jbacardi

http://www.cartoonlabs.com/comics/index.php?date=2009-12-30&show=sinfest

Sinfest
Tatsuya Ishida

Ok, this one was just an excuse to get all obsessively fetishistic about drawing hair and bodily secretions. I worked from a photo, if it that isn't abundantly clear. Pffthaha, as if I could draw that realistically from memory...

It's kinda fun every once in a while to try a more realistic style, although I'll always been a cartoonist at heart -- which is obvious with the next one. It's just more entertaining to go a little crazier with the expressions and stuff. Trying for photo-realism just deprives you of all that fun!


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Also:
"Leksand, SWEDEN -- "Jump for Joy" suddenly got a whole new meaning to it as Henrik Andersen scored his first goal of the season in his Leksand jersey, Andersen celebrated by jumping into the boards, but something went wrong..."

In 25 years of watching hockey, I have never seen that happen. What are those fucking boards put together with? Twine and snot?

During the holidays, Stuart and I took the train out from Brussels to the Flemmish town of Ghent and spent the afternoon wandering along the canals, craning our necks to look at buildings, and trying not to get run over by bicycles.







( More photos of Ghent under the cut )

http://gunshowcomic.com/d/20091230.html

Gun Show Comic comic for Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Page 165 of Family Man!

There’s nothing like a week in which you find yourself running searches on “European conifer species” and “historical menarche” for the same project.  Nothing like it at all.

Next page: will be in the glorious new year of 2010!  Shiny.

I’ll see if I don’t have a good summary to what turned out to be a rather tumultuous year for yours truly (professionally speaking; personally it’s been rather kind).

But really, I’m more excited about everything I’d like to attempt in the new year.  That’s the way it should be!  Stay tuned for new and exciting nonsense.

{wp version}

December 29, 2009 Progress Notes:

"Stay"

Words today: 100.
Words total: 100.
Reason for stopping: Need to be up at a decent hour, to do laundry before heading out for lunch with Several Writers (tm).

Darling du Jour: N/A.

Mean Things: January. Thin sandy icy snow. Wendigoes.
Research Roundup: The community of Enterprise, Northwest Territories: its geography, demographics, and resources; distances to Hay River; Hay River auto parts shops; Persephone cults; Raven.

Books in progress: Emma Bull, Bone Dance.
The glamour: Bathroom-cleaning, kitchen-cleaning (mild), finally putting some stuff on Freecycle.

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I have confirmed it. It's definitely the sentence level, which has either crumbled like old cheese in my hands or is figuring out something new and better or...something. But again, like with "When Your Number Isn't Up", I circled this and circled for a first sentence, knowing it involved the storm, which comes in at eight o'clock from the north; that the snow is like fine sand, icy and dry; that it is January; that with it comes the man in his limping long-haul truck. And I could not put one together, in a voice or cast or feel that clicked, to give myself satisfaction on the matter.

And, well. You see what that is. That's all the elements of a sentence right there: the approach, the appropriate telling detail, half the structure and the thematic tie, the hook. It's already most of the way to telling us what kind of story this is. But it's the rest. The rest is in the how, in the telling, and I can't put these jagged pieces together in a way to make that whole these days. I don't have the glue. They're just pieces, and they fall back apart without my hands to hold them steady. If I was in a worse mood today or had been doing this for fewer years, I'd say It is like I have forgotten how to write.

I have been doing this for eight and a half years, so I do not think this thing. It's a lesson, and the brain needs to deconstruct an element to reconstruct it better; hence bloody bitchy frustrating plateaus in the learning curve. And I am pushing through it with "When Your Number...", and will thus push through it with this story, but I won't lie and say that I didn't have my face pressed to that winter doorway, watching them move shadowplay inside, and mutter to them, to myself, Oh, you bastards, give me the in. Open the door. Let me in.

Largest Man-Made Mountain Could Rise Above Berlin's Skyline
We fly to San Diego tomorrow, late in the evening, arriving at eleven. I write the words, I say them, and they feel like myth, like a story I might tell a child. We will pack today, wake up tomorrow, make breakfast, make love, do all the things we do in a day, then get onto one of those roaring machines in the sky and step off in San Diego in time for an incredible party for New Year's Eve. How... How... fictional!

Today I've been figuring out the last pieces of our San Diego itinerary - where we'll be staying on which days, how to get to Evolve from downtown - and having a surprising amount of fun doing it. It helps that Tony and I have similar tastes, and while it's going to be incredible swanking it up in the luxury of the Hilton, we're also excited about the The Dolphin Motel, where we're staying tomorrow, which looks like it fell out of a snazzy movie set, (check out that neon!), and The Balboa Park Inn, right across the street from the San Diego Zoo, where the fiction and wonder continue, as we've booked... the Orient Express Theme Room! Swoon. SWOON.

Our trip is going to be so very transcendant, it's surprising my head hasn't fallen off.

This evening we're gearing up by sorting out laundry, packing and electronics, and glueing long iridescent feathers to my purple hat. We still need to work out schedules with friends in L.A. and check the local weather and all those responsible things, but so far we're doing pretty good, having settled in to wait for the dryer with West Wing, bowls of steamed vegetables, a saucer of fruit salad, and pumpkin cake with caramel sauce. Tomorrow we'll look at what we've accomplished, shake our heads, do a bunch more of it, then pop out for last minute essentials, like matching bindi decorated with sequins, glass beads, or rhinestones from the Indian shop on Broadway for our dress up on New Year's Eve, because we can't be all rational thought and action.

A giant "digital cloud" tower structure that would "float" above London's skyline has been outlined by an international team of architects, artists and engineers, which also includes the writer Umberto Eco

SCENE: the dinner table. PRESENT: my mother, my father, various irrelevant hangers-on. TOPIC OF CONVERSATION: words people mispronounce, specially featuring me b/c I read a lot when I was a kid.

MUM: Mature to rhyme with nature!
EVERYONE: *laughs*
MUM: Misled pronounced mizzled! (this wasn't me, ftr.)
EVERYONE: *laughs*
DAD, looking at Waldorf salad that has been sitting in the fridge since Christmas day: Is this salad safe to eat after "superating" for the last four days?
MUM: It's fine.
ME: Why did you say it like that, superating? It's suppurating.
MUM: No, it's superating. Ha-ha, another one of those words!
ME: Yeah, but it totally looks like it should be said like supper because it has two ps.
MUM: No it doesn't!
DAD: No it doesn't!
ME: Yes it does! S U P P U R A T I N G.
MUM: No! S U P E R A T I N G
[extended debate ensues, in which we google to inconclusive results - there are way more results for superate but they're all in Italian, whereas the first result for suppurate is "to form or discharge pus."]
MUM: But the internet's always wrong!
ME: Fine then. *gets the dictionary*
CHAMBERS ENGLISH DICTIONARY: Superate: To overcome, outdo, or top.
Suppurate: to gather pus or matter.
MUM: You're quite right.
ME: HAHAHA, I win. (Actually I was way more gracious.)

Recorded here because the number of times my mother has ever admitted I was right and she was wrong... few and far between! Also because superate is kind of a cool word.

My lovely parents bought me a ukulele for Christmas! The one that boofuls gave me for my birthday is a cute red one which I still love, but it's more of a starter. This one has an output jack and it sounds amazing! It has a really mellow sound.





I hope your holidays have been lovely, too!

A beautifully shot, very fun story about a bitchy Husband and his snarky Mife. Together, they solve mysteries and fight crime.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/wXMW/~3/tC7Sgo1-Grs/hell-of-it.html

These might be the final sketches of 2009. Maybe not, but they’re probably the final ones I’ll post this year. These are character design sketches for the book I want to do set in Hell. I am hoping to finally find a home for this baby in 2010. I’ve wanted to do this story for many years, though its earlier outlines were quite different. The plot has finally gelled, so let’s hope that I finally set it to paper soon.

So this was to be a post about the "Hal Jordan tries to fix Harvey Dent" issue of THE SPECTRE, but that's gonna require a lot more essay writing than is possible right now. I'm gonna actually have to bring in a special guest commentator (i.e. my loyal Henchgirl) to parse out that particularly frustrating story.

So instead, let's tie in the new and old years with this Two-Face Tuesday two-parter on a guy named Paul Sloane... AKA Two-Face.

"A-bwUUUHHH?!?!?!" I hear you gasp?

Actually, Sloane is one of five different Golden Age iterations of Two-Face. superfan1 was kind enough to post the original Paul Sloane story at my request a couple weeks back, along with another non-Harvey-Dent Two-Face. But Sloane is notable in that he's the only other Two-Face to actually return to modern continuity!





In Part 1, I present excerpts DETECTIVE #580 an #581, by Mike W. Barr (who writes one of the corniest Two-Faces ever, full of terrible, smackable puns) with art by Jim Baikie.


( The return of Paul Sloane: the OTHER Two-Face )

The idea of a new Two-Face is an intriguing prospect that should have been utilized while Harvey was "healed" in the years between HUSH and FACE THE FACE. A new Two-Face shouldn't be a carbon copy of the original, but should rather be used to explore themes of duality, fate, and justice in ways that Harvey Dent can't (or shouldn't), while Harvey himself could have gone on to have much more interesting character development as a wild card antihero. Not just for Harvey, but for Sloane as well, as you'll see soon enough.

Next week, Part 2: the great Ed Brubaker re-imagines Paul Sloane in 2003, published in a story that nobody noticed because everyone was reading HUSH instead.

20-25 minute drawin' warm-up

 

Yeah, so I have a twitter account now, and I'm actually pretty okay with that. If you feel the need to follow it, you can do so at http://twitter.com/RaeBeta