Oops in case anyone missed it the strip was down briefly due to me installing the latest version of Comicpress and not realizing that I had to reset a few things in the configuration that are usually too obvious to notice. Most notably having to get the software to distinguish between the Comicstrip part of the page and the Blog part of the page.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Well something resembling winter is upon us in Seattle. They say we’re going to have a real one this year, but every time I assume that we will have a real winter in Seattle it ends up lasting for only a couple of weeks.
Anyway, it certainly is cold right now. Cold enough that I thought it better to walk than bike this morning. (Though I’ll probably reassess that on once I figure out where I put my ear protectors. ) At the moment it’s still above freezing though I don’t think that will last much longer. They say it’s going to snow tomorrow (they being the weather service on Igoogle) and as I’m writing this, flurries have just started.
This has me nervous. Even after living out here for over fifteen years my biggest cause of culture shock is how Seattle handles snow. The last snowstorm crippled the city for over a week (it only snowed a little more than a day.) Even a dusting of snow, like those flurries of powder snow that is just enough to turn the asphalt grey, slows the traffic down to a ridiculous crawl. As a transplanted Yankee, I take pride in my ability to drive in snow… but it doesn’t do a wit of good if nobody else does.
To spell this out, let me describe a work related accident I had a couple of years ago… I was working for a mail delivery service. As I was doing my daily rounds the snow started coming down. Now I new my route was going to take me to the relatively steep First Hill in about an hour and this was when I made my northeastern mistake. The mistake, or more accurately assumption was as follows: “Oh, Boren is a busy street, it won’t stick.”
If Boren had been in Providence Rhode Island, I would have been correct. However, as Boren is in Seattle, this normally busy street had slowed down enough for it to cool and the snow to stick. By the time I had reached it the hill I was most concerned about, the one right before Pike Street, there was about a quarter inch of snow on the road and I found myself drifting into the sidewalk… which would have been fine if the pick up in front of me hadn’t done the exact same thing. For the next hour as we waited for our bosses and the police to show up, we watched the same accident repeat itself over and over again. Finally as an act of good samaritanism and a way to fight boredom we stood at the top of the hill, flagging people down so they wouldn’t make the same mistake.
My point is Seattleites just can’t handle the stuff. We don’t get it enough to even know how to handle the basics, like having the right amount of snow on the road, or even putting down sand. If we have more than one storm and a couple of flurries, it is going to be a very interesting couple of months.
This week’s sketch is from the Rhode Island School Of Design’s Museum in Providence Rhode Island. The Salonn d’Or Hornburg by Willliam Powell Frith. You can see what it’s actually supposed to look like here.
Much as I love the genre, I have two big problems with superheroes.
The first is that as a genre it is fragile, like a soap bubble. If
you look at it too closely; say by asking questions regarding the
existence of powers, the ethics of vigilantism, how the existence of
even one such individual would impact civilization as we know it, how
ordinary law enforcement can be so useless; the bubble pops. The only
way to truly make it work is to embrace it as the fantasy it is, and
even then it is a strain.
The other problem is, I believe, the superhero genre is suffering the
same fate that the western suffered in the sixties. It’s grown stale,
we keep trying to shake it up in different ways – be it revisionism,
deconstructionism, postmodernism – in the end it’s no use… even the
jokes, when we do a parody, are cliché. This brings us to
DreamWorks’s latest animated feature: Megamind.
It must be hard to do a super hero movie these days. I’m not talking
about the obvious problems with special effects convincing us such a
world exists, modern technology has that covered. It is because
Hollywood is trying to sell it to as large an audience as possible;
most of whom are not familiar with it, while the core audience, comic
book fans, have heard it all before. Unfortunately, this is the
weight that Megamind must bear.
To a certain extent, the main plot is actually about the problems I
have mentioned. The main characters seem to know they’re in a rut to
the point where they just aren’t trying. The damsel in distress has
been captured so many times that she isn’t impressed by any of the
villain’s threats, and when the paradigm changes nobody knows what to
do. So, all in all, the plot of MegaMind is all about what happens
next. The main character, wonderfully voiced by Will Ferrell, doesn’t
have a clue. After his first victory he goes on a childish binge of
relatively petty mayhem and larceny, but at the end of the day he’s
sitting alone with his loot and missing the old days.
What happens over the rest of the movie is Megamind trying to fill
that void, which leads to him making the mistake of trying to recreate
the old days, all of which snowballs and brings us to the exciting
climax. For the most part I enjoyed Megamind (other than 3-D induced
eyestrain). It has good design and model work (my only real problem
was all of the eyes were too reflective, as if they were made of
glass).
The animation is up to DreamWorks usual standards. The action scenes
were well choreographed and followed DreamWorks’ current formula, as
seen in its recent comedies, of being done completely straight. All
in all I’ll put this one at the same level as “Monsters vs. Aliens”; a
solid journeyman piece, and yet another step in DreamWorks’ recovery
from its earlier model of star-driven pop-reference-dependent formula
pieces.
One of my favorite exercises and pastimes is to take my sketch book to an art museum. This has several uses. The most obvious being the exercise of drawing, drawing and drawing some more. The second is that it forces you to hyper focus on the image you’re working on and in the process really looking at it and in the process taking in everything about it.
Today’s sketches are, of a piece that I have mentioned before, from the Seattle Art Museum, a wooden carving of St. Luke the Evangelist from Flanders sometime in the fifteenth century. This is a difficult piece to work on. It is clearly intended to be looked up at from a distance and because of that it is done in an extremely forced perspective and because of this I’m really yet to get it right. I give it a try about twice a year and have almost a love hate relationship with it. Also it amuses me that Luke’s symbol, the Bull, looks almost like some sort of bizarre house pet hiding beneath the writing desk.
The two sketches here include my my most recent attempt along with one of my more successful ones.
