my apologies

Haven't been posting a lot lately. It's not that nothing has been postworthy, but me, I been busy. There's a new Zero Fighter page up that will explain how I managed to get two pages finished week before last. This past week I only managed one page and an embarrassing amount of time was wasted trying to work out how car headlights would be pointing at the road surface. Still, the past Sunday update has basically all I want out of drawing comics - lots of thick brush lines and plenty of stars made by blowing white paint at the paper. As long as you give me those two things, I am a happy camper.

I am working on a flyer to advertise the Ozone Commandos screening at Anime North next month, and after two or three days of beating myself about the head trying to come up with a movie posterish image that (a) uses actual images from the film and (b) has a cheesy B-picture vibe to it, I might have something that I actually like. It involves the Death Blimp, and even sketching the thing out reminds me of how tired I got of drawing that thing and how glad I was to blow it up and never draw it again.

Thanks to Rifftrax we've managed to watch a lot of middlin'-to-terrible films that otherwise we wouldn't ever see. DAREDEVIL was a curious failure. ERAGON, while lousy, was nowhere near as bad as that DUNGEONS & DRAGONS movie. The remake of THE WICKER MAN was absolutely freakish in its badness. The TWILIGHT movies are actually entertaining with Rifftrax commentary. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY was awful, if I'd paid to see that in a theater I'd be really mad. The Rifftrax version of PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE is entertaining, their take on MISSILE TO THE MOON has Fred Willard in it, and their REEFER MADNESS is a hoot. GLITTER is a really curious film, the kind of slow-pitch star vehicle they don't make often any more (for good reason).

Last Friday my impulse purchase of the week was a couple of LPs, VELVET UNDERGROUND LIVE AT MAX'S KANSAS CITY recorded live via Brigid Polk's portable cassette deck. I'd heard cuts from this record years ago on a college radio Velvets special, but it hadn't leapt into my hand until now. Tough, no-nonsense versions of Velvets hits and a guy in the audience asking for Tuinals. The other LP was Jefferson Airplane's VOLUNTEERS, a record introduced to me tangentially by cartoonist Terry Laban's CUD. Everybody's heard their two big hits and I'd even listened to SURREALISTIC PILLOW, an LP that contains their two big hits and what seemed to me at the time to be a lot of junk. In VOLUNTEERS you can hear the origin of a lot of music that I really despise, but the Airplane was ahead of the curve and is firing on all cylinders with tracks like "Volunteers" and "We Can Be Together", and the rest of the album isn't bad either. I can excuse the noodly digressions, it was 1969 and if I was cutting records at the time I'd be noodling away stoned out of my mind too. I'll be honest here, it's only recently that I've realized I only have two criteria for good music - if it works in the background while I'm drawing comics, and if it sounds good while I'm driving. Do these two LPs make the cut? Absolutely.

We rented GODZILLA VS HEDORAH (English title VERSUS THE SMOG MONSTER) and it's definitely a creature of its time. Lots of psychedelic go-go dancing, animated sequences, really disturbing Cronenberg style ooze. Fun!

In other news, the weather is nice, the cat is annoying, and there's a whole bunch of stuff happening in May that I am totally not ready for.