Letters to Holly

Friday, February 11

A Different Look

Sometime between the New Year's party for the local rollerderby teams and this week, my logo was changed. The New Year's poster had the version I created based on their notes, and the new logo seems like a bad copy. I can only spy a small version on a poster linked on FB, but I can tell they removed the skull reflection, redrew the face, and added pigtails, everything but the basic shape and fonts. It's their logo. They can do what they like with it. But I wonder why they didn't contact me to make the changes.

Actually I do have a theory: Mine looked a bit too polished. The a-team logo is scratchy, almost sketchy. The logo I submitted for the b-team was made in Illustrator. I bet they they dirtied it up so it wouldn't outshine the a-team's. And that's what I'll tell myself whenever I look at it on billboards and t-shirts and weep silently.

I contacted my team liaison -- the roller who managed the logo contest -- and asked if this changes the outcome of the contest. If they're not technically using the logo I made, does this negate the contest results, and do I still get the promised swag? I wish I'd been kept in the loop on this, even just a heads up. I'm more confused than bristled.

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I showed a draft of the letter to the editor I wrote in response to a gun-control rant from last week. She liked it and said I should send it in. That column did inspire another letter that ran this week. It wasn't bad. A tad snarky, and that's the attitude I tried to avoid in my letter.

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We suspect the man-cub is teething again. He had a horrible night yesterday and was only calmed after two applications of Orajel. He also may be attempting hand signals. Your Sister says he associates one chair with feeding and starts squirming toward it when he's hungry.

Moving Picture of the Day
The next film in the X-Men franchise comes out this summer, and the trailer was released yesterday. It looks good, and what once seemed like a doomed, desperate effort to milk the cash cow now has hope of being an entertaining flick. The casting seems nice, and the production design stays true to the first three films (the Wolverine spinoff had its own style and suffered from it).





Wednesday, February 9

Art Progression

I put down my 2H pencil on page seven this morning, and finished my first extended fight scene for the comic. Page six gets the fighters in the ring. When I scripted it, I stayed vague about the details and intended to fill in the choreography and identities of the fighters as I went along. I figured out within the week who the robots would be and how they would be distinct in fight styles and that gave me the structure to set up a bout between two of them.

There's a UFC fighter named Anderson Silva who is the most successful fighter they've ever had. He's 13-0 since joining the UFC, and 11 of those wins are title defenses. He's tall, he's wiry, he's nicknamed "Spider." I wanted to copy that and came up with Wire Mother, the most feared fighter in the league. Here's her in-ring debut.

Here's the first sketch drawn tiny, followed by the larger sketch and the current pencils on the art board.



It's so, so much easier to draw on a larger scale. My wrist movements are larger, and the art flows easier from the pencils. Also, I may draw out my sound effects instead of typing them on the page scans.

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You might remember my hemming and hawing over a recent letter to the editor and my possible response to it. Oddly, there have been no response letters printed in the paper. Either everyone shrugged it off or the paper is saving the letters for a blowout reaction page. If it's the former, I'm glad I didn't jot off the only response letter; that would have been awkward the next time we ran into the original writer at the grocery store. If it's the latter, I would have been lost amid the probable wail of indignation.

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The sidekick has learned to bounce on his tush. This might replace the constant kicking. He still hasn't successfully assembled all the components of crawling. Not in the right order, not in the right amount.

Monday, February 7

Super Geek Bowl

The Super Bowl included two short commercials for Marvel films, Thor and Captain America, both coming out this year.



Both films are potential franchise sparks, and they lead into next summer's Avengers movie with Iron Man and Hulk.

I never thought we'd see a big-budget, live-action film of either hero. Although, we did get a very bad live-action Cap film in the '70s, not long after Spider-Man's TV show.









And there was a weak 1990 film that at least tried to keep the costume faithful to the comics.





 
 

The second Iron Man movie included Cap's shield and Thor's hammer. Marvel has planned this franchise scheme for a while.


The deputy picked up another cold and was a miserable, wet baby all weekend. It seems to be passing quickly. I moved my comic drawings to the dinner table to keep one eye on him while I sketched and erased and repeated that, um, repeatedly.  I started page six today, and that's a nice pace to maintain. 

We watched the game last night between sidekick feedings and cleanings. Your Sister picked both teams back in September, and I don't think I'll ever hear the end of that.