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

eisnered

wonderland got a nomination in the penciller/inker category! ... the full list:

* Mark Buckingham/Steve Leialoha, Fables (Vertigo/DC)
* Tony Harris/Tom Feister, Ex Machina(WildStorm/DC)
* Niko Henrichon, Pride of Baghdad (Vertigo/DC)
* Michael Lark/Stefano Gaudiano, Daredevil (Marvel)
* Sonny Liew, Wonderland (SLG)
* Steven McNiven/Dexter Vines, Civil War (Marvel)

i'm guessing Niko or the award  though i've only browsed through POB... time to visit the bookstore :p its mad exciting to be on the shortlist in any case though :p

muzak

Recent news that apple is going to stop their copyright protection nonsense for songs bought off i tunes should be great news, except its not, if your living in the far east.

Cos they won't accept credit card payments from outside the US and Europe, so you can't buy anything off the i tunes shop. The same for napster. Russian sites are dirt cheap but their legality remains questionable. The Creative download store is local and legal but requires you to install a new programme on your pc in order to download songs.

Its ludricous how much time music companies spend protecting their copyrights and going after piracy over here whilst making it so difficult for consumers to buy songs legally even when they want to.

so i say: go do a jolly roger, ahoy matey and shiver me timbers, life's too short.

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the guardian had a good article on copyright today:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2051729,00.html

updates

what i've been up to for the past couple of months:

- continuing work on SLG's Wonderland. Its been fun but i wish disney would have been nicer to dan in the trade negotiations. silly mice!

- trying to start up an anthology featuring southeast asian artists.

- getting all worked up about a postal delay for my Spectrum entry. It turned out to be OK.

- proofing the Re-gifters, part of DC's new Minx line, with Mike Carey and Marc Hempel. Its finally out in July!

- getting ready to start on something with First Second Books, who've released some amazing books, not least good ol' Lat's Kumpung Boy.

- getting chicken pox and not being able to play footie :p

First Entry

I've always wondered what to write on a blog. I had one where I pasted news on robots but that was about it.