Black and Blue

1. my last sponsor dropped me. again. but luckily, i’ve found another corporate sponsor! this time, it’s amazon. ‘search for crap you don’t need at work, it’ll be there when you get home!’.

it’s not really that great a joke. i’m just on an amazon kick. i think it’s a reaction to being part of the generation that still remembers commercials on actual tv, that would urge you to buy some revolutionary broom you don’t need, add another if you act now, and also, allow 6-8 weeks delivery. bitch, my floors are dirty now! to set the balance, i may order a roomba. mainly cause i like the idea of owning a robot. i’ll just assume we have a relationship. that or, i’ll just pit fight them against the cats. the masters of dirt face off against the swifter synthetic.  that’s it, i’m ordering one off amazon.

i recently went around the sun once more, so to celebrate this fact, the little woman immortalized my little known works by having the covers printed onto blue metal sheets. i have yet to display them in any sort of appropriate way, so for now they’re just leaning up against some comics on my book shelf. the other comics might be well known, but are they printed on metal? i think not.

 

something new i’m posting, check out the full sized version at my patreon, this one is public, and i think the rendering came out pretty aight. i wish i had more time to do stuff like this, but between work and putting out a page of a comic a week in my spare time, there’s not alot left over to play around. sadly.

 

 

so, i saw me some alien covenant. erg. ok, add me to the throngs that have, i’m guessing, stated before, the alien franchise has lost it’s way. it’s not a shock, it happens. artists evolve in one direction, their fans in another. george romero started modern zombies, and then completely let concept control get away from him. RIP you dead zombie bastard. but this is something else.

i sometimes wonder if it’s what happened to hellraiser, and the like. you conceptualize something that’s so dependent on the atmosphere and style, that when they throw money at the sequels, but don’t bother assembling the same crack crew, and the producer notes overwhelm the project with half baked shitty ideas. let’s put pinhead in space…. instead of  having the aliens hunt humans in a cramped ship of dripping lube and terror, how about in a grassy knoll?

but what i think really unites all the franchises that start strong, and falter through terrible sequels, is how they tend to double down on their bad new directions. i imagine a room of producers saying ‘yeah, sure, 1 movie, they didn’t ‘get it’, but the next one, people will see it our way. but, just in case, lets cut the budget…….’. it’s a false economy where because you can’t suffer a loss, you don’t try to hard.

Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013)

i really didn’t think i’d like this movie for a few reasons. i don’t’ usually care for documentaries, and i don’t care much to listen to people talk about the creative process. i should, but i don’t.

but there’s a few reasons i’m mentioning this movie now, and it does tie into what i’ve been talking about in this post.  jodorowsky is a director, who badly wanted to adapt Dune to the silver screen. as we all know, david lynch got the job, and when you see what jodorowsky had planned, in a way, i think it’s a shame he didn’t get the shot. not only cause he’s insane, and his ideas were truly over the top, but his joyful passion for the creative process should have made Dune either a massive success, or a dismal failure. or at the very least, some thing to drop acid to and try to sync pink floyd albums up to.

but moreso than what could have been, the movie is interesting for the people he had assembled, who went on to work without him. a crack team of artists, actors, writers and film people, who could have put out something truly unique. maybe it’s better that way. maybe the result wouldn’t have been as good as the potential. sometimes i wonder about jodorowsky’s dune, and i think of gaiman’s concept of morpeus’s library of books never written. if i were there, i’d head right to the vhs section and see if they had that movie on file.