My latest House of 1000 Manga article is on Manga Box, a new free-manga app service. I enjoyed it; it’s certainly a good deal considering the price. -_- (Until the company figures out a way to monetize…)
NEXT UPDATE: Monday!
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The Stiff
252 comics.
One of the things I distinctly remember about “Laser Tag” equipment in the late ’80s was that the art (on the rulebooks, etc.) was done by one of the AD&D artists. I forget his name, and honestly I wasn’t enough of a fan to try to look it up on Wikipedia, but it was a strange connection. I later had a similar feeling of surprise when I noticed the art of Ben Edlund (The Tick) in a Rolemaster supplement, proving that even people who end up in careers in Hollywood, making movies and writing scripts and such, may try out lots of different things like dabbling in illustration.
NEXT UPDATE: Wednesday!
I recently got approval for a big project that I’m really excited about. I can’t say anything about it yet, but I’ll be revealing it sometime in April!
NEXT UPDATE: Friday!
There’s nothing cooler than a large storm drain system. They’re fairly common in California, where it’s dry except during the winter rains (and sometimes floods). One of my friends in Oakland once had a map of the entire Oakland storm drain system, which we used to chart a long journey through a covered creek, through backyards and tunnels, up into the Oakland hills. Finally the passage narrowed so much we could hardly turn around, so we emerged from the next manhole we reached, which turned out to be in a cemetery.
NEXT UPDATE: Monday!
So after a long gap in listening, I’ve gotten back into the “Nerd Poker” podcast. Frankly, that podcast has always torn me in half as a D&D rules nerd: the players and DM are SO oblivious of the rules and SO house-ruling everything that I just want to be the most obnoxious dork in the world and write in on their forums saying “”WHY!! WHY would you ever think spell casting time is in rounds, not segments??” or “WHY!! WHY are you going back to 2nd edition Dungeons & Dragons??” But they’re just so damn good. They’re funny (they are professional comedians, after all), and Sark, the DM, is great, always keeping the players (and us) wondering what the hell is going on, always teasing out the mystery and weirdness and cliffhanging.When I think of some of the dismal 4th edition D&D podcasts I listened to a few years ago, where people just rattled off numbers and statistics and “he hits, you take XX damage”, I want to weep a tear of gratitude for the existence of actually good RPG podcasts. (“Nerd Poker” and Yog-Sothoth.com, really.)
Plus, I enjoy the fact that recently they fought a 90-foot monster that was half crocodile, half cobra.
NEXT UPDATE: Wednesday!
Just a brief mention: I’m going to be at Emerald City Comic-Con (at the end of March) and Sakuracon (April 18-20). I’ll be running some games of “Mangaka” at Sakuracon as well. More details and booth numbers, etc., coming soon!
NEXT UPDATE: Friday!
Happy March 21st, everyone! Here’s what’s going on with me:
* On March 28-30 I’ll be exhibiting at EMERALD CITY COMIC-CON! Please come by and say hello! I’ll be in booth GG-07 in Artist’s Alley, and I’ll have all my usual stuff, PLUS the just-reprinted Dreamlands Map and some The Stiff phone skins!
* Speaking of phone skins, I just got the phone skins printed for the Map of Zombies backers! I’ll be sending them out really soon.
* I’ve been working the last two weeks (slowly, sigh) on something really cool which will hopefully be finished and online before too long.
* Also, more cool projects I can’t announce yet. Imagine them! Use your fevered imagination!
* I’m working in my spare time on my diceless RPG based on Lovecraft, Dunsany and Italo Calvino, “Dreamland.” If you’re in Seattle and want to try it out, send me a tweet!
NEXT UPDATE: Monday!
One of my faults is, I spend way too much time on things. Projects always expand in size; deadlines always get pushed to the maximum limit. I’m trying to get better at this, though.
On a more important note, I realize now that the name of the Goth magazine should be “Nox Invictus,” not “Nocte.”
NEXT UPDATE: Wednesday!
It’s been a busy past few days drawing something big and getting ready for Emerald City Comic-Con! If you’re around Seattle, please stop by at booth GG-07. I’ll have some new (and old but not-seen-in-awhile) stuff to show off.
Recently I saw two borderline ‘zombie’ movies that I had put on the Map of Zombies based on others’ descriptions, but hadn’t seen yet myself. Both were made in 2008.
I’d heard SPLINTER was a fungus-infection movie, and it is, but it’s actually a tiny bit more like THE BLOB or THE THING; the parasitic fungus/thing-from-underground/whatever doesn’t even leave its hosts with a vaguely human form, instead stitching and intertwining multiple bodies together into a mass of limbs and dead flesh. In other words, I realize to my horror that I should have listed it on the Map under “Mutagenic Corpse-Parasites” rather than living fungus-zombies — curses! Anyway, it’s a good monster movie, with good if simple characterizations of the tiny cast of four, and the creature looks suitably gruesome, although it moves so fast and is shot so jerkily we rarely get a good view of its human-centipede-esque whole — which I think is entirely the filmmakers’ intention, and it works. From the trailer, I’d thought it would be more of a body-horror movie about contamination and infection, but actually this aspect is less important to the heroes than just trying not to get killed and smashed to little twitching pieces by the fungus-blob. A good, simple movie.
OUTPOST, which came to my attention through a glowing review on Steven Shaw’s “Watching the Dead”, is definitely my favorite Nazi-zombie movie. It’s a little thin-soup plotwise, with little dialogue, characterization or subplotting, but that’s fine for what it is; the deleted scenes on the DVD are mostly more character-building dialogue but upon reviewing it the movie works better when you’re just thrust into this bleak situation somewhere in Eastern Europe with these characters you barely know. Plus, it stars Titus Pullo from “Rome”! -_- Impressively, the whole thing is played totally straight and humorless (unlike, say, SPLINTER, which even though it’s by no means a comedy has its bits of silly banter and one great moment of gallows humor involving an exacto knife and a stone block). The plot involves murderous sci-fi Nazi undead in an old bunker (the movie’s one set), but they’re much, much more than ‘undead’, and the grim situation plays out with simple but inexorable logic. Or mostly logic, anyway. SPOILER — I appreciate the fact that the Nazis never talk or utter a word. My only tiny quibble is that, given what the soldiers do, it could have been EVEN gorier and more sadistic (Lucio Fulci, we miss you and your eye-injury scenes). (Also, offhandedly, the Nazis probably wouldn’t have drawn their own soldiers quite so evil-looking in the animated WW2 Nazi propaganda film the characters discover midway through the movie. But still, the bit of fake-WW2-propaganda was effective and creepy.) As you can tell, both these quibbles are super-minor, so I recommend the movie. There are two sequels, of which the 2nd movie, BLACK SUN, sounds faintly interesting (it seems to expand the premise out to the logical conclusion, although it’s equally low-budget) and the 3rd, RISE OF THE SPETSNAZ, sounds stupid — it’s a prequel which, apparently, replaces the scary super-zombies of the first OUTPOST with boring old regular zombies! Lame.
NEXT UPDATE: Friday! At Emerald City Comic-con!
I had a wonderful time at Emerald City Comic Con over the weekend! I’ll write more later.
NEXT UPDATE: Tuesday! (to make up for missing last Friday)