kate

Dear Prudence, 3 June 2013:

Q. Heartbreak, USA: I am considering having a child with my married ex-boyfriend. We recently reconnected and have spent time together, without things going too far. I still love him and he claims he never stopped loving me. After our breakup I cut all ties, but knew of the marriage through mutual friends. After seven years, he sought me out. It was great catching up with him because I really missed our friendship. I don’t want to cause issues in his current relationship. However, my clock is ticking and he is the only man I’ve ever considered being a parent with. I’m getting older and I’m in a great place with my career and finances. I date, but no one seriously. I want to start a family, and I know my ex will be a great dad. If he agrees to start a family with me, I am even willing to keep the baby’s paternity a secret. I know this is inappropriate, but it doesn’t necessarily feel “wrong." How out of line would it be to bring this up with him?

Dear Heartbreak USA,

What more could a child ask for than a mother so dedicated to parenting that she would be willing to generously sacrifice someone else’s relationship to bring a beautiful baby who can never be told who its father is into the world?

Would that all children could be raised by someone as selfless and thoughtful as you—after all, you don’t want to cause issues in your married ex-boyfriend’s relationship by having a secret baby with him, which means there’s no way you could cause any issues in your married ex-boyfriend’s relationship just by having a secret baby with him! Bam! It’s that easy. 

The reason this doesn’t feel “wrong" to you is that it isn’t—because it’s something you desire, and the things you desire can never be wrong, particularly since the only physically possible way for you to have the child you so clearly deserve is to have it with this married guy who called you up after seven years and claims to have loved you the whole time except he accidentally married someone else, because he is a super stand-up dude and a straight-shooter.

And hey, if getting pregnant by a man you’ve spent seven years secretly mooning over means he’s permanently yoked to you via a child, that’s just a silly fun little bonus! You totally just want a baby! Any baby! By any means necessary but specifically by the means of your married ex-boyfriend’s godsperm, you know, no big deal, it’s all about the baby!

Do this, because if you don’t, the world will never forgive you, the best candidate for motherhood of all time.

If there’s anything that can both dazzle my senses and make me crave Oreos, it’s this 90-second animation for Oreo’s new “Wonderfilled” campaign, directed by Martin Allais and his production company Studio Animal. Animated to a jaunty tune performed by Owl City, the spot is filled with wonderfully stylized animation, a fantastic sense of design, fun transitions, and eye-popping colors from beginning to end. And much like the classic commercials of yesteryear, it makes me WANT to buy the product it’s selling.

CREDITS
Global Marketing Communication:  Jill Baskin
Brand Marketing Director: Janda Lukin

Agency Credits
Chief Creative Officer: Joe Alexander
Group Creative Director: Jorge Calleja
Creative Director: David Muhlenfeld
Creative Director: Magnus Hierta
Senior Art Director: Brig White
Planning Director: John Gibson
Managing Director: Steve Humble
Senior Broadcast Producer: Kathy Lippincott
Broadcast Producer: Heather Tanton
Broadcast Junior Producer: Caroline Helms

Production Company: Studio Animal
Director: Martin Allais
Producer: Maria Soler Chopo
Illustration: Martin Allais
Storyboards: Martin Allais
Animatic: Pere Hernández, Javi Vaquero, Matt Deans
Animator: Pere Hernández, Javi Vaquero, Pablo Navarro, Dani Alcaraz
Tracing and color:Ezequiel Cruz, Macarena Ortega, Eva Puyuelo, Joel Morales
Compositing: Santi Justribó Martin Allais

Music
Music (performed by): Owl City (Adam Young)
Voiceover talent: Owl City (Adam Young)
Original Music and Lyrics: David Muhlenfeld (English Major, LLC)

Just two months after Disney cancelled the Cartoon Network series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, they have announced a new series called Star Wars Rebels. The show will debut on the Disney Channel as a one-hour special in 2014, before continuing as a regular series on Disney XD. The show will be set during the two-decade timespan between Episode III and IV, at a time when “the Empire is securing its grip on the galaxy and hunting down the last of the Jedi Knights as a fledgling rebellion against the Empire is taking shape.”

Dave Filoni, who was supervising diretor on Clone Wars, will head up the production as exec producer. He will be joined by Clone Wars veterans Kilian Plunkett (Art Director) and Joel Aron (CG Supervisor), as well as some fresh faces:

Leading the development of the series is a creative team of exceptional talent. Screenwriter/producer Simon Kinberg (X-Men: First Class, Sherlock Holmes, Mr. & Mrs. Smith) is an executive producer on Star Wars Rebels and will write the premiere episode. He is joined by Dave Filoni as executive producer, who served as supervising director of the Emmy nominated Star Wars: The Clone Wars since 2008. Executive producer Greg Weisman brings with him a wealth of animation experience with credits such as Young Justice, The Spectacular Spider-Man and Gargoyles.

Doug TenNapel, creator of games like Earthworm Jim and The Neverhood and the TV series Catscratch, is crowdfunding a new clay-animated stop motion game called Armikrog. He’s working with Mike Dietz and Ed Schofield of Pencil Test Studios, his animation collaborators on earlier games, to create a point-and-click adventure game for PC, Mac OSX and Linux.

In the game, you control the adventures of “a space explorer named Tommynaut and his blind alien, talking dog named Beak-Beak [who] crash land on a weird planet and end up locked in a mysterious fortress called Armikrog.” TenNapel’s Kickstarter goal is to raise $900,000 in 30 days, and the production has already received over $11,000 in a little over one hour of campaign time.

Following the misadventures of a family of fourth generation super scientists and the villains and associates they have picked up along the way, Adult Swim’s The Venture Bros., created by Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick, has been treating its fans to an intelligent pastiche of adventure fiction and the teen sleuth genre since 2004. With each passing season, the popular animated series, which exposes the bleak future of boy detectives and the failed dreams of the 1960s space race, adds to a constantly evolving collection of characters from the male-dominated catalog of secret agents, boy geniuses and action figures.

Women however, are frequently portrayed as, albeit appropriately for the tone of the program, cynical sex workers, emotionally disturbed shut-ins and hapless bystanders. However, there are a handful of female characters, all of which that walk the line of masculinist fantasy and post-feminist strength, that have risen to the top as fan favorites. For those of you who need a refresher before The Venture Bros. returns for its fifth season tonight at midnight, here’s a recap of the show’s previous seasons through the eyes of these sometimes misunderstood, always popular ladies of the Venture-verse.

Dr. Girlfriend
Occupation: Number Two for The Mighty Monarch
AKA: Lady Au Pere, Queen Etheria, Dr. Fiancee, Dr. Mrs. The Monarch
First Appearance: Episode 101: Dia De Los Dangerous!
The lover/second in command for Dr. Venture’s relentless arch-nemesis, The Monarch, and the most prominent of all the female characters in the series, she has had a string of male bosses intent on exploiting her sexuality rather than take advantage of her professional acumen and top level efficiency. Due to her bass-y, gravel inflected voice her actual gender is called into question on numerous occasions, including rumors that she is MTF with a surgically implanted baboon’s uterus.

In Episode 102, Mid-Life Chrysalis she goes undercover for The Monarch to seduce Dr. Venture and infect him with a deadly serum, only to ultimately be slut-shamed by her boyfriend and driven back into the arms of her old boss, Phantom Limb. After some soul searching, she and The Monarch reunite and are granted duo-ship by the evil-doers bureaucracy The Guild of Calamitous Intent. It appears that their villainous bliss is put in jeopardy when in, episode 414, Assisted Suicide, she makes out with Henchmen #24, but when The Monarch finds out, he simply shrugs it off, pointing out that bad guys are pretty much all swingers.

Sally Impossible
AKA: The Visible Woman
First Appearance: Episode 109: Ice Station: Impossible
Rival scientist, Professor Impossible’s long oppressed wife, she is kept hidden from the outside world and her husband’s investors due to her invisible skin — a result of one of his laboratory accidents. Trapped in a loveless marriage and desperate for sexual intimacy she is constantly looking for a way out through the few men she comes in contact with, like in episode 205, 20 Years to Midnight where she mistakes Dr. Venture’s self-serving behavior for affection and desire to rescue her from her imprisonment.

Eventually, by episode 309, Now Museum – Now You Don’t, she is living with Dr. Venture’s parasitic twin brother, JJ, on Spider Skull Island as part of his defense team. Her absence from her husband’s life drives him into a deep depression and leaves him in such a low emotional state he can be recruited into the new evil guild, The Revenge Society as seen in episode 411, Every Which Way But Zeus.

Molotov Cocktease
Occupation: Siberian Mercenary
Group Affiliation: The Black Hearts
First Appearance: Episode 104: Eeney, Meeney, Miney… Magic!
A deadly opponent of the Venture family’s bodyguard/nanny, Brock Samson, the two are locked in a pre-coital tête-à-tête that, due to her titanium-clad chastity belt, she ultimately always wins. She is truly the only woman he has ever loved, which is proven in episode 207, Assassinanny, where she discovers while babysitting the Venture family in Samson’s absence, that he kept her eye as a memento.

Publick and Hammer make up for Molotov’s shameful underuse in the show by weaving her into major plot points in the most clandestine of ways; take for example episode 313, The Family That Slays Together, Stays Together, pt. 2, when she stages an elaborate assassination attempt on Samson in order to guarantee success for her own mercenary squad, The Black Hearts. In the season 4 finale, Operation P.R.O.M she reveals that while she is no longer chaste, her heart belongs to her new boyfriend, Monstroso and she lets herself fall to her apparent death rather than stay with Brock.

Triana Orpheus
Known Relatives: Dr. Byron Orpheus (father) Tatyana (mother)
First Appearance: Episode 104: Eeney, Meeney, Miney… Magic!
The daughter of the magical Dr. Orpheus, she and her father rent an apartment on the Venture property after her mother left them for a young necromancer named The Outrider. She is unaware that, because of her father’s involvement in the dark arts, her own sanity is teetering on the brink of instability, this is made most clear in episode 204, Escape to the House of Mummies where he alludes to having to wipe her memory every time she goes into her bedroom closet, which is actually a porthole to “the burning nowhere”.

When faced with a future of being married to Dean and mothering his deformed offspring in episode 407, The Better Man she decides to go and live with her mother, where she finds a new boyfriend, a dreamboat paraplegic named Raven.

Colonel Hunter Gathers
Occupation: Secret Agent
First Appearance: Episode 207: Assassinanny
Brock Samson’s government agent mentor, after dedicating his life to the secret agency OSI, he undergoes gender reassignment surgery to escape assassination after he goes AWOL.

He is frequently seen providing professional and spiritual guidance to Samson in flashbacks and, in the case of episode 211, Showdown at Cremation Creek, pt 1, a peyote induced fever dream. After spending some time working undercover as an exotic dancer and in an all-female mercenary squad, it is later revealed that he had been undercover for the splinter terrorist group S.P.H.I.N.X. all along, where Samson rejoins him as his charge. Though he is no longer living life as a woman (from the waist up, anyway) he reveals in episode 415, The Silent Partners that he misses his breasts: “Inside of me there’s a woman screaming to be heard!”

The Venture Bros. season five debuts on Sunday, June 2, at midnight on Adult Swim.

Every decade or so, there is talk of an animation museum in the United States, and while none has ever been built, two new museums on the horizon promise to be a pretty big deal for the film and animation communities.

The Lucas Cultural Arts Museum and the Academy Museum will hopefully be two huge steps forward in the preservation and public education of filmmaking. These forthcoming institutions also serve as a reminder that film museums present a set of wholly unique challenges for the curators, designers and developers involved.

To see the world’s most famous paintings and sculptures, you have to go to a museum. The world’s most famous films, however, can be seen at a movie theater. Therefore, any film or animation museum has to offer a richer experience that brings the audience closer to the filmmaking process. In doing this, five major challenges—aside from financial ones—arise for the film museum.

1. Exhibiting the Filmmaking Process

When was the last time you heard of a museum exhibition on the making of  the Mona Lisa? Or Michelangelo’s David? The processes behind the most famous paintings, drawings or sculptures are rarely revealed in museums. The curators, in fact, function under the assumption that patrons have a general understanding of how to paint and sculpt. A film, on the other hand, is created through the joint effort of hundreds of people, each with a specific job that isn’t necessarily understood by the general public. Directors, prop masters, animators, costumers, layout artists, grips—all of these roles must be defined by a film museum in such a way that anyone, from a child to an adult, could understand. This requires infinite amounts of primary research from curators, while producing a huge headache for exhibition designers.

It’s not as simple as hanging a few character model sheets onto a wall—film museums have to explain the jobs of character designers and visual development artists, and how they contribute to the final product. This explanation usually involves text, supporting photographs and film clips displayed on monitors. Creating this educational experience is worthwhile, but demands careful planning and coordination.

2. Ephemera

The products that result from making movies—costumes, props, masks, storyboards, paints, sketches, scripts—are not made to last. They are only made to survive the time it takes to produce the final cut of the film. If these objects even survive, which is often thanks to a sentimental crew member, they present major conservation challenges that are sometimes impossible to overcome. Background sketches, for example, are often created on newsprint, a non-archival paper that quickly yellows with time. Old reels of 35mm film are at risk of fading, molding or even catching fire. Yoda, a 30-year-old animatronic puppet, is notoriously known as the ultimate conservator’s nightmare. His latex body practically melts with time, degrading further with each instance he is moved from storage to display. With film ephemera, there isn’t much conservators can do besides wear white gloves, use temperature-controlled storage, and try their best to stave off deterioration.

3. Programming

The majority of museums dedicated to film have screening rooms, therefore they need thoughtful, exciting programming that pulls in a wide range of audiences. Typically, this is where animation gets the shaft; if shown, animation is often billed as a daytime family-oriented event. It is paramount for these museums to have the foresight of an adept curator who knows how to balance rare, niche screenings with crowd pleasers.

4. Going Digital

While leaving a film to deteriorate on 35mm stock is obviously a bad idea, digital transfers are temporary fixes. Discs, USB keys, and any device that stores data are ultimately not stable, at least not by a curation standard. As more filmmakers produce digital work, museums will struggle with concerns over proper storage and care. This is a universal problem at the moment, affecting any institution that collects digital formats. Fortunately, there are whole college majors devoted to the study and development of best practices for digital archiving.

5. Myth

It’s hard to imagine any visual art that must contend with as big of a unified myth as film. The lore of Hollywood is irrevocably intertwined with film, a relationship that affects the design and architecture of the museum itself.  The Academy Museum, for example, is building a multimedia exhibition that lets visitors “walk the red carpet.” While any film museum, especially one based in Los Angeles with connected donors, must pay homage to Hollywood, it’s easy for these institutions to get bogged down in all the related tropes: red velvet curtains, wall sconces that look like film reels, potted palm trees, and vintage movie signs. All these symbols are iconic and recognized by a mass audience, but museums have to know when to put on the brakes and let the art of filmmaking, not the nostalgia surrounding it, speak for itself.

Images in this post:

1. Proposed rendering of the Academy Museum


2. UPA Exhibit at MoMA, 1955
3. Walt Disney Family Museum, permanent collection
4. Barry McGee Show at Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2013 (photo by Greg Cook)
5. Stanley Kubrick Exhibit at LACMA, 2012-2013
6. Tim Burton Exhibit at MoMA, 2010

“I have a computer that is neither on nor off.”

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Client response to what was wrong with their website

Quentin Blake, one of the most beloved illustrators of all time, was one of the speakers at this year’s Hay Festival, speaking on the importance of visual and verbal storytelling. And, thanks to event sponsors The Telegraph, you can read the whole transcript of his festival lecture by following this link right here.

It’s filled with interesting thoughts, but of special note is a section where he addresses those who try to argue down the value of illustrations and cartoons in telling stories. And especially, the importance of visual storytelling in providing children with an invaluable bridge across into the world of fiction. He advises said critics of the following story:

Tom spends a lot of time fooling around on planks, and ladders, and bridges, and barrels in alleys and his aunt decides that fooling around looks too much like playing. So she sends for Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen, and Tom has to play them at Womble, Muck and Sneedball. Needless to say his fooling around has given him real skills, and he wins them all.

Which, aside from making one want to pick up a copy of the story in question - How Tom Beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen, by Russell Hoban – also offers a succinct look at how very silly things can help inform very serious education. The speech also pulls up another wonderful quote, from the poet Michael Rosen:

When I read this book to my small son, I am reading one story and he is reading another.

Comics inherently feature two modes of storytelling – to what extent does one live beyond the other? And to what extent are current comics making the most of the visual and verbal aspects of the medium?

Brian Wood and Olivier Coipel’s X-Men #1 came out to much fanfare and awesome critical acclaim.  I reviewed it last week on CBR and Sue and I interviewed Wood on 3 Chicks last week as well. But really, that’s not enough. Nope. In my excitement for and about this title and what a long time [...]

When you can show someone the inside of your head, there’s no going back.

While out promoting his two new books, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, out on June 18th from William Morrow and Fortunately, the Milk, out on September 17 from HarperCollins, Neil Gaiman gave a talk at this year’s Book Expo of America on the subject of why fiction is so dangerous.

Read the highlights from his speech below, which include the very dark real-life event that inspired Ocean at the End of the Lane, the revelation of a family that hides inside many of his works, and exactly why fiction is so dangerous.

[“I was seven and nobody told me.”]

The idea for Neil Gaiman’s forthcoming kids book Fortunately, the Milk began “because I felt guilty about dads.” The author related an anecdote about raising his first child, his son Michael, and how one of his utterances as a young 4 year old inspired The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish. While Gaiman is very proud of the story and its popularity, he realized that in a lot of cases this story—where a dad is swapped for fish—ends up being given to dads by their kids!

So to give the dads of the world a story where they’re not shuffled away, Gaiman wrote Fortunately, the Milk, which chronicles one father’s heroic efforts to get home with some milk despite (or in thanks to) the best efforts of aliens and time traveling dinosaurs. The book itself came together in little moments here and there, as Neil essentially only worked on it when he needed to cheer himself up with something light and fun.

The author is very pleased with how the book came out and was effusive about Skottie Young, the artist, “If you ever want someone who can draw a time traveling stegosaurus in a hot air balloon, Skottie is your man! This may happen to some of you.”

His forthcoming adult novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane began as a longhand short story, then a novelette, then a novella. When Neil typed it up, though, he found that the word count actually made it a novel!

The seed for the story was planted years ago, when the author’s father came to visit him in Minnesota in 2003. Gaiman the younger was showing off his new car, a Mini Cooper, and Gaiman the elder pointed out that the new Minis didn’t look much like the ones from the 1960s, prompting Neil to remember a white Mini that the family drove when Neil was a kid.

When asked why the family got rid of the Mini, Neil’s father related a story about how at the time the family had taken in a South African lodger who had smuggled a lot of money out of his home nation; money from several South African families that was meant to be invested in British banks. Instead of investing it, however, the lodger lost it all at a casino in Brighton. Overwhelmed with shame, the next morning the lodger took the Gaiman family’s Mini, drove it to the end of the lane, and committed suicide in it. “That was my lane! I was seven and nobody told me. And that was sort of the beginning point.”

That story combined with a tale he had heard as a child that the farm down the lane from the Gaiman household had been surveyed by William the Conqueror and was 1000 years old. “At some point in my head they became called the Hempstocks. I don’t recall why. I put some Hempstocks into Stardust, just to show that I could. And in the Graveyard Book Liza Hempstock is there, and part of the Hempstock family, and related to Daisy Hempstock [of The Ocean at the End of the Lane].”

Gaiman found the impetus to finally write a story about the Hempstocks as a way of conveying to his wife Amanda Palmer what the world was like to him when he was seven. She was in Melbourne, Australia working for four months, and he missed her and this was a way for him to send a part of himself, an important part, to her.

The story evolved as it grew. “[Writing this] was like driving at night with one headlight out in thick fog. I could only just see where it was going.” The book ultimately became about what it feels like to take refuge in books and our relation to fiction.

As his “Why Fiction is Dangerous” Book Expo of America talk continued, Gaiman came back around to addressing the title question. Non-fiction, the author began, was dangerous in an obvious way because it taught you how to do things directly, the consequences of which are just as obvious.

Fiction, however, “shows you that the world doesn’t have to be like the one that you live in. Which is an incredibly dangerous thing for the world.” He related a story about being at a science fiction convention in China in 2007 and asking one of the government officials assigned to watch over the proceedings why China was now allowing such a convention. The official answered that while China has a worldwide reputation for being excellent at constructing things that others bring to them, China is not considered inventive or innovative. Through outreach to huge American tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, the Chinese government discovered that a lot of the individuals in those companies grew up reading science fiction. That, essentially, they were told at a young age that the world wasn’t static, that they could change it, that they could introduce new concepts and inventions.

Thereafter, The Chinese government relaxed their control over science fiction stories, and those stories began immediately seeping in to their culture.

Gaiman then took a break to answer questions from the audience. Check out the entire talk below. (The Q&A, not chronicled here, begins 30 minutes in if you’re curious.)

Never thought the day would come that I would be reposting a comic from Dinosaur Comics on Dueling Analogs. What’s next, Homestuck?

Hub, a cable channel for kids owned by Discovery and Hasbro, is hoping its new cartoon “SheZow” can turn the channel’s fortunes around.

Hub has struggled to gain viewers since its debut in 2010, but it’s betting a 12-year-old boy named “Guy” who transforms into a female superhero, complete with a purple skirt and cape, pink gloves and white go-go boots, will change that.

To become a female superhero, Guy uses his magic ring and says the words “You go girl!”

Amazingly, this is not an Onion story, but a plan to boost ratings for the Hub, a joint venture of Hasbro and Discovery Communications (Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, etc.) that mostly broadcasts cartoons. The channel has successes with My Little Pony and Transformers but needs a non-Hasbro hit.

Maybe it will be SheZow. The trailer suggests that the boy-girl dichotomy will be clothed in the basest of stereotypes, but surely the actual show will stand those on its head with a more subtle exploration of gender and identity.

Yeah, right.

Gender switching was the basis of Rumiko Takahashi’s hugely popular Ranma 1/2 manga and anime, about a boy who can change into a girl and back by dousing himself with water of different temperatures. And of course, manga where a youngster must disguise him or herself as the opposite sex is a whole genre to itself. (Link to scanlation site deleted even though no legit site has as good a resource.)

Whether SheZow will continue this tradition or just fall on its face, will soon be revealed. SheZow has been airing in Canada without any obvious adverse effects, and debuts on the Hub on June 1st.

Prediction: based on the number of weird images from deviantART I found while googling for an image of SheZow, it has that demographic nailed.

RJ Palmer has just released a poster version of all the Pokémon featured in his first season of the Realistic Pokémon series. The image is really awesome. Unfortunately, the maximum image size that can cleanly appear on Dueling Analogs is 750px wide and that definitely does not do it justice. So make sure to check out the image on his deviantART page where you can actually view it at full resolution.

May 4, 2013 marked the second anniverary of Free Comic Book Day in the Netherlands. An American institution which I’ve participated in for over a decade now, I was amazed last year to see it brought over to other countries as well.

This year the full selection of free comics was raised from 7 to 10, far less variety than what was offered in the US, but at the same time had many of the charms and stylistic tendencies associated with European comics (even if they may not have been made in Europe!). The comic book store owners I did talk to all seemed to make it a point to tell me that they lose money participating in Free Comic Book Day, and urged me to buy something alongside. In my opinion, this kind of goes against the spirit of Free Comic Book Day in the sense that it isn’t supposed to be a guilt trip, but it might just be a difference in population/costs/other factors which make it not as sustainable as the American FCBD.

Sadly I am mostly illiterate in Dutch so I can’t really talk about the quality of narrative, but I can at least talk about some of the comics which caught my eye, or which most likely would catch yours.

Probably of greatest interest to people would be the Game of Thrones comic, adapted by Tommy Patterson, and actually available in English. I have not read A Song of Ice and Fire, nor have I seen the HBO Game of Thrones, so in terms of accuracy or spirit I can’t really say anything. At the very least the art is vibrant, and I like it way more than Patterson’s previous work on series like Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Next is Sienna, by Desberg, Filmore, and Chetville, about a female government agent. “Sexy women of action” as far as I’ve seen is quite a popular genre here, at least in terms of comics made, and this one takes a more mature and dramatic angle. The art is quite nice, and there’s plenty of violence and (I assume) conspiracy. You can see a small preview here.

De Verborgen Geschiedenis (“The Hidden History”) by Pécau, Kordey, and Chuckry stands out immediately just because of the camel on the cover. As far as I can tell (and please correct me if I’m wrong), the comic appears to mainly be about what its title implies: some mix of conspiracy and secrecy spanning decades. Like both Sienna and even Game of Thrones, it goes for a more serious art style. There’s also a prominent English (?) female military officer in this issue whose name I can’t find. With a prominent scar on her face, she  toes the line between sexy and legitimately frightening (more the latter), as her expressions go from cold to menacing throughout the comic. Overall, she comes across as like a female Golgo 13, especially because one scene has her casually waking up surrounded by a pile of naked bodies both male and female.

The last one I want to point is De Legendariërs by Patrick Sobral, due to its overt stylistic influence from anime and manga. Unlike the other three, this one has much more light-hearted feel. Its super-deformed characters and fantasy setting give me the impression of a pre-Playstation Japanese RPG. In fact, the characters look more like a late-80s/90s anime characters instead of current ones anyway, which really harkens back to that era. Anyway, the villain is named “Darkhell.”

So that’s a (very) cursory view of Free Comic Book Day 2013 in the Netherlands. Take my opinions with a grain of salt here, as I can’t give you a true impression of any of them.

And I must ask, for those of you who can read French or Dutch and picked some of these up, which ones impressed you the most?

Giant... freaky... birds.

If you're a fan of classic fantasy stories then this is for you...

That poster you see is the teaser for the upcoming animated film adaptation of Tad Willaims' "Tailchaser's Song".  It's an epic fantasy that is told through the eyes of a society of cats.  If you're rolling your eyes, please don't.  It's an enchanting tail, um tale about a particular cat that has to go on a quest to find out the who is killing cats.  It's sweet and haunting, involving cat gods, strange worlds and bizarre adventures.  Crazy, beautiful stuff.  It's been described as "Watership Down with cats", but that doesn't do the story justice.

Animetropolis Productions along with IDA and EFG-Renascence are in the process of animating it right now, so it'll probably be out around 2015, although there's no official release date yet.  But if the animation is good then this film could be a great film.  They already have great source material that is epic.

Not every animated film can start off with a great story, but this one does/can...

Hat Tip to Ain't It Cool.

Sometimes you like a webcomic because it tells a story you can’t find anywhere else. Sometimes you like a webcomic because it’s NONSENSE.

Vectorbelly is the second one, as far as I can tell. One of the smartest thing about webcomics – and this is something which gets glossed over incredibly often when writing about them – is how quickly they can hit home. Whereas a graphic novel is an investment of time, a webcomic can joyously race away from any idea of being substantial. Instead, it can tell a joke, and then abandon the entire concept forevermore. There’s something to be said for a webcomic like Vectorbelly, which has amassed around 350 cartoons all telling short, to-the-point gags.

 

Created by Mike Rosenthal, you can find the strips over here: http://vectorbelly.com. I’d recommend the more recent ones to start with, as he seems to have hit a real rhythm with his nonsequiturs recently. And at his best, he makes strips I want to frame.

Steve is tweets @stevewmorris

A few weeks ago I wrote about 6 recent superheroine redesigns that I loved. People went, expectedly, nuts, even though there was nothing particularly dramatic or mind blowing about the piece. Y’know, unless things like opinion pieces send you into a blind rage. Anyway, I had always planned to write a companion piece about 6 [...]

… to look at any successful geek as Manifest Destiny rather than a crew lucky enough to have found an escape hatch seems … unhealthy. It just all seems so unhealthy. Worse, it seems like sales. And — who do people think PAYS those guys? Who do they think runs those guys’s careers? Have you ever seen a movie executive? Have you ever been around AGENTS? (I don’t recommend it). Do people think that the creative personnel are really running the game and calling shots? That’s not true of nearly every creative enterprise I know, certainly not pre-internet at least. If you’re not a person who can say No in their life, then I don’t care who’s lined up to kiss your ass. Heck, it’s certainly not true now — this generation of nerds is churning out Star Wars movies and Marvel bullshit for corporations that keep nerds like pets.

– Abhay Khosla, poking holes in the popular notion that nerds and misfits will inherit the earth.

As he’s wont to do, Khosla pokes a lot more holes than just the part I’ve quoted there, but I pulled that section out because it directly mentions comics. The Big Dream for comics creators used to be working for either Marvel or DC, but that’s changed. It’s still a dream for many and I’m not putting down anyone who’s working for those companies or would like to, but it’s no longer the dominant goal that it once was. More and more creators are jumping ship at the corporations to pursue their own projects with their own characters, at least partly for the reason Khosla mentions: they want to be able to run the game.

But as Khosla also points out, there are limits to that even with creator-owned comics. The comics themselves can be completely controlled by the people making them, but the game changes when those stories are licensed to other media. A huge part of the creator-owned dream is making that big movie or TV deal and getting to keep the money from it instead of accepting whatever portion Marvel and DC choose to let you have. But when that deal is made, the creator is back in cahoots with a corporation that now has final control over the project. Robert Kirkman and The Walking Dead is as a big a success story as we’re likely to get, but even Kirkman doesn’t call all the shots on that show. I don’t claim to speak for Kirkman or suggest how he feels about that, my point is that in the best possible case, the dream of making a gazillion dollars while retaining full creative control in comics isn’t in any way realistic. 

What’s realistic – but only for those willing to work really really hard at it – is making a living in comics. Maybe even a good one. That could mean giving up some control if a movie deal comes knocking, but there’s nothing wrong with that. I remember Mike Mignola’s attitude when he first sold the rights to a Hellboy movie. I don’t have an exact quote, but he basically said that he was happy for the check and that whatever happened with the movie wasn’t any of his business. It reminds me of the famous story about Raymond Chandler where someone asked him what he thought of Hollywood ruining all of his books. He took them to his study, pointed up to the shelf where they all were, and said, “Look, they’re there. They’re fine. They’re OK.”

That’s a noble goal for creators, isn’t it? To make a good living telling stories that they own and can be proud of. The dream of reaching the top and looking back down at all the people who picked on you in high school isn’t just sad, it’s bogus.

This animation is hypnotizing.

No, Mr. Darwin, I believe that is how it works… I’m just kidding. There’s a rare candy in there somewhere, too.

“Well, excuse me Princess! That’s what I should have said… I’ll say that next time.”

But only if it’s online and connected to the internet at least one time a day. That’s the rules.

We’ll kick off a day of Webcomics with something educational. Did you ever wonder if cinnamon comes from giant mythical birds or not? Then Brief Histories of Everyday Objects, by Andy Warner, will be for you.

For the next 24 hours, we’re going to be sharing 24 webcomics with you here on t’Beat. For the most part we’re going to steer away from comics you’ll already be totally aware of – Hark A Vagrant, Achewood, that sort of thing – and towards projects that are hopefully new to you. We’ve got a mix of styles and ideas, and at times we may well stretch the definition of ‘webcomic’ close to breaking point. At the same time, the main goal here is just to share some comics with you. Give them a try!

The first webcomic is Andy Warner’s Brief Histories of Everyday Objects, which was recently nominated for The Stumptown Comic Art Awards.

Taking a different ‘thing’ in each strip and explaining it to readers, the comic reminds me a little of Horrible Histories in the sense of humour it displays. The comic revels in the grossness of the past, and how invention and creation has led our silly species to slowly grow a bit of self-respect. Whilst brief, the comics take the very basics of each invention and make it quickly accessible and interesting – this is a series which writes about postcards and kitty litter, and manages to offer readers an entertaining read each time.

I love this sort of comic, which offers something different and goes along in a different direction. There are currently 12 full strips available at http://tapastic.com/series/303 right now, along with a few other bits and pieces. It’s funny, clever, and very well done indeed. Worth a look!

Let’s try something a little different, as we’re a short way into our 24 hours now. Bottom of the Ninth was launched last year by Ryan Woodward, and is an animated comic strip. If you click on each panel of each page, there’s usually a sound clip or animation detailing the progression of the story at that point. It’s an interactive piece of work which adds sound and music and motion to the story, to play around with the idea of what a comic really is.

You also have to work out for yourself that the pages turn if you click the bottom right-hand corner. The images here are from his concept work, because each page of the comic is a carefully-crafted multimedia work which tells a simple story. The ideas and experiments don’t detract from the comic itself or make it unreadable – they create a different experience, much like Think Tank does.

You can pick up the comic as an app – that was the original intention – but it works just as well on your computer, if you have a fast computer. It’s a lovely thing, with the animation not distracting too much from the story itself. Woodward’s art is as interesting as his animation, and the story is interesting too. It’s an experiment above all else, and a successful one. Have a look at http://www.bottom-of-the-ninth.com

Uglydolls and DC Comics have just announced a new collaboration that will see Uglydolls characters get a superhero makeover with a new series of plushes! The first two plushes, appropriately enough, are two versions of Ice Bat as Batman (modern and retro designs) and Babo as Superman. According to the Diamond Comics preview page for retailers, these guys will be around 11 inches tall each.

The Uglydolls DC plushes are coming this fall at around US$20 each; Funko will also be producing some vinyl figures based off the Uglydoll/DC Comics designs that should release around the holiday season. We'll see the plushes first, on display at events in June and San Diego Comic Con this July. What do you guys think of the designs?

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In case you thought it was only comics that unnecessarily sexed up female characters, fear not: It happens in all media — and the newest guilty party is Disney.

On Saturday, the studio inducted Merida of the Pixar film Brave as the 11th Disney Princess. More accurately, it inducted some alternate-reality Merida who’s thinner, wears her dress off her shoulder and exposes more cleavage. A redesign of the character appeared on the corporation’s website in advance of the induction at Disney World, and faster than you can say “Wonder Woman’s pants,” someone launched a Change.org petition, which is now approaching 200,000 signatures. Disney removed the images of the redesigned Merida, not that it matters; the Internet never forgets.

I’m being somewhat flip about this but the whole thing is kind of amazing. I loved Brave, and thought it was the animated-princess story that was so overdue. It was so refreshing to watch an animated movie that stepped away from cliches to give us a female lead who isn’t pining after a man, can skillfully defend herself, and looks and acts reasonably like a girl approximately her age. And it not once felt like an agenda movie. Really, it’s pretty stupid that these kinds of characteristics feel like such a breath of fresh air.

A major entertainment company should have a sense of its own properties — Disney must know what Brave represented to segments of its audiences. Surely executives read reviews, or had assistants read to them if they are above such things. Maybe a quick summary in a PowerPoint presentation? I just don’t understand how they could be so tone deaf when preparing Merida for the Disney Princess induction.

It’s worth pointing out that the informal tradition of Disney princesses has now become a formal brand, which is why the character was redesigned. The Disney Princess brand has books, CDs, playsets and other merchandise that essentially mashes together these characters into the same world, or at least the same packaging. Putting together disparate characters from Pocahontas, Mulan and Cinderella might seem too jarring, so the distinctive styles are toned down to create a unified look that the redesigned Princesses all share. While I think they go a little too far with some of them, making some almost unrecognizable from their movie counterparts, it makes sense from a branding and marketing standpoint. However, redesigning Merida isn’t the problem; it’s the choices they made. Giving her a tiny waist, and exchanging her bow and arrows for excessive makeup and an alluring look that ages her a good 10 years is counter to so much of the character. It’s almost as if Disney didn’t watch its own movie. In the aftermath of the protests and condemnations, you’ll notice that Merida’s page now uses an image from the movie, while every other Princess has the more unified look. They also no longer show the group shot (another oddity is that Tiana from The Princess and the Frog is missing in the Visit the Princesses menu at the very bottom of the page).

So did Disney listen to the protests? Maybe. Such a response isn’t without precedent. Earlier this month, Disney backed down from registering a trademark for the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos after a Change.org petition charged the corporation with trying to exploit Mexican religion and culture. Of course, Disney said it dropped the filing because it decided to go with a different name for its movie, making no explicit mention of public pressure. But it’s not too hard to read between the lines and see the blowback at least partly influenced the decision.

Time will tell if Disney eventually releases a new redesign for Merida. About a week ago, a Disney spokesman told the Disney fan blog Inside the Magic that different style guides would be used for different products, “so some images of Merida may be in 2D and some may still be 3D – it all depends on the product and what type of art is most appropriate.” The petition continued to gain signatures, and the film’s co-director/screenwriter Brenda Chapman protested the changes, calling them “blatant sexist marketing.” In the meantime, Disney downplayed the redesign by making changes to the Disney Princess website and using a pretty faithful real-life version of the character for the coronation.

I’m hoping this whole incident will inspire Disney to rethink the Disney Princess designs. Maybe instead the studio should go for something more inspired, such as Amy Mebberson’s adorable yet feisty Pocket Princesses fan cartoons. That may not ever happen but it’s encouraging to know Disney isn’t completely tone deaf as to why Merida is important to young girls. Maybe I was just feeling sappy, but this “I am a Princess” video of a young archer explaining how she overcame the difficulties of being one of the only girls into archery kind of got me. It shows that while big entertainment companies can make some questionable choices, it’s really encouraging when they get it right.

Yuko Shimizu recently posted a gallery of amazing science fiction-style art at the portfolio site Behance. A couple were covers for the Vertigo series The Unwritten, but most consisted of book covers and illustrations that were too good not to share. Shimizu posts pictures of the unadorned illustrations beside shots of the images out in the wild, for context. As well as being a great illustrator, she’s an extremely talented designer.

My personal favorite after the jump may well be the Robert Crumb-referencing piece for a Fused TV magazine ad: Keep on space truckin’, indeed.