Finally, the truth revealed. On the other hand, Spider-Man would be a lot more interesting if these editorial suggestions were taken to heart by the good people at Misney.
Hidden in the tooltip for today's XKCD, a piece of important existential philosophy:
A human is a system for converting dust billions of years ago into dust billions of years from now via a roundabout process which involves checking email a lot.
R3LOAD.net sez, "YouTube is streaming the full move Superman, a 1987 Hindi remake of the Hollywood movie. Synopsis: In this Indian take on the classic superhero story, a young baby from the doomed planet Krypton is sent to Earth, where he is adopted by an elderly couple in India who name him Shekhar. After growing to an adult and learning about his origins and powers, he goes to the city in search of his school sweetheart, Gita, who has become a newpaper reporter. At the same time, Verma, Shekhar's rival for Gita's affection in their school days, has gone on to become a crime lord and general super-villain. Verma has hatched at plan to become rich by devastating part of India with natural disasters, then buying up all of the abandoned land."
Just watched 15 minutes of this and was hooked.
Superman
Time to clear some space on the knick-knack shelf. Mezco has shown a line of AXE COP action figures at the NY Toy Fair:
Based on a webcomic that turned into a print comic that turned into a web based animation that turned into an animated tv show soon to be on Fox, Axe cop features some of the most outlandish characters ever seen. How outlandish? Well, besides the titular axe wielding cop, there is a t-rex with machine gun arms, an avacado unicorn, and soldiers made of poo. Mezco’s Drake indicated that Mezco has a long history of producing poo based characters and with their Mr Hanky of South Park they have cornered the poo toy market. “No other toy company besides Mezco will be offering three separate poo based characters in 2013 “ said Drake. Mezco will be producing both 3.75 inch figures and plush characters for the series.
Sigh. Because, like, the whole gender role thing is binary. But, binary as in, are you Betty or are you Veronica. It hits stores February 7. More pix here. (HT: @marynmck)
The astounding, amazing, brilliant comics creator Kyle Baker has thwacked a whack of his graphic novels onto the tubes, for free, including my all-time favorite Baker, "Why I Hate Saturn." Run, don't walk.
Zack sez, "Just did an interview with Sylvia Toth, who uses public-domain images in a unique way -- she creates sugar cookies with images from 1940s comics printed onto icing sheets with food coloring. Her best-sellers are a line of cookies featuring images from Fletcher Hanks' Stardust the Super-Wizard, and they've earned a thumbs-up from Paul Karasik, who collected Hanks' stories in I SHALL DESTROY ALL THE CIVILIZED PLANETS! Though people are often reluctant to actually eat the lovely cookies, I've tried them, and they're worth ruining the art over."
Zack sez, "Mel Birnkant, creator of the Outer Space Men and major Disney collector, has a section on his website paying tribute to his friend Charles Ponstingl, who did amazing, elaborate wood carvings based on classic comic strips. Check out these dioramas based on Winsor McCay's "Little Sammy Sneeze" and Little Nemo or these elaborate pieces recreating an old Disney picture book.
On the first day of the first Brimfield Flea Market of 1978, Ron told me he had something he thought I would like. And took me to his van to show me four shadow boxes with scenes carved out of wood. They were a little primitive, a little naive, but quite fabulous. Ron, as usual, was right; they were, indeed, something I would like. He explained that they were four of sixteen, the rest of which were various sizes, some smaller, some larger. He had put four in his van to show me and left the rest at home. If I was interested, he would deliver the other twelve to me.
It is amazing how even these, the first four carvings that Ron showed me displayed characteristics that proved to be prophetic; touches of unspoiled freshness that have never faded from Charles’ art, in the many years that followed. This first, in which the Little Bad Wolf is handing his dad a can of beans, while Papa studies a book of pork recipes, is typical of Charles' propensity to portray a scene that often seems elusively arbitrary; characters caught in mid-action, rather than posing for the camera in an iconic fashion. Then, he freezes the moment in wood for all Eternity.
And this is the story that Ron told me: An old time toy dealer, who I’ll call “Tom”, had acquired these carvings, of which there were twenty. It seemed that Tom was keeping four and sold the remaining sixteen. They were the work of a man who Tom’s son had met at work. This guy was described as a “crazy old coot”, a cantankerous old timer, who refused to take suggestions or requests, and just carved what he pleased. None of that mattered, anyway, as has he had stopped at twenty carvings, and was never going to carve again!
A Dec 22 article in the Economist looks at the thriving world of webcomics and suggests that they have broken the awful cycle of mediocre newspaper comics -- a cycle that Bill Watterson decried when he gave up on Calvin and Hobbes. It's a great piece:
Many of these comics are expanding outwards into little media empires of their own. “XKCD”, probably the most innovative, now features a separate blog called “What If?”, on which Mr Munroe answers questions sent in by readers. One recent post asked “if every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?” (The answer is no, unless you can borrow 6 billion one-megawatt lasers from the Pentagon.) “SMBC” and “Ctrl Alt Del” have both experimented with sketch shows and animated comics. “Penny Arcade” has become a sprawling video-games industry phenomenon, hosting games conventions and fund-raising campaigns.
One thing they have in common is how they make their money. The typical audience for one of the leading web comics is between 1m and 10m unique browser visits per month, comparable to a medium-sized newspaper website (the website of the Daily Mail, the best-read newspaper on the web, gets 100m per month). But unlike on newspaper websites, where advertising is the main source of revenue, the audience on web comics are not just readers—they are also customers. Most artists sell T-shirts, books, mouse mats, posters and other paraphernalia. The most successful at monetising content is said to be Mr Inman: his site, “The Oatmeal” made $500,000 in 2011 from its audience of around 7m unique visitors per month.
Amplified by social media—Mr Inman has some 700,000 Facebook followers—this audience can be powerful. One extremely long and exceptionally geeky comic last summer on “The Oatmeal”, extolling the virtues of the inventor Nikola Tesla and attacking his better-known rival, Thomas Edison, somehow snowballed into a campaign to save one of Tesla’s labs on the outskirts of New York. By leveraging his immense traffic to attract donations and to sell T-shirts and other gear, Mr Inman raised $1m in nine days—enough, with matching funding from New York State, to buy the building.
Mastaba Snoopy is surreal and wonderful dystopian science fiction choose-your-own adventure whose premise is that an all-powerful alien has mistaken a Peanuts book for a guide to human interaction, and enslaved humanity according to its principles. It's built on Twee and Tiddlywiki:
1. An Unknown Alien Being acquires a child's forgotten book and mistakenly beliefs that it depicts proper protocol for interaction with the human world.
2. It grows and converts all life into more of itself, like a living strangelet - emotionless spacial cancer.
It can shapeshift or divide at will and learns quickly. Each mass it breaks off possesses its own intelligence.
3. The new being filters everything it perceives through the lens of Peanuts comics. It mimics characters, but with no understanding of how they fit together.
A computer-generated collage. It doesn't understand human rules - but it does understands the laws of Peanuts.
4. After many years, the Milky Way and surrounding galaxies have been entirely overtaken by this single entity. Suddenly deprived of food, the organism begins to STAGNATE.
5. The organism transforms into a distorted parody of the former planet Earth, a foul, expansive hellworld - filtered, again, through Peanuts.
End result: There exists an infinite, nonsensical world with all locations, living things, and social interaction based on half-remembered dreams.
Thousands of years to fester and the memory is going bad, the original book having been long since lost in the constant churning reshaping. This new, living world has been dying for millenia.
Windowpane is the graphic novel debut from Joe Kessler, one of the friendly fellows working behind the cash-register at London's wonderful NOBROW (about whom we've written lots). It's a collection of short, surreal, dreamlike stories, some more experimental than others, as well as a memoir of the near-death of Reuben Mwara during his boyhood in a Kenyan slum.
Kessler's use of color and the printing techniques he employs (which you can see at his blog are very striking, and the storytelling style is accomplished and sure. A very promising start!
Here's a remix of the DC supervillains crossed with real-world bad guys, courtesy of Brazilian graphic designer/illustrator Butcher Billy.
A human is a system for converting dust billions of years ago into dust billions of years from now via a roundabout process which involves checking email a lot.
Based on a webcomic that turned into a print comic that turned into a web based animation that turned into an animated tv show soon to be on Fox, Axe cop features some of the most outlandish characters ever seen. How outlandish? Well, besides the titular axe wielding cop, there is a t-rex with machine gun arms, an avacado unicorn, and soldiers made of poo. Mezco’s Drake indicated that Mezco has a long history of producing poo based characters and with their Mr Hanky of South Park they have cornered the poo toy market. “No other toy company besides Mezco will be offering three separate poo based characters in 2013 “ said Drake. Mezco will be producing both 3.75 inch figures and plush characters for the series.
The astounding, amazing, brilliant comics creator Kyle Baker has thwacked a whack of his graphic novels onto the tubes, for free, including my all-time favorite Baker, "Why I Hate Saturn." Run, don't walk.
On the first day of the first Brimfield Flea Market of 1978, Ron told me he had something he thought I would like. And took me to his van to show me four shadow boxes with scenes carved out of wood. They were a little primitive, a little naive, but quite fabulous. Ron, as usual, was right; they were, indeed, something I would like. He explained that they were four of sixteen, the rest of which were various sizes, some smaller, some larger. He had put four in his van to show me and left the rest at home. If I was interested, he would deliver the other twelve to me.
