Gaze into the Fist of Dredd!

two arts books from kinokuniya: The Art of Brian Bolland and a book of paintings by  Tetsuya Ishida.

Ishida (http://fullofroses.blogspot.com/2006/09/tetsuya-ishida.html) died aged 31 in 2005, leaving behind 180 paintings that mixed self-portraiture with surrealism and social commentary; endlessly downbeat but arresting images.

Brian Bolland I first encountered reading 2000AD and the Killing Joke way back when. The book collects his works from his teenage years to the present and his reflections on his career were instructional and inspiring.

Bolland was at last year's SD comic con, where I wanted very badly to shake his hand and tell him how big a role he played in making me want to draw comics growing up. But comic-con is huge and getting from the SLG booth to his was a long trek, plus the queue was outrageous so I ended up passing a couple of comics and a note to above effect to his assistant which I don't know if he ever read :p

More than that though I wonder about rapports and friendships amongst artists. Bolland, Grant Morrision, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons et al... they were brought together by their love of comics, and became a community of sorts offering mutual support, competition and inspiration. Maybe a sense of mission too.

It's something I wonder if i'll ever find, a meeting of minds,  lifelong friendships struck over conversations about comics and stories we can't wait to tell. I don't know if it's a matter of fortune or the shape of my own personality. A little of each, maybe, perhaps. And maybe the important thing is to be creating comics, whatever else transpires :p

Manga Manga!

Bought a bunch of mandarin translated manga today. Pick of the lot is Inoue Takehiko's "Real", which i think is a step up from his samurai series "Vagabond", maybe more grounded in reality, maybe avoiding the shadow of Hiroaki Samura. The scene where the paralysed protagonist gets his first bath at the hospital was handled quite brilliantly.

Well my chinese is pretty hopeless so mostly i just skip the words and look at the pictures. Its a shame in a way but my excuse is it allows me to focus on the visual storytelling :p

Also arriving in the mail soon, hopefully, will be a couple of artbooks from the anime Tekkon Kinkreet (http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/tekkonkinkreet/index.html). Haven't seen the movie but the original manga was great and page previews of the artbooks look amazing. Also dvds of Mind Game and Fooly Kooly. Its manga week! :)

soccer rant

I never quite understand it when pundits talk about the 'lottery of the penalty shoot out". That implies that nothing but luck is involved. If this were so a bunch of five year olds would have an even chance of beating Brazil in a penalty shoot out. Clearly this is absurd.

Maybe they mean that skill, composure, reflexes, training and so on are all involved, but then so is luck. This is true but makes it nothing like a lottery.

Perhaps its the idea that when you pitch two evenly matched sides together and neither can win in normal time, winning the the shoot out is a matter of fortune since every other factor has been set as equal (hence 'evenly matched'). This is more persuasive, except how else exactly would you separate two such sides, if not through luck?

By that logic, any game between two evenly matched sides could be described as a lottery, whether its won in regulation time, extra time or penalties.

In any case: Liverpool 1 Chelsea 1 (Liverpool 4-1 on penalties)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=KUARniPvvTU