My drawings not gone so great today so I did this quick sketch of Philip K Dick instead. I need to think of some new ideas for stories so I'm a bit stuck until they come.
I'm bored today so I thought I would start a new and exciting feature on my blog - Films for Friday! Where I will pointlessly talk about some films for a bit. Hurrah.
'The East is Red'. If you are only going to watch one Maoist Chinese Opera performance this year, make it 'The East is Red'. It's really very flash! At one stage a tank rolls onto the stage, and at the end you can see Mao himself in the audience clapping away happily. The dancing and acrobatics is second to none and it has a great rendition of 'The Internationale' as a happy musical number. Maybe this should be Andrew Lloyd Webber's follow up to 'We Will Rock You'?
'Phantom of the Toilet' sounds like it would be a great film! Sadly the knocked off copy of it I bought in Hong Kong is blank. Maybe it's better to never see it and not spoil the dream...
I got the great big 'Multiforce' book this week from Good Grief. It's a brilliant book! Here's a very interesting review of it by Frank Santoro that talks about it a lot better than I could. Well worth going and getting it. It's the first time in a long while I've especially gone to a comics shop to buy a comic they have just got in, before they are all gone. Must be five or six years...
I've been drawing away at 'The Ballad of Hatty Jack' for the last week or so. I'm on page 10 now out of (hopefully) 11. It will be my story for 'Gin Palace' but I'll split it into two parts so it doesn't seem too long.
I've just finished reading the two next books in this great series. Book 4 ends with the 1999 New Year almost upon the heroes and the evil plans of the Friends about to come to fruition. What's going to happen? Then suddenly book 5 jumps to 2014 where Kanna (who is a little kid in the earlier books) is grown up and now becomes the main character, and apparently the last hope of the world...
I didn't like it as much as his other book I've read, 'Tekkonkinkreet', but that's one of my favourite books of all, so it would be very difficult to compare. It's very realistic compaired to that, instead of the wonderful Treasure City from Tekkonkinkreet its set in a very real highschool in Japan. It's about a kid who can see monsters everywhere. Everyone else at school (except the old friendly caretaker/ gardener) thinks he's just a weirdo and keeps away from him, except for a new kid who becomes his friend, sort of. It's very lovely drawing and I'll definately be re-reading it a bunch of times in the future to look at the art more, as the first time I read it I was trying to follow the story. I was worrying too that something horrible was going to happen as it's quite dark and there's a huge sense of foreboding hanging over the tale.
I got the new Crumb book for Christmas off my brother. I enjoyed it no end, the drawing is brilliant as you would expect. Crumb really doesn't leave anything out (as it says on the cover 'All 50 Chapters') so I must admit I skipped through the many pages of thingy begot thingy, and his sons were... Crumb does a lovely job of making up the hundreds of different faces for these chapters, all individuals, but they are still just lists of names really. He doesn't do anything satirical or change much as he goes along, just kind of illustrates the stories, which are really weird when you re-read them again. I thought his notes at the end were good too, he has done lots of research and has read some interesting ideas about the stranger bits, which don't make much sense when you read them straight from the text.
Dave Hughes has done a cool 5 page story for the 'Gin Palace' anthology called 'Little Scary Monsters'. There's a drawing from it above.
Wow, this might well have been on my books of the year list except I got it on New Years Eve and have only just read it. I'll definately be reading it over and over again in little bits. It's a copy of Josh Cotter's sketchbook I guess, or it's made to look like that anyhow. A moleskin type sketchbook with rounded corners and inside covers and that. There's several pages of dense tiny text that doesn't make much sense but it's lovely words and makes a kind of poem, and as you read the book it seems to fit with it and make some sense of what's going on.
Ant Mercer has done a one page story and is finishing off another two page story.
Jarod Rosello has done a great three page story called 'The Rain'. Here's a link to his website.
