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Chronicles of Narnia
It had some nice visuals, which, no doubt, were even better on the big screen. There were some nice moments in it.
But, damn, the whole “prophecy tells us to make a bunch of children war leaders to save the world, and it works” is so bloody, painfully stupid. As was dividing the good and pad people in Narnia along species lines, and putting the good guys in mirror-polished armour and in one case on a white unicorn, while the bad guys had black iron and were all in all more on the “ugly” goblin-and-troll side.
The movie also once again made me wonder if there is a fantasy stereotype saying that women in positions of power must be evil, or if my memory is selective there.

The Dark Crystal
Yeah, I saw that a short while ago for the first time, so no nostalgia for me here (same as with the Narnia movie; I never read the books).
Suffers from the same “prophesied hero with no clue whatsoever” as the above, but marginally less grave in my mind, because the scale is smaller… Or maybe I just like the rest of the movie more and thus am more forgiving.
The trying-to-figure-out-myths part of the story was rather interesting, even if it should not have been neccessary, if the gelfling’s teachers were so damn wise. The ending seemed rather predictable to me, but, eh. I really loved the strange creatures all through the setting.

Labyrinth
Same as before, was new to me.
How refreshing! A story about “personal” problems rather than saving the world. Like in The Dark Crystal, I think the strongest point are the creatures and setting, though it got a bit very random at times, and I probably would have liked it better without that swamp full of farting arseholes.
Jareth’s little “I did it all for you” speech was interesting. It’s also one of the rare examples where I like the translation better than the original. From the German version, I expected the line that turned out to be “You cowered before me, I was frightening” to say “You wanted to fear me, so I was fearsome”, which is just a better line.

All in all, I don’t consider any of those a must-see.

Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-27426-8

As the title suggests, a book on drawing animals. Ken Hultgren was an animator for Disney, the former showing in poses and walk cycles, the latter in some of the “carricature” examples.

Ignoring the preface, here we have 134 pages full of black and white illustrations, with a few explanations thrown in. Quite many of the example drawings are shown as one roughed in and one finished version.

After 18 pages of general notes (the division of the body in three parts, rule of the thumb for placement of eyes and ears, boxing in forms, examples for simplified skeleton and mannikin frames, “mood and feeling”, “use of line”, and some examples of textures you can achieve with a brush) the book is divided into “chapters” of very varying length devoted to one animal or group of animals each. Nearly all of those have action poses like leaping, and a page or two on carricaturing the animal(s) in question.

The first one, “The Horse Family”, goes over 29 pages into most detail, starting with how the different parts of the skeleton are made up and fit together, the assumption being that the reader will be able to apply the same methods to other animals without being walked through all of the steps again. In addition to random action poses throughout the chapter there are sequences on leaping, kicking out, trot and canter. For a bit variety from the “generic horse” there’s a page on draft horses and zebras each, as well as a double page on colts.

The 20 pages of “The Cat Family” is mainly devoted to lions, with a page each on Tigers and Domestic Cats.

“The Deer Family” (including stags and fawns) is covered on 9 pages including sequences of walk and jump. It only shows a “generic deer”, no note on different species. By contrast, the later chapter “Dogs” of the same length has only a page of random sketches for general information, followed by one or two pages each with sketches of a particular breed. “The Bear Family” and “Elephants”  are similar in page count, with the elephant chapter being noteworthy for a for the species unexpected variation of poses (albeit none “leaping”).

Five pages spared for “Cows and Bulls”, four for “Kangaroos” (including a jump cycle), three each for rabbits (and a hare which wasn’t labelled as such), foxes, pigs and warthogs, and gorillas, two for giraffes, and camels (both, like the elephant, sadly lacking any information about pace, their main or only gait), and a single page on squirrels.

The book is capped by a 7-pages chapter on “Composition and Animal Grouping”.

I was slightly disappointed because the title implies more variety than is actually shown; “The Art of Mammal Drawing” would have been more accurate. The “The X Family” chapters are more concerned about showing (presumably) commonalities, rather than going into details of differences between species.

There is nothing like the staple of how to draw humans books, the figure divided into head-heights, so you need to be able to see or measure the proportions from the examples, or photos or models.
On the other hand, I think the many examples of “roughed in” mannikin – simplified skeleton and/or basic shapes – next to a finished image can be very helpful.

In my eyes the greatest strength of the book are the dynamic poses, and particularly the running and jumping sequences.

Considering the low price, this for me was worth it.

Uku is a wordless, painted fantasy comic, telling, as far as I can tell, the story of a cave painter looking for paints, and finding instead something entirely different. Visually, it’s on the bright and cute side, story wise, well, it has only 10 pages so far and being just a reader I don’t know where it’s going.

The main reasons why I’m drawn to it are the style of art, and, I guess, that wordless comics are rather unusual.

Honestly at first I didn’t catch that #3 was drawn by a different artist, but now I saw the name on the cover, it does explain things. The most obvious difference are the outlines; guest(?)artist Christopher Jones uses more varied and bolder outlines, and also more spotted black. I guess I blamed that on the scenes.

Many of said scenes were flashbacks to Hunter’s past, or otherwise connected with it, stuff like that is pretty interesting, in my mind. It’s pretty serious, though, so the issue is less funny than the others.

My favourite moment is definitely Dingo showing that he’s not always as silly as he appears usually.

#4, Karine Charlebois back on the art. The faraway crowds were a bit meh with the random dots, but in turn the closeup was lovely, and over all the art’s again solid work with great expressions.

Time-wise this was pretty linear, only the first four pages taking place five days after the rest. I think having the cliffhanger on page 4 rather than the last page might be slightly unusual, but I don’t read that many comics.

The bad guys were nuts, but after the opening scene of the entire series – starring a criminal costumed as a thylacine – that shouldn’t be a surprise. A bit toeing the line for me, but still more hilarious than ridiculous. I’m very curious how Fang will develop.

Dead, She Said #1 (of 3, if I remember correctly), written by Steve Niles and illustrated by Bernie Wrightson, with colours by Grant Goleash can be pretty funny if you read Raymond Chandler for the laughs. I do.

It starts with your standard private detective, Coogan, waking up in a puddle of gore and blood. He is dead. After stuffing his entrails back inside and taping gaping holes in his belly and back shut, he sets out to find out who killed him. There’s another plot thread possibly involving monsters, but there’s no telling yet if it’s connected more than very indirectly to Coogan’s not-death. In addition to the usual problems, there’s also stuff like, “There was a big stink and it was wafting from yours truly.” And as I like it, by the end of the issue he’s in even bigger trouble.

The art is on the realistic side for a comic, with detailed inks, and just one spot where something that looked off pulled me out. The colouring is in a sort of brushstroke-look, by which I just mean it’s not airbrush-smooth, which is definitely a good thing in my opinion. All in all the art doesn’t make me go “Oh, wow, that looks great!”, but it does its job very well.

The printing seems a bit off, with what I think should be black looking dark grey instead, but paper and cover quality are very nice. IDW Publishing also gets major props from me for collecting all adverts at the end, rather than ripping apart the story with them.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

No time travel this weekend, I wasn’t feeling so well, and was busy with other stuff. Now I wonder what that was, but, oh, well. A bunch of comics I had on my pull list arrived last week, though.

Gargoyles: Bad Guys #2

Greg Weisman seems to be awfully fond of those random jumps in time to tell a story. Oh, well. In this title isn’t as bad as in the main one, and apart from that I quite like the writing. The last pages definitely make me hope the next issue won’t be late. Or maybe this one wasn’t, and my sense of time is shot.
I think I’m detecting a pattern when it comes to Karine Charlesbois’ problems with backgrounds. The ones constructed with a ruler – modern city views and whatnot – are pretty darn good, but more organic stuff – a heap of trash, a tree that’s not far off – turns into a bunch of scribbles. Or maybe she’s just running out of time sometimes.
Anyway, over all the art is really pretty good. And I love, love, love that the women shown in the scenes towards the end actually have different faces and body shapes.

Gargoyles #8

Still with the way, way, way confusing timejumps. I’m looking forward to the arc being finished so I can re-read it in one go and maybe make sense of it.

The short-term writing I love, for example the juxtaposiotion of page 5 and 6, or the chat in the coffee shop. Getting a bit more insight into Gargoyle’s more or less normal clan life is a very nice touch, too.

I guess I don’t have to mention that I love Constance. XD

Nothing really to complain about art-wise, which means I get to say “YEAH, GREAT!
Looking forward to #9

Return of the Gremlins

A 3 issue miniseries published by Dark Horse Comics.

The somewhat more cartoony art is a nice change of pace. Random observation: Seems like #1 and #2 were only pencilled before colouring, and #3 also inked.

A rather light-hearted story, also a nice change.

The treatment of female characters is somewhat aggravating, though. There’s one who is named, Molly, who is the love interest and trophy for the male main character. Like the three other human women seen in passing, she’s super-thin. The dozen or so men of course have different body shapes.

In the Gremlins the male-to-female ratio seems to be something like 6:1, judging from a splash page showing a lot of them in one go, and while the guys are all equally pudgy, the gals have carricatured hourglass-figures, and one of them was even “look how sexy I am”-posing at the viewer/human main character.

What the fuck, really.

I watched two movies yesterday and today, Howl’s Moving Castle and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. What I think they have in common is that their really strong point are the visuals, but maybe that’s just me liking steampunkish stuff (it’s blatant in the Moving Castle, in Lemony Snicket it’s more of a slight flavour).

Lemony Snicket was way more weird and interesting than the book blurbs I read led me to believe, so that was a positive surprise. There were two points or themes that rubbed me the wrong way at the time, but both – people not taking anything the children said seriously, and the aunt’s ridiculous fears – were at least somewhat addressed in the movie. I spotted one big “wait, what?!” moment which might be a plothole (how did the aunt get there?), but in the general weirdness it doesn’t stand out too much.

Not a new favourite, but quite nice. I don’t think it’s suitable for having running in the background while doing something else, since, again, the visuals were what made the movie for me. I did like one theme of the soundtrack a lot: the one played when the extended family showed something impressive to the children – the reptile room, or that big window overlooking the lake.

Howl’s Moving Castle… Honestly, the story doesn’t hold up for me. It’s too soppy. I mean, Sofie gets turned into an old woman by a curse. A bit later she gets an offer from a demon that if she finds out the secret of the contract between that demon and Haoru (I guess that’s Howl in the English version), he will lift the curse. And then she never makes any attempt to find out; she’s too busy cleaning house, enjoying the scenery, pining after Haoru, and forming a family with Haoru’s apprentice, fetchmonkey, or whatever the little kid was.

Haoru didn’t seem very interesting, either,for my taste there were just too many questions left open.

The scenes showing the castle looked awesome, and I liked Calcifer the demon, but all in all I got the impression there were too many plot threads for the time.

This books contains Peanuts Snoopy strips dealing with writing, short articles from about 30 authors in which they share experiences or give tips to beginning or wannabe writers. Each of those has only a few pages, sometimes only one, dealing with a limited topic, so the book is good for people with a short attention span, too.

I have no idea how helpful this book is for writing, but it’s certainly fun to read. The comic strips deal with ideas, titles, puns, critics, cover letters, rejections and dark, stormy nights.

And here’s one strip for a teaser:

Blade of the Immortal 20

Oh, yay, the arc is over. Or possibly the entire series. It wasn’t bad, and I’m quite happy where it is now, so even if there’ll be more volumes, I probably won’t get them.

What drew me to it first was the apparently pencilled rather than inked art in some places, which vanished long ago, and for some reason the mix – some serious themes, some bloody stupid parody of fight-manga tropes (called attacks, whatnot), high violence in a relatively realistic style of art (well, compared to, say, One Piece) – doesn’t work that well for me.

Gargoyles # 7

So, Macbeth asks the Gargoyles to help him keep the Scone of Stone from being stolen. And other stuff, including relationship(drama).

This being the first issue that will be part of the second trade, it seems like it’s a setup for a new part-arc, trying to draw in new readers. Maybe. At least that’d be one possible reason for the jumble of flashbacks, flashforwards, stories being told, in short, panels with timestamps you needed to sort out, which I found confusing.

Mind, I need to re-read the series, after watching the TV series. Having missed some latter part of the second season, I think there’s a lot that’s going over my head in the comics.

One of the flashbacks did tickle my humour damn well – the third one in this post at scans_daily, which CONTAINS SPOILERS.

Other strong points include some very nice art on facial expressions, and the sheer “WTF?! Yay, funny!” of the last pages (which you can see if you follow the link above, at least as of this writing).

Over all, the art was nice. The “photoshopping pencils to look clean” worked way better than last issue, for one thing. The lineart may have even been a bit too light and thus lack variety for my taste, but that did look better than the very thick and blocky and rough in one of the early issues.

Gargoyles: Bad Guys #1

Again with the non-sequential story, as the above, but not that bad.

There’s some really goofy stuff involving a masked villain with a tasmanian tiger theme, and a nearly-as-goofy superhero, namely Dingo assisted by a nanotech AI serving as armour. They are later press-ganged/persuaded into some team (which was first shown, including them, on page 2; time-confusing, I tell you) by a woman calling herself a hunter.

Thankfully, the artist completely gave away one chance to highlight her arse in that fightscene. I guess the fact I noticed this mainly says something about what reading Marvel comics for a year or so did to my brain.

The art is black and white, with digital greytones, and in my opinion could do with a bit more variety in line-weight and a bit less of randomly switching shape of chins, but it does the job just fine. Nice work on some of the backgrounds, too.

I had started a dedicated blog on this topic, and this is the first post imported from it. Now I post everything on the topic under the tag “German(y|s) in media” here.

I read comics. I sometimes even read Superhero comics. I’m fed up with the following:

• Germany being depicted as “place where everyone lives in timber frame construction houses and wears lederhosen”, stuck a hundred years in the past.
• Roughly 9 of 10 German characters being villains.
• German language being usually completely butchered.

So, I’m going to point out this nonsense as I find it, serving the double purpose of letting me vent, and maybe, maybe helping someone out there avoiding factual errors. I will also point out comics that get things right, or at least not wrong, to see if things are really as bad as my current impression suggests.

I’m pretty sure other countries and languages are getting similar treatment, but I feel unable to accurately comment on those issues, so I’ll leave that to other people… Thought I might be the only nutcase interested in something like this.

For a start:

2 panels from Marvel Comic’s New X-Men #36 (published in 2007)

Yes, there are woodframe construction buildings in Germany – I even happen to live in one. It’s not the norm, though.

However, Lederhosen are completely ridiculous as “typically German”. First, they are “typical” for some parts of the Alps (parts of Bavaria, Switzerland, Austria, northern Italy).

Second, they are not everyday wear, but traditional costume. Ethnic. Folkloristic.

“Lederhosen” relate to “typically German” roughly like “traditional Native American costume” relates to “typical for the USA”.

It’s ridiculous, and not in a good way.