Well, I enjoyed the new Indiana Jones movie.

I don’t have anything particularly intelligent to say about it, but then… the movie doesn’t particularly give you any reason to say intelligent things about it. It’s like a big bowl of one of those horrible sugar-cereals you used to love as a kid but haven’t thought about in 20 years. Except now all the frankenberries have tiny microcomputers in them that project holographic CG prairie dogs all over the kitchen as you chew. It’s kind of distracting and you wonder why they bothered, but you know what? The frankenberries taste just like you remember, you’re getting a nice nostalgia kick, and that’s what you paid for, goddamn it. I mean, sure, maybe you can’t slam the entire bowl of sugar-sludge the way you did 20 years ago, but, um.. but…

(Honey, is that box of bran flakes still on top of the fridge? I like the flax bits.)

I think my enjoyment of Indy 4 was strongly enhanced by having watched the entirety of that Indiana Jones marathon they had on the Sci-Fi Channel last week. It reminded me what those movies really ARE, warts and all, so I wasn’t just riding some sort of dewy, soft-focus nostalgia train into the theater last Sunday. This has always been a goofy, cornball kind of series. Raiders of the Lost Ark is clearly head and shoulders (and chest and groin and legs and feet and several miles of empty air) above the rest, but Crystal Skull certainly isn’t any sillier or less engaging than the other two. It fits in pretty well, actually. Yes, Crystal Skull has Shia LaBeouf Tarzanning it up with CG monkeys, but if you recall, Last Crusade had Sean Connery destroying a Nazi fighter plane by riling up pigeons with his umbrella. (The birds weren’t CG though, so I guess that’s okay.)

I was kind of surprised, watching that marathon the other day, by how much I liked Temple of Doom. I used to be pretty adamant that Temple of Doom was the worst one, but looking at them again I think it holds up ever-so-slightly better than Last Crusade. Maybe I’ve just endured Kate Capshaw’s character often enough to build up a tolerance at this point, but I dunno… The mine carts… the monkeyheads… that whole first scene in the nightclub… all that stuff is as good as anything in Raiders. (That shish-kebabbed puppet shooting wildly in the air is maybe my favorite thing ever). Mostly, I think I just appreciated how different Temple is from the first one. I mean, Last Crusade is great, but sometimes it really does feel like they just slapped new labels on all the old Raiders stuff and called it a new movie.

The villains in Last Crusade are kind of forgettable, too… Some people mentioned the bad guys weren’t very good in this new movie, but I dunno. To be honest, I thought Irina Spalko was maybe the best villain since Toht and Belloq in Raiders. It’s kind of hard to go wrong when you give somebody like Cate Blanchett a thick Ukrainian accent and an inexplicable set of rapiers. I thought she was all kinds of neat.

The Beouf didn’t bother me the way he bothered other folks, either. After Constantine and I, Robot, I went into Indy expecting the guy to be in full “Scamp, the Lovable Wiseacre” mode, but it wasn’t like that at all. I figured his character would be all “Lay off, Pops! I ain’t got time for all your science museum mumbo-jumbo! I gots pomade to spread all over my hot rod at the rock-n-roll malt shop sock hop, Daddy-O!” There was a little of that, yeah, but I liked that Steven Spielberg, etc. largely avoided any kind of culture clash nonsense between the two leads. Mutt was pretty much on board with smart being cool right from the start.

I do agree, however, that the double agent guy was kind of pointless. And John Hurt’s performance was, as I read over at CHUD, sorta Lassie-like. The movie was maybe 15-20 minutes too long, went “too cutesy” a bit too often (ugh, that quicksand scene), and the last scene is kinda limp. And yes, fakey CG continues to be the slow death of Big Hollywood.

But still, I enjoyed the movie. The atomic blast shot, the jungle chase, the weird capoeria-spinning skull-masked grave-guards, the motorcycle slide through the library…. men dragged to their death by ants (ugh, ants)… Harrison Ford still being all cool… It felt like an Indiana Jones movie, and that’s all I wanted.

It’s kind of odd, a couple weeks ago I admitted to enjoying another critically derided movie, Speed Racer, on the grounds that it was a bit of silly fun that was at least trying something different. And now here I’m telling you I liked Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull because it’s a bit of silly fun that wraps me in a warm blanket of familiarity.

Oh, wait… that’s not odd at all, actually. That’s called “having fun with different films for different reasons.” Nevermind.

WOW!

Has it really been almost a month since I posted? How lame!

BUT… here are all the posts I would’ve written had I not been spending all my time on, y’know, Serenity pages, freelance character designs, Comic-Con preparations (July 23-27 at the SLG booth, but I’m sure I’ll post more on that later) and, of course, important LOST DVDs from Netflix:

1. GRUNION UN-RUN. Two weeks ago I made a point of trekking down to San Pedro’s Cabrillo Beach in the middle of the night to join well over a thousand of my fellow humans in watching tiny, sardine-like fish called “grunions” squiggle out of the tide, half-bury themselves in the sand (if female), squirt big, steaming gobs of “milt” all over half-buried females (if male), then high-tail it back out to sea like dirty, dirty sailors, leaving nothing behind but great hordes of newly-fertilized orphan eggs. That’s right, I went out to see a fish orgy. And I didn’t even get to see the fish orgy, thanks to my darling, precious countrymen’s inability to follow simple directions. Put it this way: If thousands of babbling primates went charging into your home brandishing flashlights, buckets, and pure stupidity, you probably wouldn’t be able to stuff your loved one in a hole and dump semen on her, either.

The Cabrillo Beach Aquarium was way cool, though. Before our ill-fated grunion-love excursion, they prepped with a short film about grunions presented in glorious, 60′s-era, “teacher needs a smoke break” Technicolor. It was sort of the highlight of the evening. Well, that and the awesome octopus, moon jellies, shark eggs and monstrous demon lobsters.

2. THE INCREDIBLE HULK. The new Hulk movie was pretty good. Edward Norton, the vast shantytown chase, Tim Roth kicked into a tree and the notion of one day seeing Tim Blake Nelson don the big, green, hydroencephalytic head of The Leader… Good stuff. And it really felt like part of the same universe as Iron Man, tone-wise. The whole “house style” approach Marvel is taking with these new movies is kind of fun at the moment, but you can see how it might backfire down the line. I mean, one of the things I really loved about Ang Lee’s version (which, I have to admit, I still prefer) was how odd the thing was. It seemed very Ang Lee, however compromised it might’ve been. But maybe that movie’s fate is exactly why Marvel’s decided to stay out of the “personal vision” business. Which is fair, but you have to wonder… would a guy like Christopher Nolan want to work in a “house style?” Would Sam Raimi? GDT?

(By the way, why are internet people always hatin’ on the Hulk dogs so much? What’s not cool about The Hulk having to fight giant monster canines? I LOVED the Hulk dogs! All the hate kind of freaks me out a little, too… I mean, forcing my characters to fight a massive, irradiated hell-poodle is EXACTLY the kind of thing I’d put in my comics… God, should I be worried?)

3. THE ANIMATION SHOW 4. Going to Mike Judge’s (and until recently, funniest man alive Don Hertzfeldt’s) animation festival always reminds me of going to the old Tournée of Animation with my Dad every year. Man, I was too young for a lot of those shorts… This year’s batch is solid as always, although it’s kind of weird how much animation is coming out of France these days. Sort of a cartoon renaissance going on over there, I guess. But anyway, if the show comes to your neck of the country this time around, you should definitely take a look. My favorites this time around were Key Lime Pie, Paintballing, John and Karen, and, of course, Usavich:

ON THE BIG SCREEN, FOLKS. The schedule is right HERE.

4. WALL-E. Wow, another absolute masterpiece from Pixar. The first, nearly wordless, essentially all-character half of Wall-E is right up there with the very best films I’ve ever seen. The rest of the movie is great, but maybe not quite great enough to knock Ratatouille off the top of my list. Wall-E is actually a pretty fantastic bit of science fiction, too… It reminded me of all those old “EVERYTHING’S SCREWED!” sci-fi movies from the 70′s more than anything (Silent Running, Logan’s Run, Zardoz… DEFINITELY Zardoz….). Amazing, beautiful stuff. And the people who animated Wall-E himself should get a Best Actor nomination, as far as I’m concerned.

(SPOILER MAYBE! What was with all the live action bits, though? If we were never supposed to see humans later in the movie, the live actionny parts would’ve been neat, but as it is… What, do centuries of physical neglect turn people into pudgy Incredibles or something? It’s a very, very minor complaint, but still. WHA’ HAPPEN, Fred Willard??)

5. GRIM DEATH. June was not a good time to be a famous person I love, as both Stan Winston and George Carlin died all sudden-like last month. As the co-creator of the Predator, Alien Queen, and T-800 (the holy three!), Stan Winston was probably the first behind-the-scenes movie hero I ever had. And George Carlin… well, George Carlin is the greatest stand-up there ever was.

The world is worse without them, but better for having had them in it. Strange that it works that way.

Talk to you again in (hopefully) less than a month!

SPOILER ALERT PROBABLY!

Yep, that Dark Knight movie sure has collected a lot of hype over the past few weeks. I haven’t seen so many gushing superlatives hurled at a comic book movie since… ever.

Incredibly, the movie totally lived up to the hype. It’s really unbelievable.

I don’t really want to write a whole THING about it, though, seeing as how I’d just be sort of repeating a million other THINGS people have written. Mariah pretty much wrote my review for me, anyway. (Thanks, Mariah!) I honestly can’t imagine there’ll be a better movie this year. What’s coming down the line to even compete? The Road, maybe? Burn After Reading? The Curious Case of Benjamin Button?

I do, however, want to take this moment to do what no other Dark Knight bloggist has yet to do: Congratulate the MPAA on yet another towering triumph in the field of movie ratings.

Sure, I just watched a PG-13 movie in which I was seriously worried I was about to witness a man with half his face-flesh burned off put a bullet in an 8-year-old boy’s skull in front of his crying, screaming family, but thanks to the good people at the MPAA, I had absolutely no fear of any nude female nipples sneaking into the scene. Thank you so much, MPAA. Because of you and your stalwart vigilance on behalf of our nation’s many unspoilt young minds, I can rest assured whenever children go to see crack-y, psychotic clowns stick knives in people’s mouths, those clowns will never, under any circumstances, dare to use the word “fuck.” I doff my hat to you all.

Yeah, the PG-13 rating is a joke. This is a dark, intense film…. Which is, of course, exactly why I loved it. The Dark Knight is a tar-black film about nothing less than the fragility of hope and the allure of chaos – Yes, it’s exactly that pretentious. But – oh my god, are you shitting me – they pulled it off! They really did! Through a combination of actors who take the material seriously, a director who never pulls his punches, 3 writers willing to take a summer blockbuster into places summer blockbusters just do not go… they did it. This is a “Fall prestige picture” disguised as a superhero spectacle and dumped in the middle of July to record crowds.

And god, this thing is brutal. I swear to god, there were moments in the theater when I was genuinely afraid of what I’d have to watch the Joker do. I was uncomfortable. And that kind of thing never happens to me. You can believe the hype. This Joker is one of the best movie villains of all time, Oscar nomination for sure (and not just as some cheap “Sorry to hear you died!” consolation prize, either).

You know those videos you can find on the internet of terrorists sawing people’s heads off with knives and whatnot?* Heath Ledger’s Joker is the guy with the knife. Only instead of a mask, he’s got clown paint smeared all over his mutilated mouth. Oh, and he’s laughing.

(I bet you could show those videos in a PG-13 movie. Y’know, as long as no one says “tits.”)

One more thing before this becomes a THING… Having grown up in Chicago, it was really cool to see where they staged the big car chase in the middle of the movie. Those hellish orange lights along the “lower” streets used to haunt my dreams when I was a kid.

…

SPEAKING OF HELLISH…

I also enjoyed the hell out of Hellboy 2. (Now THAT was a proper PG-13.) It was just one big, 2-hour-long orgy of the most inspired, imaginative production design you’ve ever seen. Brilliant action choreography, too (miles ahead of the Dark Knight, unfortunately, except for maybe that car chase scene). BUT… I’m not sure I agree with the consensus that Hellboy 2 is such an improvement over Hellboy 1, though. The main villain is definitely more compelling this time around, and there’s frankly just a lot MORE on the screen to appreciate, but I dunno… It seemed like Guillermo Del Toro (one of my favorite-ever guys, if you recall) really upped the SILLY for this one, occasionally venturing dangerously close to Men In Black territory. I’m usually a big proponent of the silly, but in this case, I was a little distracted. The tone just seemed slightly off from what they established the first time around (and miles away from the comics).

And what was going on with Abe Sapien in this new one? He betrays them all toward the end, then just kind of stands around while everyone else fights? What’s going on there, Fish Guy?

These are pretty minor complaints, though. Hellboy 2 is, without question, a beautiful movie full of agonizingly beautiful visuals (The dying elemental! The regenerating army! The rock door guy!), the best action scenes of the year, a note-perfect performance by Ron Perlman, and tons of really nice character animation (that poor, dying tooth fairy…). Also: Johann Krauss is worth the price of admission alone. Family Guy voice and everything.

Y’know, The Dark Knight and Hellboy 2 will make a good double-feature when I have the discs here at home. After two and a half hours of punishing Gotham oppression, maybe I’ll better appreciate the light and silly adventures of the hellborn demon destined to destroy mankind.

It’s been a really cool summer movie season, hasn’t it?

THREE DAYS TO COMIC-CON!

*A friend of mine e-mailed me a link to one of those videos SANS WARNING one time. Luckily, someone told me what it was before I clicked it, but other friends were… not so lucky.

Do you consider John Carpenter’s The Thing one of the coolest movies ever made?

Did you have a whole swarm of 4″ G.I. Joe figurines in the 80′s?

Do you love eerie-synthy Goblin/Carpenter-style giallo-type music?

If you answered “yes” to all those questions, then… um… well, then you’re probably me.

And boy, do I have a YouTube treat for me!

It’s a music video for this band called Zombie Zombie, and it has a bunch of G.I. Joes stop-motioning their way through The Thing. And it’s SHOCKINGLY well done. It’s not just a dumb joke.

Who knew Outback (or “Survival,” as we used to call him) was such a fine little actor?

A wee animated music video by Yannick Puig for a Parisian prog band called Kwoon. The prettiest thing I’ve seen this year (so far).

My favorite moments are at about 2:36 and 3:47, respectively. (Yay giant monster mouths!)

The animator has a lot of other beautiful bits and things and stuff on his site, too. Except the audio doesn’t seem to work on the Quicktime version of that Kwoon video… Still amazing to look at, though.

I’m still trying to clear all the cobwebs of brain medication from my skull (just 5 pages this month, holy god!), but I figured I should at least post some thoughts about the big Minx collapse last week…

If you haven’t heard, a few days ago DC Comics abruptly guillotined their whole “Minx” line of teen-girl-targeted books after just 16 months in the wild. The status of all their pending releases and pitches and whatnot is sort of up in the air right now, it seems. I had three pitches over there (including a Kimmie sequel), but I hadn’t heard anything about those in a while…

Anyway, here’s what I told Andy Khouri at Comic Book Resources (sorry to steal, but I’d just be repeating myself otherwise):

“Confessions of a Blabbermouth” illustrator Aaron Alexovich (also a character designer on “Invader Zim”) had the unique privilege of not just drawing a graphic novel aimed at teenage girls, but also collaborating with a teenage girl on its creation. “Mike [Carey] and Louise [Carey] put so much personality into those characters, I was more than happy to be dragged out of my typical spookyscreamymonster comfort zone,” Alexovich told CBR. “I’d work with them again anytime.”

Alexovich also wrote and illustrated for Minx the 176-page “Kimmie66,” a critically acclaimed graphic novel about a girl in the 23rd century who investigates the apparent suicide of her closest internet friend. “I have nothing but good things to say about working with Shelly on my Minx books,” he said. “‘Kimmie66’ was my first book for DC, so I sort of went into it expecting a pretty heavy editorial hand, but there was a lot more freedom than I expected. There was a lot of conversation and re-jiggering, yeah, but in the end, that book came out feeling just as much ‘mine’ as if I’d done it with a smaller publisher. That’s probably the saddest thing about Minx falling apart. It’s one less place at the Big Two for unique, personal voices to be heard. You can certainly pour a lot of your own voice into a Superman story, but it’s just not the same thing.”

“Kimmie66” is widely considered a highlight of the Minx line, but that didn’t make it any easier for its author to find in bookstores. “All I can say is that whenever I’m in a Borders, I look to see if my books are there, and I’ve found them maybe three times, always smooshed in among the ‘Captain Americas’ and whatnot,” he said. “I don’t think they ever found the best place to shelve the Minx stuff, to be honest. I don’t think I would have, either.

“Alternately,” Alexovich added, “maybe people just didn’t like them as much as they, y’know, liked other things.”

Read the whole thing here. It’s really in-depth… I think he got quotes from pretty much every creative team involved.

I haven’t really gone mucking through the comic blog-pits for other comments, but I did find some great posts on my Livejournal Friends Page:

Mariah (who helped edit Kimmie66) has her usual in-depth, well-thought-out take on the situation. I especially like that she brought up the lack of “genre” books in the line. Kimmie66 always seemed like an odd duck at Minx, and I’m absolutely certain the marketing department realized it… (There’s a reason Kimmie was released dead last in 2007.) This whole “real girls in the real world” dictate seemed to come about long after I’d finished my book, and it just depressed the hell out of me. I mean, that “teen girl” perspective has been so hard to find in so much “genre” stuff for so long, especially in comics, why not try to tap into that? Maybe more girls would read science fiction (or westerns, or war stories, or monster stuff, action-adventures, whatever) if the stories had more relatable protagonists and recognizable situations. Maybe they wouldn’t,* but it’s something for the next intrepid publisher to consider.

Mariah also points out that “Moxie” would’ve been a better name for the line. I agree 100%… but sadly, the focus groups did not. This, unfortunately, marks the first time I and any random group of average teenage girls have not been in total agreement on matters of personal taste.

Some other findings from my LJ Friends Page: Ross brings the whole line down with short-shorts,** Dave Roman (Agnes Quill rocks!) has some great points about serialization, my new favorite artist Faith Erin Hicks dodges a bullet, and Re-Gifter’s beyond-brilliant Sonny Liew wraps it all up thusly:

“As comics creators i guess all we can really do is try and tell the stories we think are worth telling and hope that the jungle of the marketplace out there somehow thinks they’re worth reading too.”

In other words: If you want certainty, may I suggest a career in mathematics?

*Yes, they would.

**Knock it off, Ross! Your work is beautiful and your girls are the truest, most realistic-looking teenagers in the business. Anyone who doubts that oughtta be strapped into one of those “Clockwork Orange” chairs and have Wet Moon forced into their eyes over and over and over again until they’re properly reprogramed.

Hooray for no brain cancer!

After nearly two months, one CAT scan, two MRI’s, an EEG, one failed “sleep study” and something called Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (which seems to involve the same technology used to determine the chemical composition of stars, only pointed right at my skull), I finally got word today that all my various sleep disorders and assorted headache troubles are not, thank god, the result of cancer in the brain.

How’s that for good news?

It’s not every day a guy gets to hear he doesn’t have brain cancer. (Have you heard you don’t have brain cancer today?)

The neurologists still aren’t sure exactly what’s been causing my assorted head problems… Scary words like “tumor” and “biopsy” originally came up when the first MRI showed my hippocampus lit up like Christmas and festooned with festive “little dots.” I’m not sure what that was all about, but it might have something to do with having the test done just a few days after the second-worst migraine of my life. But anyway, the second MRI showed my brain essentially back to normal. (As if it ever WAS! BWAHAHAHAHAHAohdeargodmakeitstop…) The “little dots” might actually be scar tissue from 20 years of chronic migraining, believe it or not. And if the notion of scar tissue on the brain freaks you out… well, join the club, buddy.

They put me on this new seizure medication to cut out the night terrors, and so far it seems to be working. The migraines I’m not as worried about, since they only hit me once a year or so (again, like Christmas). But I have some new meds for that, too, so with any luck this’ll be the end of any health-related blog posting for a long, long time.

Man, that was pretty scary. Not as scary as it would’ve been if I’d actually allowed myself to think about it much, but still… scary.

I have a disc right here filled to brimming with images of my brain, but they won’t open on my computer. So here’s an image of a bride and groom being impaled on Triceratops horns instead:

It’s about as good a look inside my head as anything else, to be honest.

Hooray for no brain cancer!

Our parents’ generation got to watch the first man walk on the moon.

I think I finally know how that must have felt.

“And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright – tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

For that is the true genius of America – that America can change.”

Full bit of history here.

I really need to learn how to draw faster.

My art style has always been sort of cramped and fussy and sort of timid-looking, which I kind of like (the whole world’s a little to BOLD for me, thanks), but it’s not so good for getting stuff done, and getting it done quick. And being a really fabulous artist isn’t just about how well you can draw, but how quickly you can draw well. I mean, any half-decent artist can make something wonderful if they spend eighteen years on it. It’s the ones who spend eighteen minutes who really make an impression, get all the good jobs, etc., etc.

I’m bringing this up because I just spent most of November working on three little book pitches. I got most of the writing part done, but I only managed to draw ONE measly little bit of finished concept art. When I realized I was in danger of falling behind on the Serenity stuff, I had to put all the rest of it aside for a while. This is simply unacceptable.

Now, I worked in animation for a little while. I know how to scribble things out pretty quick if I have to. In fact, that’s the FUN part. Rough drawings are what I like. I can get four or five Serenity pages done in a day if I’m just scribbling out some rough layouts only I’m meant to see. It’s doing those finished, final, ready-to-present-to-the-public-and/or-potential-publishers artwork that’s like pulling teeth for me. I hate whittling things down to one solid line. I hate having to carefully figure out tones and perspective and three-dimensional rendering. Don’t even talk to me about color.

I find no joy in Photoshop.

It’s sort of like I’m addicted to that initial flare-up of beautiful, scribbley creativity, but then my brain quickly glazes over to the point where I’d rather just ditch it all and go refresh CHUD.com for the twentieth time that day.

I WILL PROVIDE AN EXAMPLE.

This is the extra-sketchy version of page 21 from Goodbye Crestfallen (final here):

At this point I have completely lost interest in the drawing process, and am quite possibly staring at my cat or thinking about John Carpenter’s The Thing. Maybe I’m eating a cookie.

This is indicative of a dangerous lack of what professionals call “followthrough.”

And I have the same problem with writing. I love making plot outlines and scene descriptions and little bits of dialogue and whatnot, but once I’ve come face to face with that vast expanse of horrible, soul-devouring blankness in MS Word… Hey, maybe I should check and see if Matt Yglesias has updated his blog!

Anybody else have this followthrough problem? Does EVERYone have this followthrough problem? How do you get over it? Or more importantly, how do you get over it without an employer breathing fire down the back of your neck to get things done faster?

Have you ever wondered what it would look like if I were allowed to scribble-scrabble all over one of the most beloved, long-running (and sassiest!) webcomics on the internet? Well, check out Wapsi Square today and put all your wonderment to rest.

Thanks again to Paul for letting me be a part of this winter’s Guest Comic Week. Your characters are all kinds of fun to draw, sir! (Especially the hands…)