Chromophobia

One Hour Comix

I've written about Colin White here before. He's a comic artist and illustrator out of Canada, and he's got a great style and ease of line-work that belies how sharp his gesture work is: all around, a great talent. Like most comic artists aspiring to make a living, he found that he was, in fact, doing very little actual comics in lieu of paying work, something I can relate to. So, over the past few months, he developed a project called One Hour Comix, in which he devotes one hour each day to his craft. Now, the idea, dedication, and goals behind it alone could be lauded; but Colin has actually managed, with just one hour a day, to actually make compelling work, which is all the more impressive. It's very bizarre, stream-of-consciousness type of content: feuding, AK-47-wielding, broom-riding deities, masturbating bunnies, sun-eating turtles: all at once he manages to create a surrealistic yet very personal comicscape on which he scribbles his life. It's really, really cool.

Then, the other week, expectedly, I showed up in the strip, in the form of a talking mouse: Colin and I often debate the nature of art and the artist's role over IM, and in keeping with his personal nature of the work, my comments in his Flickr gallery metastasized themselves into a character. It's turned into a running gag/experiment (read through the rest). Besides the flattering nature of putting me in there, I like the unexplored territory this trods: it's audience-aided content, with the creator responding to the audience in ways that wasn't possible before. It's all very web 2.0 wonderfulness, and in response, the least I thought I could do was respond with my own contribution. I'm not exactly sure where this is headed, but I like it, it's exciting...and, Hey! I'm doing comics again!

Little Panel, Big Screen

During my interwebs surfing , I've come across two little chunks of comic-to-movie adaptation newslets that seem to beg some kind of comment: I don't have to remind my 4 readers how I feel about the whole comic-book to movie thing (Why...are...you....doing this?!), but I feel like the announcements are large enough to at least recognize.

The first is Zac Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore's The Watchmen, something that I (and many others) would argue is the comic book that matured comic books: even Maus, since it's basically a biography, doesn't carry the heavy narrative weight that Moore's and Gibbons opus does. The Watchmen is basically the first movie released as a comic book first, which is why I actually have high hopes for it: unlike other comic books that are too fantastical or too intimate to make a good movie, The Watchmen reads like a movie from the beginning: the pacing, the framing, even the action, all seems made from production stills. I loathed Snyder's 300, but here's a (admittedly old) transcript of his talk that seems to show he at least has a lot of respect for the material. Below is also a rad graphic showing the casting options for the last two times The Watchmen was considering for Hollywood, as well as the most recent iteration. I personally think the casting of Ron Perlman as The Comedian would be brilliant (second only to Mel Gibson), but that's just me.



The second little piece of "Holy-shit-it's-really-happening" news released this week is that Spielberg has seemingly found his Tintin.

(sounds of shotgun being removed from gun rack)

The movies are slated to be all original scripts...

(sounds of shotgun cartridges being loaded into shotgun)

...with a lot of money attached to them; Spielberg is slated to direct the first, Peter Jackson the second, and as-yet-to-be-determined hot young director to helm the third...

(click-CLACK!)

and they will all be motion-captured CGI films. Hooray!

(BLAM!)

Stop Motion Tron

Tron
Video sent by freres-hueon

Oh my. This made my day.

Sketchblog 3/18/08

The above is another poster in the series I've done for Blue Flavor, advertising some of their software and projects. I've got a huge response from these posters, which brings up a rather interesting idea that we're dabbling with here: album art for programs. I considered this at first just advertisement, but the BF guys have been great, as usual, and given me complete creative freedom. I'm basically allowed to do whatever the word makes me think of. Which brings up an interesting new venue for illustrators. In a world in which albums are released digitally, and software and video games sometimes have a big and feverent a following as music ( see Firefox!) who's to say that software packaging needs to be all boring swooping blue lines and staid san serif fonts? I hope this is the beginning of a big trend... in any event, thanks again to the BF guys for being on the side of the good guys...

Toutes les autos de Tintin

This is an online gallery of every single car, along with a picture of it's real life counterpart, when possible, to ever appear in a Tintin book: some Tintin nutcase has a lot of time on his hands. Herge was known to be a religious collector of reference art for the books, especially in his later years. While the early books, like Tintin and Land of The Soviets, and Tintin in the Congo, are the slapdash work of a kid with a lot of things on his mind, as he got older, Herge began making sure everything in his books was accurate, going so far as to redo panels from books twenty years earlier because the objects that Tintin interact with isn't accurate enough. This gallery is a true monument to Herge's dedication to making the world that Tintin lived in as real as possible, and yet another reason he is one of the greats.

Found via the Musesum of Online Museums.