This is the kind of thing that seems funny at 1am, but probably won't seem funny after I've had some sleep. I spent the majority of this weekend trying to clean my room and reading James Kochalka comics. Plus a bunch of other stuff like meeting up with Kathleen to catch a Midnight Madness showing of Harold and Maude, watching the Critereon DVD of The Seven Samurai twice (the second time was for the awesome commentary), and picking up Capcom vs. SNK for the GameCube and getting beaten down by my roommate. The mess has been reduced, but it still looms. Overall, a good weekend.
All right, I confess, I am a cat person!
I felt like cheating tonight by tracing a photograph on the Wacom. It's not as easy or precise as I thought it would be, but eh... not bad for a half hour's work I say!
I miss Sidney. He's still alive and well (I assume) living with a friend who can provide a much better home than I was able to. She calls him "Sid" rather than the fully-expanded "Sidney," as if he weren't a big pansey. (No offense to all you Sidneys out there!)
I had to give Sidney up (along with his neurotic buddy Waldo) when my life went haywire last year, and I think they're both better off because of it.
I brought Sidney home shortly after my first cat, Illyana, died in late 1997. Check out the online memorial I made for her at the time if you're so inclined. It's very sappy, but it did help me out to write it at the time, and I hear other people who stumble across it have found some comfort there.
Some day I want to have cats again, but it will have to wait until I have my life a little more together... like in ten years or so.
ONE DAY WHILE SAVING THE WORLD..! (184k)
For some reason, I really like this one. It's another one of my images from Neefer's collection, drawn some time in 1991. During that time, Peter David's "Incredible Hulk" run was in full swing, starring the merged Hulk (later dubbed the "Professor" persona during Paul Jenkin's run, but really he was just a giant bully with the intellect to match). Spidey's summary of the Hulk's volatile backstory was cobbled together from my OHOTMU TPBs and then-recent issues. And it only scratches the surface of how messed up the Hulk was at the time.
Of course, the thing that sets the Hulk apart from most characters in comics is that his status quo is constantly in flux, and has to stay that way for the concept to work. Thanks to the pop-psychological nature of the Hulk as a violent manifestation of Banner's multiple personality disorder, each new creative team can make up new rules and shift to any persona for the character they feel will suit the stories they want to tell. If the book starts to flounder, they can dump it all and start from scratch without pretending the past never happened... an option a lot of comics don't have today, with 40+ years of backstory to keep track of and no convenient MPD to make everybody forget.
Bruce Jones is currently writing the character very close to the TV series incarnation, with an emphasis on the horror and suspense that comes along with a guy who can't help toppling a few buildings when you piss him off. It's probably the most popular the title has been since 1991 when Dale Keown and Peter David were on a roll. This current phase will pass eventually like all the others and the Hulk will be interpreted another way, and so it will be as long as the property is going.
As for the art... I would like to think I've at least gained a better grasp of how to draw thighs...
CLICK FOR YOUR RDA OF SHAMELESS DRAGON ART! (60k)
Awwww.... Isn't that just adorable?
Yeah, I know... *RETCH*!
It's been a while since I've posted any "new" art here, so here's one that I've had on the backburner for a while.
This dragon started out as a napkin scribble during last week's Pub Trivia night. I used the tracing slide on the Wacom for the first time to bring the scribble into the digital world and finished it off there. Pretty nifty feature, since one of my biggest problems with the tablet is that the shapes always come out more flat than I would like.
This one is kind of rushed, but I like how it turned out. My goal was to be in bed by midnight... well it's 12:02 so better luck next time!
Boy, it's been a big time for nostalgia. I had my high school reunion a few weeks ago, and now Neefer has surprised me by scanning in all of the artwork she stole from me while we were "an item" back in the early 90's... I haven't seen most of this stuff in over ten years! It's a happy-sad discovery, since I see some areas where my "art" has improved and other areas where I've lost something over the years.
I want to post more of this batch, but for tonight I'll just share this ditty:
 Page 1 (54k) |  Page 2 (48k) |  Page 3 (25k) | Society of Spirit Leaders |
The first entry is called Society Of Spirit Leaders. This is a very early comic strip effort from (probably) November '91. It's an embarassingly heavy-handed diatribe on peer pressure in High School, drawn to kill time during a family Thanksgiving trip. It definitely reads like the work of a teenage geekazoid struggling to make a "statement", which it was. There are plenty of moments where I have no idea what the hell I was thinking! Lame as it is now, this turned out to be my first step away from wannabe sci-fi/fantasy art and closer to the wannabe cartoon style that eventually led to The Bastich.
I kind of regret the portrayal of the Spirit Leader. By this time I was so completely alientated from the "average" student body that I had no point of reference to base her on, so she just comes off as an insulting caricature. Oh well, this is all good therapy!
The three punk kids who appear on page 2 are based on some friends of mine... or at least for a while some of them were. The guy with the spikey hair was my best friend for about a year, and then he hit his Freshman year and hooked up with the elite non-conformist clique, ditching me almost completely without a moment's hesitation. What a fucknar. Yes, I'm still a bit bitter about that. The NC's had their secret handshakes, and trenchcoats, and in-jokes and the whole deal, and no matter what I did, I was never cool enough to get into their inner circle. Of course, as an adult, I would know to tell these guys to spin on it, but at the time is was like being a loser squared -- even the dorks were too cool for me!
I actually had some good friends during High School, but it wasn't until I got to college that I finally found a sizeable group of people who were both "cool" by my estimation and also not a bunch of asswipes. (Pat and Bapper excepted, of course.)
Bastichlabz is finally moving from WebIntellects to Lunar Pages. It's in that funky in-between stage where sometimes the lookup goes to the old server and sometimes it goes to the new one.
What's weird is that here at work, I was getting the new server this morning, but now I'm getting the old one again! Oh, that zany DNS! I guess I'll just have to sit this out for a few more days until all of the DNS servers agree on the truth.
I'm switching because I'm a cheapskate. WebIntellects is a good company, but I'm paying an extra $10 per month for the privilege of having a MySQL database, which LunarPages provides at no additional cost.
CLICK FOR INCREASED SHAREHOLDER VALUE! (36k)
This is the first of a series of Icon-Based "Lost Episodes". Years ago, Pat and Bapper came up with a bunch of ideas for Icon-Based strips that, for whatever reason, I never bothered to draw. They even went as far as to fully script and lay out a few of their ideas, which I still have in my big ol' Bastich art folder. Now that I'm drawing semi-regularly again, I'm going to blindly implement these old scripts without concern for whether they are dated, unfunny or otherwise detrimental to the health of our great society. You have been warned!
This first strip was actually laid out by me, but I'm pretty sure it came from a collectively drunken night at the Icon-Based HQ. There was a scribbled note in my handwriting next to the final panel saying to change the punchline to something that's actually funny. Well, sorry buddy - you snooze you lose!
Warning: this is a Journal entry... one of those things that nobody should care about except me. But I'm stealing a page from Pat's book. I want to read this stuff when I'm a decrepit old man and have some idea of what was going on all those weeks ago when I wrote this down.
Anyway, what did I do today?
- I got caught up on some comics reading, not least of which was a stack of "Ultimate Spider-Man" issues that's been building up for a while. The issues were USM #22-26 and the Marvel Team-Up Super Special. I was dreading reading this run because I knew something bad was going to happen in #25, and I didn't want to face up to it. I made an effort to avoid spoilers and finally just started reading the story one page at a time without peeking ahead. I always enjoy things more when I can force myself to do this. They don't call 'em "spoilers" for nothing, but usually I can't resist. However, if you like spoilers, I'll elaborate on what I'm talking about in the "More..." section.
- I drove to Golden Gate park and wandered around for a bit. Then I went and had a burrito at Gordo's, a place on 9th & Lincoln that my roommate showed me a while ago. I also wandered into a small market in search of some fruit... the place was so tiny and packed that I think I incovenienced every other patron there at least once with my clumsy, lanky bumbling. But at least I came away with some very tasty peaches and plums.
- I went to see "Goldmember" at the Parkway Speakeasy theater, a very cool joint in Oakland where second-run and classic films can be viewed over a slice of pizza and pitcher of beer. Other participants were Pat, Kathleen, Beej, and Adam. Adam courageously decided to stay behind after Goldfinger to watch "Attack of the Clones" without us. I hope he made it out intact.
It's always good to see my friends, and I feel I have to appreciate it as much as I can now, because these fun times are getting more and more sparse as time goes on.
I intend to go again, especially now that I know how to find the place. I'm finding my navigational skills are easily crushed by the streets of San Francisco and Oakland, and only the worst can be anticipated when I'm driving from one to the other. I can't believe that a place I can see from the hill behind my house in SF would take an hour to reach on the road, but there you have it.
- I've had the song, "The Book I Read" from Talking Heads: 77 stuck in my head all weekend. I'm swimming in a sea of sap! Make it stop!
- Jeez, I guess that's it!
SPIDEY SPOILER
Okay, the "shocking" event I was dreading was the death of Mary Jane Watson, which had been hinted at for a while. She was getting set up to play the role "Gwen Stacey" played in the original series. Only this time, it would have been a character everybody cared about rather than the annoyance that the original Gwen Stacey was. While reading the whole storyline, my thoughts were "You bastard Bendis, I see where you're going with this! You wouldn't dare!"
But he dared! The final page of #25 has Spidey holding a limp MJ in his arms after he thought he had succeeded in rescuing her from a deadly fall from atop the Queensboro Bridge, just like in the earlier story. My thought: "Bendis you are a bastard!"
The real surprise, however, came in the first few pages of #26 where MJ just kind of woke up, shook the whole thing off, and got into a cab to escape while Spidey continued with his rage-fueled tirade against the Green Goblin (continuing to echo the original Gwen Stacey story).
Wow... what a cop-out. But in almost a good way. I like this version of MJ, and I was in no hurry to see her get killed off. Reversing her death is kind of cheap, but it's also a bit of an "up yours" to the long-time readers like me who went in with preconceptions about how this storyline was going to turn out.
And that, I think, was the point of all this. Bendis is playing off of our expectations and enjoying himself while we all squirm. If any other book had ended with a character "not waking up" in the hero's arms, we would not automatically assume the worst. It's only the Gwen Stacey parallel that made everybody assume that it was for real. The lame thing is that this makes it an instance where the "Ultimate Marvel" concept fails, because the dramatic impact relies on a familiarity with the old storyline.
Oh well. I'm relieved that she's still going to be around. It's a testament to Bendis' writing that I even care this much about whether a fictional character dies or not.
Well, I should have seen this coming. This news is almost 2 weeks old and I just found out. Some friends told me about it, but I didn't want to believe.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!
I should be used to all of my favorite Sci-Fi shows getting canned, but it still stings.
The Sci-Fi Channel has decided not to pick up Farscape for season 5, even though the series had been optioned for both 4 and 5. The whole thing happened so fast that the moya sets have already been torn down and the show is pretty much kaput.
To be honest, this season has been kind of a disappointment to me, but it was still the best show on the air to my tastes. I'm not so upset that the show is ending; it's more that it will be ending on such a bad note. They were just wrapping up the last episode when they got the news, so there was no time to try and set up an appropriate ending.
They were clearly building up to some big payoff for season 5 that we'll never see. Season 4 will end on some huge cliffhanger like every season before it, only this time it will be worse because they thought they had a gurantee that the story could play out in the next season.
I'm still not totally believing this. There's still a chance that somebody will come to save the day. Some huge outcry from fandom will lead to TNN picking it up or maybe A&E, TLC or BET. Babylon 5 was cancelled at the end of every season, and it still got through to the end, though that last season was painful. Maybe Farscape will find a way to continue, but for now it really seems like the show is dead.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!
Why couldn't it have been Alias or Buffy or some show that other people watch and not me, dammit!
I need to start watching shows that other people like, apparently.
It's been a while since I've drawn a battle chicken for this blog, and I wanted something quick to do, so here it is. I was trying to reclaim my white trash heritage, but I think I've fallen out of the trailer for good. Enjoy!
Here is one of those blog entries the detractors hate the most.
$90.99 in balance adjustments since 09/02/2001!
Yes, my anal-retentive tendencies run so deep that I keep track of my cash spending in Quicken. I just ran a report to see how I've been doing on balance adjustments, and $90.99 was the damage.
That's just under a quarter per day! When you consider that all of that error is from the last three months, I've really been losing track of a dollar per day. The first 9 months, I kept flawless records, and now I've really slipped. I guess gainful employment will do that. I spend more cash on lunch breaks now, and I don't have the time to update Quicken before some of it has slipped from memory's grasp.
Luckily it all goes to food anyway, so I can still run reliable monthly reports to satisfy my anal retentitude for all time!
The blog has now officially transfered to Movable Type on the future host of Bastich Labz. I'm waiting for my friend Alan to move his tech humor archive to the new server before switching the DNS. However, this URL will work before and after the switch unless you and your puritanical browser cower in the presence of redirects:
http://www.bastichlabz.org/golabutron3000
Big thanks go to Pat for writing a handy Python script for porting my Radio entries to MT. You saved me from a heap of cut-and-pasting, man!
All of my old comments are gone forever, now, but I'll survive!
Golabutron 3000 is moving to its permanent home at BastichLabz.org as soon as I get the domain switched to the new host. My Radio evaluation period ends tomorrow, so the current URL will soon be invalid (or whatever they do to people who don't pay up).
This URL should always work, though...
http://www.bastichlabz.org/golabutron3000
(Right now, this is a redirect back to this page, but soon it will go to my new Moveable Type setup)
CLICK FOR MINDLESS BLISS (76K)
No, this is not Rick Hunter! Unless you want him to be, in which case, be my guest!
This is the antidote to "WEEP DAY" from a few weeks ago. I deliberately set out to draw something stupidly "happy" this time. I used the same "technique" as I did with WEEP DAY, which basically amounts to smudging all of the paint around until I like what I see. It's a very mind-numbing process, which was exactly what I needed. I'm still digesting everything that happened at the reunion last Saturday. I feel happy about how it went, yet I also feel emotionally devastated. I could really use some mindless cheer tonight, so here I go.
Rock Solid OS, my arse! I managed to totally crash OS X during my first pass at this drawing, losing all of my work and having to start all over (no, I'll never learn). I was impressed at how friendly OS X's version of the BSOD is, though. The screen goes dim and a pretty little dialog box floats in with some hex codes and instructions on how to hard reboot (hit the "on" button twice -- of course!). I could blame the Wacom drivers, which are still in Beta, but it's more fun to blame Steve.
Tonight is my 10 year High School Reunion, so I'm heading home for most of the weekend. Enjoy this cheesy cartoon, which got more and more rushed as I worked left to right (bombshell first, of course)...
I'm still not sure what I hope to get from this reunion. I won't know anybody there since my friends were mostly in other classes. I think my main motivation is that I don't want to regret not going. But I'm not too worried. Worst case scenario: it sucks and I'm out $60, but I still get to spend the rest of the weekend with my family. So it's not a huge risk.
(BONUS: This is the first "published" Bastich drawing since, I dunno, 1998! Whee!)
WTF!? This is funny.
(from Comic Book Resources)Wanna differentiate yourself from the competition? Why not have your product delivered to your customers by Spider-Man! Those lightning reflexes and that spider sense are the perfect way to protect sensitive goods en route through the mean streets of Bangkok.
That's exactly what this company in Thailand did, at least until Marvel found out and tossed a few lawyers their way. No moonlighting for the wall-crawler, so Spidey's out, and Austin Powers is in! Yeah, baby, yeah!
CLICK OR YIELD TO THE BAP-O-MATIC! (42.2k)
I worked on this comic last night, but I started too late in the evening to finish before exhaustion took its unforgiving toll, so here it is a day later than intended.
WARNING: This strip is not necessarily funny. It was based on a suggestion from Pat, but nothing here is to be considered his fault. The joke was perfectly served by Pat's one-line IRC message to me, but it sounded like it would be fun to draw so I went for it. I didn't put much effort into the dialog this time. My goal was to see if I could do a better job on the art than the last Icon-Based, and at least there I think I succeeded. The rule seems to be that Mtn. Dewd has to be shaking his fists in frustration by the 3rd or 4th panel. Hey, it's a winning formula!
Icon-based newbies should read this old gem from four years ago for the first appearance of the BAP-O-MATIC. That one is a favorite of mine across the whole IB/Bastich canon.
This also marks the return of the bearded BAPPER! Yay! Just in time for the real Bapper to announce that he's once again clean-shaven yuppie scum. Well, I give up, man! Bapper and Mtn. Dewd are staying AS IS from now on! Quit getting married and cutting your hair, ya freaks!
I have fond memories of the original Icon-Based days. I spent a great deal of my last semester at Chico State hanging out at the Pat-and-Bapper pad. I was kind of going through a "rough patch" at the time, so I really appreciate the friendship they offered, which helped keep me sane. They were also an excellent source of material. Most of the old "Icon-based" strips were group written or at least inspired by some conversation we had over too many beers. I have a folder full of unused ideas from those guys, most of it indecipherable after all these years. It was just a huge, fun time, that eventually had to end when we all packed up and headed off to start our "adult" lives...
Bwah-hah-hah-hah!
PS: Sorry about the gnarly font. I built the whole thing out at 4x its published size, and Helvetica doesn't look quite as good at 10pt as it did at 40. Oh well. Back to the hellspawn, Arial!
Well, it looks like things for Marvel and the comics industry in general are going better than I thought:
- Marvel Prepays Bank Debt by $10 Million
- Comics Clamber Back from the Brink
- Marvel swings to profit with help from Spider-Man
(Some of this is pretty old news, but I haven't been paying attention)
I wonder how long this current upward trend can continue... I want to believe that comics sales follow the quality of the output, which in my opinion would track perfectly with the slump that began in the mid-nineties and continued unfettered through to 2000. Obviously, inflation and the encroachment of anime and video games were big contributors to that slump, but it's not the whole story. Comics rather sucked through most of the nineties. The Lee/Liefeld wannabes, the multiple embossed dice-cut holofoil covers, the 22 straight splash pages, how everybody started wearing bandoliers, strapped a beltfull of pockets on their thighs, ran around with dinner plates on their shoulders and two-fisted toaster guns. It was a horrid time.
But now, comics are good again. Marvel is making a lot of bizarre and rewarding editorial decisions, and the industry is following them back into prosperity. Of course, the Spider-Man flick is a huge part of this, but we know from the X-Men film that a blockbuster alone can't get people to buy comics if they aren't any good.
Maybe if comics continue not to suck, things will continue to get better. Eventually, the pulp will be left behind, and we'll be readin comics online, but that's not the death of the artform so I can live with it (even though I prefer paper aesthetically).
So, way to go Marvel! And everybody, quick! Sell your collection before the bubble bursts again!
BTW, go check out these guys... they are why I didn't give up on comics while the mainstream was still sucking (yeah, I know, everybody's list looks like this):
CLICK OR DON'T! (49k)
I got about 1/3rd through my real drawing for tonight, and decided it was time for bed. Here is a quick one because I've gone too many nights without posting.
I need to start drawing before 1am on work nights!
Newsarama has posted an update to the RADIX vs DOD story.
All right. A public apology has been issued by MIT to the Lai brothers for the use of their artwork in winning the $50 million military contract. I still believe that this was an honest mistake, and that the Lais should back down from their aggressive legal stance toward MIT.
The linked Newsaram article also has some words with the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s legal counsel about the legality of what happened, which doesn't seem to be under debate. At least, not any more. There was a period of time where MIT tried to cover up what happened and make excuses, but now they've come clean and admitted that they simply made a mistake.
The real culprit here is the artist who stole the images from Radix #1 and passed them off as her own. That has to be an "actionable" offense, as they say. It's strange to me that nobody seems to want her side of the story, but she could be refusing to speak. If anybody owes the Lais restitution, it would be her.
Kat posted to her blog about this story last week, but her take was more on the bizarre relationship between Sci-Fi and real technological developments. A pretty decent discussion came out of the comments on that one. If there is anybody on the planet reading this who doesn't read her blog, go there now!
I didn't comment on that take initially because it doesn't seem very strange to me that Science Fiction eventually becomes reality. To me, they're both part of the same overall future-looking endeavor of human society. Or something like that. Sci-fi is just the artistic wing of innovation, and it's basically their job to imagine what comes next while the real-life inventors are busy working on what's happening right now.