A wild John Higgins appeared! Go, Steve Bissette! Use Ong Bak 3! It’s super effective!!!
Originally published at RKdia Comics. You can comment here or there.
Tuesday night was a busy and entertaining night at the Center for Cartoon Studies. Great cartoonist sightings calore! Jen Vaughn had a run in with Aaron Renier of The Unsinkable Walker Bean at the Schulz Library with his best friend, CCS Prof Alec Longstreth. Aaron is this weeks visiting artist, who will present and take Q&A for 2 hours at CCS this coming Thursday.
The big surprise today was a visit from Watchmen colorist John Higgins! After coming across The Pond to spend time at New York City Comic Con, he swung up to VT to visit with his old friends CCS Prof SRBissette and Rick Veitch. He spent a little over an our hanging out and talking about his career in comics, his approach to coloring and how that has changed since the advent of digital coloring techniques with Photoshop. He shared a very optimistic outlook on the future of comics and his desire to perhaps return to painting full comic stories as he had in the past. Here are some more pictures from the talk:
In front of CCS Alumni Al Wesolowski is sitting Steve, who’s adding to John’s thought from off-camera.
Rick and Steve look on as John talks to CCS Co Founder Michelle Ollie.
John was nice enough to stick around afterwords and sign books and chat, including CCS Senior Josh Kramer’s copy.
Steve himself let his fan boy side out and had John sign his first edition copy of the collected Watchmen.
Following Johns talk, Steve saw his friends off and the we hustled over to the Gates-Briggs classroom for a special Tuesday night kung-fu movie night!
The third Ong Bak movie once again starred Tony Jaa; his first feature film since completing his training as a Monk and returning to his every day life. It showed. The action was intense and the stunts were spectacular, Tony once again proves he is the new Bruce Lee of martial arts action films. Every fight was spectacularly choreographed and showcased a wide range of styles with both weapon and fist!
However, the majority of the film was focused on Tony’s character, Tien, overcoming a severe defeat in the previous film, and this is where Jaa employed great use of the spiritual aspects of his life over the last several years. Supremely dramatized of course for movie goers, the middle of the movie was filled with meditations, training’s, dances, and even some plot! *Gasp!* Worry not, it’s all worth it to see the final battle scene as Tien takes on an army with animal-like ferocity and then his rival with calm confidence and precision.
Over all Ong Bak 3 was a nice way to close up the trilogy (the last two STILL have nothing to do with the first one…unless you consider that Tien is the reincarnated hero of the first movie, and struggles with the bad karma he was born with.) and definitely leaves little room for further adventures in that specific universe. I look forward to Jaa’s next exciting, action-packed flick!
-RD