Gem From The Past

My friend A.P. Furtado sent me a link to this wonderful Vaughn Bode video dug out of the ancient foothills of the past. Its a real pleasure to watch him draw and listen to him talk about it. The quality is not great, but hey...this is what we have so love it or shut the hell up.

Bells

Walking at lunch I heard the very pleasing sound of a bell cutting through the earbud noise. Not a WAKE UP! bell, but a clinging, gonging, ringing sort of sound drifting through a gentle and persistent breeze. I was walking through the overgrown parking lot of a defunct manufacturing plant. The sound was coming from the vicinity just in front of the plant’s doors. There were three flagpoles (flags long gone). The lines were dangling and at the end of the lines were metal weights with hooks. It was these hooks, being peacefully swayed in the breeze, that were making contact with the hollow flagpoles and producing a nice musical tone.

Sometimes the world is kind and moving in a quiet sort of way.

Watch or Anchorwoman?

In this video we see President Bush working the crowd in Albania and at about :55 seconds into the clip his watch gets stolen. Pretty funny, and there is an actual debate over if this is true or not.

But isn't it more interesting - at least for some of us guys - that the anchorwoman who introduces the clip is really hot?

Just an observation.

On science news, Jerry Coyne slams Behe. God bless Pharyngula.

Naked As The Day You Were Born

If you were telling a tale set in the ancient, primordial world, why on earth would you have your characters wearing clothes? Especially if your characters predated human beings by so many million years?

I’ve struggled with this quite a bit. Yes, this is one of the many ways I wile away the hours in my head, considering the implications of drawing panel after panel of non-human-yet-anthropomorphic characters talking, running, and fighting in the nude. The point isn’t to be titillating, but realistic. A fur-covered character would have little use for clothing, right? And if we’re talking about a breed of people only marginally human in nature, why would we assume they’d have inherited our self-consciousness about our bodies?

I was listening to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “A Princess of Mars” audiobook recently. I recall reading “Back to the Stone Age” several times as an adolescent boy, plus “Tarzan of the Apes” at least twice. I also read “Pirates of Venus”, but for some reason never managed to read any of the John Carter of Mars series. Anyway, one of the things about Princess that struck me in the first few chapters was that John Carter was naked. And so were the Martians he encountered. I love this sort of primal, savage, barbaric stuff - though it really is the purest of male adolecent power fantasies. I mean John Carter has superpowers. Come on!

Anyway ERB didn’t describe genitalia. In comics – a visual art – it becomes much more difficult to simply leave something like that out. You have to make acrobatic efforts to hide the naughty bits with leaves or other objects and have your characters always standing or lying or sitting or leaping in such a way as to obscure the parts you don’t want the children to lay eyes on.

I confess I don’t understand what the fuss would be about. Big shocker, we all have peepees and hoohoos, for the most part. Yet for some damnable reason this Judeo-Christian nightmare of a moral dragnet makes it a veritable crime to acknowledge such a fact in something as boldfaced as a drawing without someone stamping it “Objectionable Material”. Its not that I want to draw buck naked beast men with large phalluses, hell I don’t even want to draw the phalluses at all. In fact, it would be a simple matter of having an appropriately thick and well placed tuft of hair to take care of that problem. My goal is not to create an erotic comic book, just a significantly primal one.

One of the problems are with breasts. I like breasts. They’re very nice. And if I design a female character in this alleged comic book who I want to be attractive (as much as a non-human could be to us, of course) I’d give her some breasts. Not beach ball bouncers, mind you, just a healthy pair any woman would call adequate. But I’m not going to draw a large tuft of hair to cover them up. How silly would that look? Some ancient intelligent creature with overtones of humanity running around with tufts of thick hair that just happen to coincide with the areas us modern humans are for some reason terrified to look upon…nah. No artificial bras, thank you. I suppose it would be a simple matter of checking the size (since drawing larger breasts = an obvious nod to male heterosexual desires…not that I haven’t done my fair share of it), and keeping those nipples very tame, or completely leaving them off. I mean, I don’t draw fingernails on every hand or eyelashes on every eye…why would I draw nipples on every breast unless I want you to look at the breasts? Since I’m not talking about an erotic comic, I don’t want you to focus on breasts. So maybe no nipples.

Its all so goddamn exciting, I tell you.

Hooligans of the GOP

I didn't catch the Republican presidential debate but I hear it was a mind-numbing doozy of a ignoramafest.

Take this gem from Brownback:

"While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man's origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as atheistic theology posing as science."

Best be praying to God and Shiva that this man never makes it to the Oval Office.

Jerry Coyne had a good response to some of this stuff at Edge.

We're not talking about space aliens, folks. Just basic evolution. A presidential candidate ought to at least know his ABCs.

Art, Life, and Evolution

I’m listening to Richard Dawkins’ “The Ancestor’s Tale”. Dawkins reminds me of an excitable child relating some event he found terribly fascinating. I like him. He’s kind of goofy sometimes, but I like his take on things.

Getting an MP3 player was a smart move. Time I normally spent listening to NPR or nothing at all is now spent listening to audiobooks or podcasts. And of course I can listen while I draw, which is fantastic.

Speaking of drawing, I’ve been having a lot of difficulty getting anything done this year. That’s right…this year. And last year too, I suppose. There are many reasons, discipline and drive being the main ones. But other reasons too. My life is fairly normal for an American male. I work 40+ a week, have a wife and child, and enjoy doing some things that don’t involve work or art. So my time is limited. That limited time combined with a natural tendency to meander creates an artist that is not largely well-suited to the professional life. In other words, I’m not pro material (“pro” meaning “comic book pro” specifically).

And that’s fine and dandy with me. In fact, I like the freedom I have. I like being able to do what I want when I want. What I dislike is leaving people hanging and constantly worrying about deadlines.

Lessons in the Trenches

Engaging in a protracted internet forum debate is both educational and monumentally wasteful. After a year of exchanging diatribes and messages on a local forum I’ve come to a few conclusions:

1 – I know less than I think but I know a surprising amount I didn’t even realize. When you go into an argument with only half the facts you’re gong to make silly mistakes and you’re gong to look like a fool. But doing so will invariably strengthen your ability to recognize your own weaknesses, and it will help you figure out just what it is you wanted to say in the first place.

2 – There are strange people in the world. Even locally the mix of opinions is diverse, although heavily…dangerously…frighteningly skewed in one direction. In any local sampling you will encounter people with beliefs and opinions so utterly at odds with everything you thought was true in the universe that it will scare the bejeezus out of you. Still, some people will surprise you with little nuggets of wisdom you didn’t know they possessed.

3 – Sacred cows really are sacred and you’d better watch your ass when slaughtering them. When I engage in an open discussion about something meaningful I do it just like I would with anything else. So sometimes I may say things that are rather harsh about something rather delicate. This tends to irritate people so much they will shut down any attempt to have an open discussion. This is a hard lesson and one that makes me feel kind of like Carl on Slingblade because I reckon I don’t understand it.

4 – People are fragile. Even over the internet they can get their feelings hurt and you end up in something akin to a drama situation. This is not good. Don’t get into that territory.

5 – Negativity is not good. Spending too much time as the guy who argues from the other side will get you into a mindset that is not healthy. Personally I’d rather be creating something than destroying something. But when you’re the only square guy in a room full of ovals who want to build oval doorways you really do run the risk of being the naysayer. Its challenging, its even important, and it can be fulfilling. But it is also rife with the slippery slopes that lead to constant negativity. Beware.

So, after having come to these conclusions a year later I've moved on from this particular mix of folks. There's only so much you can say or do before it gets tiresome, right?

Still, these topics are important. This is my town. I have a two-year-old son who will depend on his mom and dad to pave a clean way for him to learn and grow. At some point I may have to take on some of these people in a more public fashion, possibly in terms of schooling. Oh joy!