Sorry that today’s page went up late; I got distracted working on card game instructions text and writing a big article on “Dr. Slump.”
NEXT UPDATE: Friday!
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The Stiff
252 comics.
I had surgery for three hernias on Friday, and I’m just now beginning to recover enough to walk around. I always thought hernias sounded like an especially disgusting problem, even before (especially before) I knew what the word even meant: my first impressions were just that it had something to do with the lower part of the body, the despicable/dirty crotch/groin area, or the stomach at best. Hernia. The very word sounds repulsive and suggestive of bad behavior, like hysteria: like the tissues of your lower body are pulling themselves apart, or have been agitated in some grotesque way (doubtless due to a bad habit or moral failing).
Anyway, having had the surgery and been educated in the ways of hernias, I now know hernias are a fairly common thing. (It’s probably partly genetic, actually, as my father had them in the exact same area.) I now have three pot-holder-like plastic meshes implanted in my body to keep my guts from spilling out. It’s unpleasant to realize that your muscles and your overall body design aren’t necessarily enough to keep your body from just spillin’ out all over the place — if my intestines are going to go flying loose from my body, at least let it be due to being disemboweled by a broadsword in medieval combat! Even in sword & sorcery, the fate of disembowelment is always reserved for mooks and low-level bad guys: heroes almost always get to die by more dignified means, such as decapitation, heart-piercing or loss of limbs; perhaps equally bloody but not something that ends with their bowel messily splattered on the floor, their very integument and bodily shape compromised. I guess my point is: due to 21st century cybertechnology keeping my guts in place, this particular distressing scenario is that much less likely to happen. Whew. What a relief.
NEXT UPDATE: Wednesday!
I’ve recovered enough from my surgery that I’m able to walk around the neighborhood and do stuff, although I missed Ryan Andersen’s RPG night last night. (Sob…) When not working on a new D&D map, I’ve been catching up on the last season of Doctor Who — my favorite superhero series! I have to admit I prefer Russell T Davies’ episodes to Steven Moffat’s though. If I could make one wish (about Doctor Who), I’d wish Steven Moffat would just CUT IT OUT WITH THE SPOOKY CHILDREN. It worked in “The Empty Child”, but do you have to have spooky children in, like, EVERY EPISODE OF THE SERIES? This is a horror trope I’ve never gotten into, perhaps because I don’t have kids — and I henceforward vow that even if I do someday have kids, I will NEVER become a fan of spooky children. SO LAME. (end rant)
Everyone knows that adults are a thousand times scarier than children, anyway.
NEXT UPDATE: Friday!
I haven’t had the opportunity to look at the last D&D Next playtest packet yet. I really need to do that.
NEXT UPDATE: Monday!
Working hard on a project that’s due on Halloween. Beautiful Autumn leaves are falling all around Seattle; whenever I take the dog for a walk she tramps through yellow and red leaf-piles up to her knees.
NEXT UPDATE: Wednesday!
Sorry for the late update: working on a big project today.
I want to apologize to everyone who’s made an order from the store recently; with my recovery followed by my next assignment (deadline: today) I haven’t had the chance to go to the post office. I’m really sorry and I’ll be sending you all individual emails (and your stuff) shortly.
NEXT UPDATE: Friday!
If you play D&D, or you like comics with Mock Men, or some combination of those two, go over to the Wizards of the Coast website and check out my walkthrough map of the classic adventure, Ravenloft!
Written by Tracy & Laura Hickman, with original maps by Dave Sutherland (definitely some of his best work, and it was hard to improve on them), this module was an insta-classic. I remember when it came out in 1985-ish. Some kid brought it to elementary school and told me that it was the hardest D&D module ever (almost all the boys in our small elementary school played D&D… sadly, I didn’t meet any female role-players until high school) and that in the Ravenloft dungeon there was a room with 3,000 WIGHTS!!!
Anyway, despite that un-refuseable challenge, somehow I never actually *read* the adventure, or played it. (I did later buy the Ravenloft campaign boxed set that came out in the ’90s, which was quite a different thing, more of a guide to playing D&D in a horror-ish setting.) Imagine my disappointment when I finally read Ravenloft for the first time and discovered… …. aww, I can’t even bring myself to say it…. there isn’t a room with 3,000 wights. -_- The kid may have been thinking of the room with 3,000 bats. To be sure, I was saddened, just like any time you revisit something that was super-hyped during your childhood only to discover that the truth is different in the harsh light of adulthood.
BUT!! Despite the lack of the legendary 3,000 wights, I was thrilled to discover that RAVENLOFT IS A FRICKIN’ AWESOME ADVENTURE! It’s a really amazing dungeon (well, castle + dungeon) with lots of great tricks and traps, and the setup and plot are excellent. I really wish I’d played it before I read it, and even now I’m eager to run it for an unsuspecting group of players, using the D&D Next rules, of course. It’s said that the module arose from a Halloween D&D adventure the Hickmans had run for guests once a year for the past four or five years, and I’d be curious to know how the concept was refined and improved over those iterations. Anyway: Ravenloft is great, and it was fun drawing a cartoon map based on it.
NEXT UPDATE: Monday!
Hope you had a good weekend! Today I’m working on my zombie project, and looking up good sources for old-fashioned medical illustrations.
NEXT UPDATE: Wednesdsay!
The other day I went to Scarecrow Video and grabbed some more possibly-zombie or pseudo-zombie movies: “Zeder” and “The Dead Outside.” I considered also getting “Evil (To Kako)”, the first (?) Greek zombie/madmen/horror film, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it because the cover art was so frickin’ bad I was not only embarrassed to take it up to the register but annoyed at the filmmakers. In my experience there are basically three types of imagery used on the covers of zombie books and movies:
(1) medical-style, cold, clinical, scientific. Lots of blues & grays & whites, with a splash of blood. Almost always photorealistic. Observe the cover of Jonathan Maberry’s Patient Zero for an example. Another example, from a better book: the first edition of Walter Greatshell’s Xombies. Scary!
(2) ‘vintage’ style old-fashioned medical illustration, sometimes steampunk-y. I suppose Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection counts. More of a clinical ‘anatomy of the zombie’ look.
(3) just totally crappy, cheeseball shock-gore images of zombies sticking their big badly-made-up heads in the camera, snarling. Or otherwise looking stupid. Lame covers like this is the reason I never rented Return of the Living Dead until people swore to me it was a good movie… and that’s not even a particularly bad example. I guess you could divide this further into two more meaningful categories, the intentionally campy “punk rock zombie” (like “Return”) and the wanna-be-scary-but-actually-just-awful “photo-cover gory zombie face” image (like too many movies to mention). I’m really just lumping two things I hate into one category. But I mean, everything I hate about the horror genre and the way it’s marketed can be summed up with the fact that the film Mulberry Street, which was originally released with this poster, was later released on DVD with this poster. AAARRRRGGGGHHH
OK, rant over! Anyway, Scarecrow Video is a wonderful store. They have all those good movies that are increasingly getting lost in the void between “new so they’re available commercially on Google Play and Netflix” and “so old that they’re available on YouTube because the copyright holders don’t care enough or don’t have the resources to take them down.” I hope they stay in business. I need to rent more movies from them.
NEXT UPDATE: Friday!
The other day I spoke on Japanese comics for a class at UW Bothell, at the invitation of Michael Dean. It was a lot of fun, and while I was there I also met another guest speaker, Nadim Damluji, an expert on Arab comics and also a huge Tintinologist who’s visited almost every country Herge references in his stories. Check out his website at the link!
Meanwhile, for me, it’s back to drawing zombies… or more like sifting through zombies…
NEXT UPDATE: Monday!