Watching Stuff

Here are a bunch of things I've been watching lately. In no particular order. For no particular reason.

"The New Avengers" - This is the TV show from the 1970's that was the sequel to the TV show "The Avengers" from the 1960's. Though I am quite familiar with the original I've never seen any episodes of the 1970's version. They were never the cult classic the original was and therefore not shown on TV as much. I remember seeing commercials for the show when I was kid but I never saw the show then and I don't think it's popped up on TV since then.

I've watched about ten episodes so far and I have to say that I like them. Patrick Macnee reprises his role as John Steed and we get Gareth Hunt as Mike Gambit and, Joanna Lumley as Purdey. There are three Avengers instead of two now. I think the two new Avengers do an excellent job. Plenty of action and double dealing in the world of British intelligence. This show is much better than I expected it to be.

"The Hollow Men" - An Australian show that I stumbled on to is a comedy about working in the office of the Prime Minister of Australia. "The Central Policy Unit". There are two seasons of six episodes apiece all about the absurdities and crazy backwards logic of politics.

A favorite episode of mine was when there was going to be a budget surplus and that triggered a "crisis". You see a surplus was a sign that the PM had no big plan for the country and was floundering. They had to create a huge project to spend some money so that the PM would have "Momentum". Whether the project even got done or the money actually spent was irrelevant. Definitely my favorite new comedy.

"Mad Men" Season 2 - This is the show that is about an ad agency in NYC during the early 1960's. The ad game was a man's world and woman's lib not even a notion. Men ran the place and women were secretaries and wives. But things were changing. Slowly.

I liked the first season of "Mad Men" better than the second. Only because the first season dealt more with the drama of the ad business. In the second season they got more into the drama of the characters personal lives. I wasn't as interested in that. A solid show though. It does it's best to capture a time period.

"The Mentalist" - This is a new show this year and it's a cop drama. The lead character is a former fake "ESP guy" who now consults for the California state cops. His schtick is that he's really good at noticing things and reading people. It's also kind of an anti- "The Medium" and "Ghost Whisperer" show.

There is nothing really special about "The Mentalist" but it's okay. The characters are likable and do their jobs well as we watch them track down criminals. It's a good show to accompany me on the stationary bike.

"Burn Notice" - I've watched a bunch of episodes of season one from this show. It's about a spy who worked for the US government until he got a "Burn Notice" put out on him. This means all his spy privileges have been revoked and he can't be trusted. All his old government contacts have to turn their backs on him. Bank accounts frozen and all that.

So now he is stuck in Miami trying to earn a living and helping people out with his spy skills. All while trying to figure out who put the burn notice on him so he can get it removed. It's a pretty cool show with lots of violence and style. You get to see all sorts of neat spy tricks that we all wish we could pull off. As if we have a reason to. I'm going to have to watch some more of this show. It's in season two now.

"Big Apple" - Here's a show from 2001 that I didn't even know existed. Probably because there were only eight episodes and who can hear about every new TV show? It stars Ed O'Neil as the quintessential New York City cop. He doesn't trust anyone. Not the criminals and not the feds he has to work with.

"Big Apple" is basically an eight part miniseries about local cops and federal cops working together to bring in a big case. Another cop show that walked on familiar ground but did it pretty well. Who are the good guys? Who are they bad guys? Can all the good guys work together well? You know the drill. But still it was okay if you like that sort of thing.

So there has been some of my TV watching of recent days. Most of the time I'm doing something as I watch TV. A lot of the time I'm working so I'm just listening to the TV. That's why I like dialogue based shows. So your milage may vary.

Comics I Bought: December 26, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got three new comics, plus a hard cover collection and a digest:

Usagi Yojimbo - 116

Savage Dragon - 143

Mr. X: Condemned - 1

Marvel Minis - Rock, Paper, Scissors

Herbie Archives Volume 2

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"The Incredible Hercules: Secret Invasion by Greg Pak, Fred Van Lente and Rafa Sandoval

I have never been a fan of the company wide crossover event. I was just born too early. The first such event I can think of, "Secret Wars" from Marvel Comics, came out in 1984. I was a senior in high school then. I bought a few issues of the series but it didn't grab me. I though it was dumb then and I think it is dumb now. I know some people who were in junior high in 1984 and they loved "Secret Wars" so maybe if I were thirteen when I read it I would have liked it better.

"Secret Invasion" is Marvel's latest company wide crossover event. I haven't read an issue of it but I liked the first "Incredible Hercules" volume so I decided to pick up this volume despite it being part of a company wide crossover of which I have read no other part. Turns out that the story is fairly well self contained.

The story of "Secret Invasion" has to do with Skrulls. They are a shape shifting alien race that has secretly invaded the Earth. They have disguised themselves as humans and now people on Earth have found out about them and are fighting back. This volume involves Hercules and a hand full of other Earth gods going off into space to fight the gods of the Skrulls.

Like the first Hercules volume this one was a fun read. We get glimpses of Herc's past as he compares this quest he's on with other ones. We get a bickering crew of gods with competing agendas who all have to work together. We get a snappy script that keeps things fun and interesting. All in all a nice comic.

But the comic does have a weakness. It's the fight scenes. They are just not very well staged. Confusing even. And the coloring doesn't help. It seems like Hercules is always fighting on a monochromatic background with a bunch of guys dressed in brown. It's tough to separate the foreground, middle ground, and background which makes the fights hard to follow.

It's a good thing this book isn't all about the fights. It's about being a super strong god and having some fun even in a dangerous universe. Now if only it didn't end with a bit of a cliff hanger that I didn't understand at all.

Top Ten List of Nothing

It's getting near the end of the year which means it's time for everybody's top ten list about everything under the sun. I've never been a fan of top ten lists. I find it tells you more about the person writing the list than what the list is allegedly about.

I'm the type of person who is always looking for something new. A book, a comic, a movie, a TV show, a magazine, or whatever. Something I might have missed that I may enjoy. And I miss a lot of things. I'm not plugged in anywhere and don't have my finger on the pulse of anything. But I look around. One place I know not to look is an end of the year top ten list.

First of all people rarely put a lot of thought into an end of the year top ten list. It's not like they keep a running tally all year with the list in mind. I'm sure some people do but most just jot down what comes to mind as their deadline looms. This means most of the list is from the last few months of the year. A great thing from last February is harder to recall than a great thing from last week. So most top ten lists are inaccurate.

There is also a lot of group think going on in end of the year lists. Especially movie lists. I would guess that any random end of the year movie list has at least five movies in common with any other random list. And if I were to look at any random movie list there would be two movies on it that baffle me how they got there. People are willing to believe in the "greatness" of a movie quicker than any other medium. As long as others believe it too.

And top ten music lists? I have heard more crap on top ten music lists then I can believe. Music is so fragmented and genre driven that one person's top ten of the year is another's worst of the year. Or more probably the second person doesn't even know the first person's music exists. I've never found a song I've liked from a person's top ten list. We associate music with personal events so sometimes a personal event can make a song "Top Ten" for someone and the rest of us don't care.

The only thing more useless than a top ten list is a top one hundred of all time list. Do you know what a top one hundred of all time list really tells you? The age of the person or people making the list. You can tell their age by the time period the things on the list came out.

For example I once saw a top one hundred comic book covers of all time list. If the list were somehow made by an objective standard then the comic book covers should have been spread out evenly over time. Good comic book covers were being made throughout every decade but the list ended up something like this:1940's- five covers,1950's- ten covers, 1960's- ten covers, 1970's- fifteen covers, 1980's- thirty covers, 1990's- twenty covers, 2000's- ten covers.

The decade with the most "great" covers was the decade where the people making the list were probably ages 12-22 or so. That's when any comic book cover would have the most impact on a person. There is no way by any objective standard the 1980's had six times the amount of great covers than did the 1940's. It's just that the people making the list weren't around for the 1940's and so couldn't see all the great covers.

All time music lists are just as telling. That is they tell you the age of the person making the list. Once some friends of mine participated in an e-mail conversation about the best albums of all time. Everybody wrote up their top ten albums of all time. You know what? Everyone had albums on their list that came out during their high school and college years. That's when music has the biggest impact on the average person.

Someone born ten years later would have a completely different list. And it would in no way be based on the quality of the music it would just be based on when the music was released. Just like everyone else's list.

So there you go. That's why I'm not bothering with looking at top ten of the year lists. There are probably some out there that are useful. But someone would have to done an exhaustive examination of a lot of books, movies, or music. I'm sure someone has. But most top ten lists are just the top ten things that the author happened to stumble onto that he can still remember as his deadline approaches. That's far less useful.

Comics I Bought: December 18, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got seven new comics plus a hard cover collection. It's been a while since I bought that many new comics in a single week:

Fear Agent - 25

Ex Machina - 40

Buffy Season Eight - 20

Stormwatch Post Human Division - 17

Rex Mundi Vol 2 - 15

The Walking Dead - 56

The X-Files -2

The Lone Ranger - Volume 2 Hardcover

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

Green Lantern "Will World" by J.M. Dematteis and Seth Fisher

I picked this book up to check out the art of Seth Fisher. I had never heard of Fisher before learning of his untimely death at the age of 33 back in February 2006. A sad way to learn about an artist but I liked the examples of his work that were published along with the tributes to him.

Fisher's art is far out and fantastic with a thin lined Moebius/Geof Darrow look to it. His imagination was grand and apparent in this book. He drew all sorts of wacky and wild stuff to fill "Will World" to the brim with different life forms.

Though his storytelling is pretty solid he used more of an all over drawing technique to fill this book up with life. What I mean by that is that he doesn't visually cut the story down to its essential parts but fills up the page with a variety of drawings that don't necessarily have to do with the story. That can distract from the story but gives the reader a lot to look at. It's a matter of taste weather you like that sort of storytelling or not. I'm ambivalent towards it.

Though the art was very good I have a problem with the story itself. First of all its main plot device is that Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) has amnesia. Yes, that most hackneyed driver of bad plots, amnesia. There have probably been more cases of amnesia in fiction than in real life. And it's rarely pulled off well.

Hal Jordan wakes up in the dream like "Will World" not knowing who he is, where he is, or what he is supposed to do. We go on the journey with him through this lavishly illustrated world until he discovers his identity and ultimately triumphs. Except we already know who he is. Half of the questions he asks himself are obvious to anyone who has ever read a Green lantern comic.

The problem with the plot (the script was fine) is inherent in well known company owned character comics. Dematteis was trying to do something different, something other than a typical super hero story, but economic necessity means that all parties involved need a well known character as the lead.

Story-wise there was almost no reason for this book to star Green Lantern. The ending involving the Green Lantern's real world seemed tacked on and was the least interesting part of the book. A whole new character could have been created for this story and it might have been better. The story would have been freed from the shackles of what the reader already knew. But I doubt the book would ever have been green lighted without the Green Lantern.

This book is an example of the double edged sword of trying to do something new and different with an established character. It didn't satisfy me, a fan of the new and different, and it probably didn't satisfy Green Lantern fans. But the art is pretty to look at.

Cintiq Critique

I've had my Wacom Cintiq 12WX for about two months now so it's time to write down some of my thoughts about it. For those of you who don't know the Cintiq is a graphics tablet that is an LCD screen. You interact with a computer and draw right on the flat screen of the Cintiq.

I bought the twelve inch model (measured diagonally like every TV and computer screen) rather than the twenty two inch one because I wanted to use it on my drawing table as I would a piece of paper. The twenty two inch one was too big for that task. That and too expensive.

The first problem I had with it was that the Cintiq was not made to work very well with my old school CRT computer monitor. The aspect ratio of my old monitor is 4:3 and the Cintiq is somewhere around a letter boxed movie. Since both screens have to have the same resolution one or the other is going to be distorted.

Like I said I wanted to use the Cintiq on my drawing table so I wouldn't be looking at my monitor much anyway so I thought this wouldn't be much of a problem. I'd set my preferences for the Cintiq resolution when I was going to use it and change them back after.

Surprisingly this turned out to be more of a pain in the ass then I thought it would be. My monitor can be set to a zillion different resolutions and Mhz and I never remember which one I use. Even writing it down was a pain since every time I want to use the Cintiq I have to find where I wrote the info down. That is just a small irritating thing but it usually made me think, "Eh, it's faster to do this without the Cintiq".

As a matter of fact for the last couple of days I've been using the Cintiq without bothering to change the resolution. It was easier to deal with the distorted image. None of this is really the tablet's fault and I hope to get a new monitor sometime soon and eliminate this problem but it is a problem.

I use the Cintiq for a few specific tasks. When I'm using photo reference for something it makes it real easy to draw on top of a photo. That is where I knew it would excel and it does. I can still draw on paper and scan in a lot faster and easier than using a tablet but for that specific type of drawing (photo reference) I prefer the Cintiq over drawing on paper or with my regular graphics tablet.

The other type of work I've been using it for is my vector based artwork in Adobe Illustrator. I'll draw on paper, scan it in, and then color the drawing with the computer. I draw shapes of color on top of all that. That is where I'm using the Cintiq. To draw those shapes of color.

Because I'm new to the Cintiq I'm a little slow at the drawing vector shapes part. I'm not using it in conjunction with my keyboard or CRT so all the key command shortcuts I'm used to aren't there. I've been setting up the function buttons on the Cintiq to substitute for the key commands but it takes practice to use them effortlessly. There is a learning curve.

My fingers automatically hit the key commands when I'm using my keyboard and regular graphics tablet. I've been doing it so long I don't have to think about it. I'm nowhere near that level on the Cintiq and it's a little frustrating sometimes. Learning a new working method is usually not easy.

I do like the three little bumps they put on some of the function keys to differentiate them by feel. I call them the "Pain Lands" (an old Magic the Gathering term that popped into my head) and know that the buttons I have to think about, undo and save, are under the bumps. Learning is all about association.

One funny thing about when I first got the Cintiq is that I couldn't find the on switch. It's on the upper left narrow edge side of the tablet. It's recessed and marked in a subtle fashion. I really couldn't find it. I had to look up in the instruction booklet where it was. I can't remember ever having to do that before.

Overall I'm happy with the Cintiq even though I haven't used it enough to be efficient with it. Hopefully when I get a new monitor it will be more effortless to use. I expected it to a complement to my existing computer tools, including my regular graphics tablet, not replace them and that is what it's done. It does a few things well and that's what I'll do on it but the Cintiq not the be all end all of drawing on the computer. At least not for me.

Comics I Bought: December 11, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got two new comics plus three hard cover collections (they had a buy two get one free sale):

Echo - 8

Savage Dragon - 142

The Runaways Volumes 1-3

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"Thunderbolts Volume 2: Caged Angels" by Warren Ellis and Mike Deodato Jr.

It is amazing to me that this is a Marvel comic. Y'see all throughout the late Nineties there were a lot of comics from Image and Wildstorm that subverted the classic Marvel/DC super hero paradigm. Instead of super heroes being virtuous and true but flawed human beings who could make mistakes a lot of Image/Wildstorm heroes were saddled with a single flaw. They were assholes not to be trusted. A lot of Image/Wildstorm super heroes were also thinly disguised versions of Marvel and DC heroes. Hence the subversion. They would take Marvel and DC heroes and make them assholes. This wasn't the sole characterization of Image/Wildstorm super heroes but it showed up a lot.

Government and police organizations were also not to be trusted in the Image/Wildstorm universe. Everybody was corrupt and hiding something. I think there was a higher percentage of assholes in whatever Image/Wildstorm's version of S.H.I.E.L.D. was then even on one of their big superhero teams. And black ops groups were everywhere. I'm not saying any of this was bad. But it was different from and subversive of the Marvel and DC universes.

Warren Ellis was one of the founding writers of that dark "don't trust anyone with power or authority they're all jerks" type of writing at Image/Wildstorm. And here he is, all these years later, writing for Marvel as he and other writers have made the Marvel Universe turn into a dark, foreboding place where no one can be trusted. Truly a strange turn of events.

All that being said I liked Thunderbolts Volume 2. The Thunderbolts are a team of ex-villains who are lead by ex-villain Norman Osborn (the Green Goblin) who are in the employ of the US government tasked with the job of apprehending unregistered super people. Yes, this story takes place after "Civil War" (which I never read) in which it was established that all super heroes must register with the US government or be arrested.

The Thunderbolts barley stay together as a team. They are all assholes after all and to get them to do the right thing is a chore. This story takes place in their headquarters. A top secret base filled with lots of technical equipment, security grunts with guns, and holding cells for the supers that they catch. But something has gone wrong and things inside the fort go to hell. That's about all you need to know about the plot.

I enjoyed Mike Deodato Jr.'s art. I never liked his stuff much in the 90's when he was drawing in the style of the day. Endless little noodling lines everywhere. He uses a lot more blacks, shapes, and photo reference these days and overall I think it looks a lot nicer. He's a better story teller now too. The art was a positive.

So if you want a pretty good tale about asshole super heroes give this book a read. It's just weird to me we're at a point where the inmates run the asylum.

Sense My Tension

I've never been a fan of the "To Do" list. Some people love to make lists and check things off after they're done but I've never been that person. Even as a kid in school I usually didn't write down homework assignments. Unless there was something really specific I had to remember. Otherwise I just kept what homework I had to do in my head. Oddly I found that if I wrote my assignments down I would not only forget them but also forget that I wrote them down. It was easier for me to just remember.

I've noticed that a lot of people who like "To Do" lists are also procrastinators. They use the list to motivate themselves to get things done. I am the opposite of a procrastinator. If I have stuff to do I want it done as quickly as possible and out of the way so I can be free to do what I want. The more time I wait before getting things done on a "To Do" list the more time I have to think about doing those things. Thinking about getting things done takes way more effort than actually doing them. At least to me.

One thing I don't understand about procrastinators is what the heck they are doing with all that procrastination time? They usually claim to be wasting it (at least in internet status updates) but wasting it doing what? What people consider wasted time varies. I occasionally like to play video games in my leisure time but I don't consider that wasted time. But maybe if I played video games in the time that was alloted for work it would be. I'm not sure. I like to get things done so I can spend as much of my time my way as possible. If I'm spending time doing what i want it's never wasted. Wasted time is spent doing what I don't want to do.

Though I'm not a fan of the "To Do" list I have recently gotten back to my "What I did today" lists. Half of my work is freelance stuff that I do for the dough and half is my own art that I do for myself. I have no career in the usual sense of the word so I don't have the satisfaction of moving up the ladder at work which usually give people there sense of accomplishment. I have to find my accomplishments where I can.

In that spirit I used to write down in a calender what I did that day. I've always been fairly prolific when it comes to making my own art but most of it ends up being filed away. It's not all where I can see it so it won't necessarily leave me with a sense of accomplishment. That's why I started writing what I did for the day down. At least I could flip through the pages of my calender and, at a glance, see that I did things. I had some small number of accomplishments.

I fell out of this habit a couple of years ago. I'm not sure why. I think I just got tired of calenders. I had a bunch of them stacked up on a shelf and they looked too much like years going by. That made me a little wistful.

Recently I started using the iCal calender on my computer. I had to keep track of a few things in it so I decided to start writing down what I did for the day in there. It's not perfect program and kind of clunky for this sort of thing but I can sync it with my iPod. My sense of accomplishment has gone portable. It's kind of fun again.

I started naming some of the drawings that I've been working on just so I can keep track of them in iCal. I found in did me no good, I got no sense of accomplishment, from writing, "Worked on drawing today". "Worked on drawing named 'Sense My Tension' today" gave me more of a glimpse of what I did that day. And I like coming up with names for things.

So there you have it. No "To Do" lists but plenty of "What I did today" entries. That's how things are over here. I think I'll go enter that I wrote this blog today.

Comics I Bought: December 4, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got no new comics this week. Slow week. I did get one hard cover collection:

Astonishing X-Men Volume 2

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"Northlanders - Book One Sven the Returned" by Brian Wood and Davide Gianfelice

I had noticed "Northlanders" on the stands a couple of months ago. I liked "Demo" and "Local" by the writer Brian Wood but didn't like his "DMZ" series. I gave "Northlanders" a quick look. It's a historical fiction piece about Vikings. Being a fan of history it was right up my alley but since the first issue I saw wasn't number one and it was published by Vertigo Comics, which I usually don't think much of, I gave it a pass.

This week the trade paperback collection of "Northlanders" came out priced at the "get you hooked in" price of $9.99. At nearly two hundred pages that's quite a bargain so I decided to give it a spin. I'm glad I did.

"Northlanders" takes place in the year 980 in the Orkney Islands. Those are the islands just north of Scotland that were conquered and lived on by Vikings at this time. Sven has been spending most of his adulthood far away on the Mediterranean living in the city of Constantinople. Having received word that his father has died and his uncle has stolen his birthright Sven returns home to claim it.

That is how the story starts and it sticks to that path for a while but then gets a little more complicated and interesting than a basic "return home to conquer evil" story. No one really has a grand plan. Not Sven, his uncle, or his uncle's right hand man. They are just kind of muddling through trying to figure things out like we all do. Sure there are life and death battles but they don't seem to ever quite solve things.

This book is about the choices people make and choices people have made for them. It's about living life in turn of the first millennium Orkney. Life, death, sex, dirt, nudity, snow, and relationships both casual and deep are here.

I enjoyed the art in this book. I've never heard of the artist, Davide Gianfelice, but he does a nice job of capturing the time and place of the story. Plus he gets pretty good variety in his long hair and beards as most of the characters are wearing them. He can draw a nice naked lady too.

The book is printed on crappy newsprint but the colorist did a nice job anyway. It's mostly muted tones to capture the times with lots of red blood splatters thrown in for the sword fights. Nice coloring over all. The texture of the newsprint even adds an old time feel to the book.

So if you're into some tales of the past pick up "Northlanders".