Rumors of my demise have been slightly exaggerated.
I started doodling on this page Tuesday and didn't finish filling it out until last night/early this morning. I haven't done an anime-style profile in a long time, I think it came out decently. The chibi-me face lies, though. I was really adding "...IN YOUR MOUTH!", out loud, and wasn't the only one. Haha, pine cones.
Wednesday night I splurged at the library. I brought home an armload of books on everything from cartooning to computers to making fun of the government.
The first to fall before my deadly gaze was a thin Will Eisner adaptation of Don Quixote, entitled The Last Night. It reads like a 3rd grader's introduction to the story and features an in-story appearance by Cervantes hisself. I found it in my library's newly minted Graphic Novel section, which consists of two blocks of shelf space right next to the CDs and is very sparsely populated at the moment. They do, however, have more of Jeff Smith's Bone books in that section (while the first three and Vol. 18 are still in the Fiction section, for some reason). Personally, I don't think this Quixote venture displayed anything that made Eisner one of the greats. The artwork is so-so, the page layouts are mediocre (and sometimes confusing), the dialog is extremely bland and blunt. Though the back cover said that it was an adaptation of the fairy tale "for all ages," I surmise that this is only the case for those who are recently literate and haven't seen any Eisner before. Admitted, that's a very large target audience.
I've skimmed a bit into the other books, too. The Superhero Book edited by Gina Misiroglu and David A. Roach aims to be a one-volume encyclopedia about superheros in comics, film, etc. up to the first of the recent Spiderman/Hulk/X-Men movies. At nearly two inches thick, it is sadly going to be incomplete and I suspect that most of it I will already be familiar with (seeing as how I've read extensively on the history of comics and especially comic books already).
Speaking of Encyclopedias, the Encyclopedia of Cartooning Techniques by Steve Whitaker covers everything from materials (paints, inks, pencils, etc.) to page layouts, character design, and rendering things expressively in proper comic fashion. It should be refreshing to take a break from the purely super-heroic style of How-To art books I've been immersed in for years and get a different perspective.
Right now I'm dual-wielding America the Book by Jon Stewart and the Daily Show writers, and Linux for Non-Geeks by Rickford Grant.
As you may have heard, America the Book is written to appear like a high school textbook on American government. It just has the Daily Show's unique presentation. I mean, reading this you can literally hear Jon Stewart's voice, timing, and inflections. Were You Aware That John Hancock was 23 feet tall, and that's why he signed his name so boldly on the Declaration of Independence? It wasn't so that King George could read it without his specs, it was simply his normal fashion. Many similar myths are debunked within, plus naked pictures of the 2003 US Supreme Court!
Linux for Non-Geeks is a project-based introduction to Fedora, in fact it includes 2 Fedora Core (the first version so named, so it's about 6.9 versions behind) disks for a full installation. I haven't installed them yet, don't know if I will. Not only is the OS a bit dated, but I was leaning more towards Ubuntu Linux and I don't know if installing an old Fedora on my only working computer is worth the effort of making a second partition on my HD and whatnot. In any case, the book's very well-written (not at all dry) and is giving me some idea of what I'm in for should I decide to play around with a recent Linux distro. Looks like the hardest thing will be finding drivers for hardware. Another might be wading through the near-obsessive "OMG FREE SOFTWARE NOW!" culture that seems to permeate the non-windows/mac community, where the focus looks more about making sure things are copylefted than on making sure they work well. You start to get the feeling that things like Linux are largely a vehicle for revolutionizing the handling of Intellectual Property more than anything else. Personally I don't care if I'm allowed to roll and distribute my own package of such-and-such CamelCased software, I'm just the average end user and I want things to run.
I read the Three Panel Soul comics, but I didn't know if the events depicted recently were true until just this morning. Yep, that's what happened. You can read about it in Jin Wicked's LJ. I'm reminded of the shit that got me kicked out of high school two months before graduation. Also the thing I got into a shouting match with Sammie over, earlier in the week. See why I can't stand this kind of thing?
Speaking of comics, today is Free Comic Book Day. Find a participating shop near you.
Wednesday night I splurged at the library. I brought home an armload of books on everything from cartooning to computers to making fun of the government.
The first to fall before my deadly gaze was a thin Will Eisner adaptation of Don Quixote, entitled The Last Night. It reads like a 3rd grader's introduction to the story and features an in-story appearance by Cervantes hisself. I found it in my library's newly minted Graphic Novel section, which consists of two blocks of shelf space right next to the CDs and is very sparsely populated at the moment. They do, however, have more of Jeff Smith's Bone books in that section (while the first three and Vol. 18 are still in the Fiction section, for some reason). Personally, I don't think this Quixote venture displayed anything that made Eisner one of the greats. The artwork is so-so, the page layouts are mediocre (and sometimes confusing), the dialog is extremely bland and blunt. Though the back cover said that it was an adaptation of the fairy tale "for all ages," I surmise that this is only the case for those who are recently literate and haven't seen any Eisner before. Admitted, that's a very large target audience.
I've skimmed a bit into the other books, too. The Superhero Book edited by Gina Misiroglu and David A. Roach aims to be a one-volume encyclopedia about superheros in comics, film, etc. up to the first of the recent Spiderman/Hulk/X-Men movies. At nearly two inches thick, it is sadly going to be incomplete and I suspect that most of it I will already be familiar with (seeing as how I've read extensively on the history of comics and especially comic books already).
Speaking of Encyclopedias, the Encyclopedia of Cartooning Techniques by Steve Whitaker covers everything from materials (paints, inks, pencils, etc.) to page layouts, character design, and rendering things expressively in proper comic fashion. It should be refreshing to take a break from the purely super-heroic style of How-To art books I've been immersed in for years and get a different perspective.
Right now I'm dual-wielding America the Book by Jon Stewart and the Daily Show writers, and Linux for Non-Geeks by Rickford Grant.
As you may have heard, America the Book is written to appear like a high school textbook on American government. It just has the Daily Show's unique presentation. I mean, reading this you can literally hear Jon Stewart's voice, timing, and inflections. Were You Aware That John Hancock was 23 feet tall, and that's why he signed his name so boldly on the Declaration of Independence? It wasn't so that King George could read it without his specs, it was simply his normal fashion. Many similar myths are debunked within, plus naked pictures of the 2003 US Supreme Court!
Linux for Non-Geeks is a project-based introduction to Fedora, in fact it includes 2 Fedora Core (the first version so named, so it's about 6.9 versions behind) disks for a full installation. I haven't installed them yet, don't know if I will. Not only is the OS a bit dated, but I was leaning more towards Ubuntu Linux and I don't know if installing an old Fedora on my only working computer is worth the effort of making a second partition on my HD and whatnot. In any case, the book's very well-written (not at all dry) and is giving me some idea of what I'm in for should I decide to play around with a recent Linux distro. Looks like the hardest thing will be finding drivers for hardware. Another might be wading through the near-obsessive "OMG FREE SOFTWARE NOW!" culture that seems to permeate the non-windows/mac community, where the focus looks more about making sure things are copylefted than on making sure they work well. You start to get the feeling that things like Linux are largely a vehicle for revolutionizing the handling of Intellectual Property more than anything else. Personally I don't care if I'm allowed to roll and distribute my own package of such-and-such CamelCased software, I'm just the average end user and I want things to run.
I read the Three Panel Soul comics, but I didn't know if the events depicted recently were true until just this morning. Yep, that's what happened. You can read about it in Jin Wicked's LJ. I'm reminded of the shit that got me kicked out of high school two months before graduation. Also the thing I got into a shouting match with Sammie over, earlier in the week. See why I can't stand this kind of thing?
Speaking of comics, today is Free Comic Book Day. Find a participating shop near you.