense she'd suffered a bit herself.  Now she has died, after slipping and hitting her head on a cobble walkway outside her home in Seattle.  She was only 58.

I painted the accompanying image for the Foolscap program book, illustrating her award-winning story "Bloodchild."  It's a coming-of-age tale, in which a young boy learns the appalling secret adults never speak of: the benign, nurturing aliens living among the humans on this planet must, to reproduce, plant eggs in human hosts, which gorily (but not fatally) emerge as alien infants.

If you think about it, this is a realization every human girl goes through.  Bad news, honey!  You're going to endure the worst pain of your life and bear children for those people with the hair on their faces.  The process looks like this...

Talk about seeing things in a new way.

My technique wasn't quite up to my ambition in this painting, but I do think I got the ambiguity of the boy's relationship to the alien right.  Click to enlarge.

Sketchbook Art

Here's a piece I did in a sketchbook (the gutter Photoshopped out) for Lance...what's his last name?  Kreiter?  Morrow?  I forget my own editors names at conventions, so I'm not surprised it escapes me.

Anyway, he's an artist who works in animation, and has amassed a collection of xeroxes of Alex Toth's animation work -- storyboards, model sheets.  As Toth is a hero of my generation of comics artists, he's able to swap copies for exceptional sketchbook art.  You really should see it.   My contribution is pathetic compared to Dan Brereton's or Steve Rude's.  But Lance was kind enough to send me a scan, so I share it with you, funky drawing and all.

The painting I loosely copied (its shape is actually vertical) is by the French Symbolist Puvis de Chavannes.

Frank Godwin

I'm nuts about this guy.  Nuts.  The way he drew folds, the way he handled body English, the way he made a pen nip paint like John Singer Sargent's brush.  Frank Godwin was an illustrator in the Charles Dana Gibson/JM Flagg school, who also did comic strips...one called Connie, about a flapper-turned-Flash-Gordonesque adventurer (okay, it was silly), and Rusty Riley, about a boy and his horse.  But it doesn't matter what he drew...it was how he drew it.  Click to enlarge.  Thanks to Brian Apthorp for the pic.

The Human Dilemma Trade

Click to enlarge.  Just got the proof for the collection cover, which I like very much indeed.  The Dark Horse design department has a crackerjack crew.  Thanks, Heidi, Lia. 

Shame on Me

But let me blow my own horn: I made Time.com(ix)'s Best of 2005 list.

There's a link there as well to Andrew Arnold's long-form review of Concrete: The Human Dilemma, which just about made my week when it came out. 

Though he looks like a rock pile and has super-strength, he's actually a nervous, left-leaning smarty who copes with issues like population control rather than absurd super-villains. While staying true to the requirements of the genre by creating dynamic action scenes and melodramatic storylines, like having Concrete, who is ostensibly male, get pregnant, Chadwick keeps Concrete grounded to the real world.

Thanks to editor Diana Schutz for letting me know.