Jackpot

We met up with Travis and Kathy on Friday for dinner, and he asked me to join him and some other guys for a man-date to see 300. We're going to see my parents next weekend for mom's birthday, but I'll be able to squeeze in. While the guys see the film, the wives will have a ladies night. Then, of course, Your Sis and I will go watch 300.

I woke up early Saturday, sketched the comic a bit, and went to work on the yard. I always prefer to rake the leaves at winter's end so all of them can be gathered at one time. We have plenty of space behind the tree line to stash them. I also cleared out the creek obstructions. It was one of those things that develop organically. I dump some leaves, see the high waterline, yank out some creek junk, notice the other patches of junk backing up the water, tackle those, and go back to raking. The iPod is nice for this kind of work. I can even listen to NPR; the local Saturday lineup is stellar: Car Talk, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, This American Life, Fresh Air recap, The Ticket, Money Matters, On the Media, All Things Considered, and Prairie Home Companion. Your Sis came out about an hour later to plant bulbs we got from my parents. We grabbed lunch at the pub later, and then Your Sis, brace yourself, napped. I worked on the comic. I'm almost through with penciling, and I finished up the hardest panel with the strong perspective.

But at 4, we split up. I had the poker party, and she was off to Greenville. This was my first tournament game, and we only played Texas Hold 'Em. This is the game you see most often on TV because it's extended and relies on individual betting on communally held cards. I knew no one else there aside from Big Mama, but it was a friendly gang. Some saw the play but didn't recognize me even after looking at the cast photos. I've got more hair, a beard, an earring, and no accent. Her husband Mike ran us through the house rules. I knew the game fine, but the betting rules were new. We had randomly assigned seats at two tables (it was me, Mike, and five women at one), and the betting increments increased every 15 minutes. We all paid $10 to play $2,500 worth of chips. You began with a stack of $5 chips as the smallest increment, but within an hour the minimum bet was $40. And when you got to the last two cards, all antes doubled. This was done to move the game along as we had 13 people playing.

I have two rules of playing poker:
1) if you have a face card, bet at least for one round to see the next three dealt cards; and
2) play further if you have an 8 or a queen. These are my lucky cards. And sure enough, the first hand I won was a split pot with a Q8 full house.

I wore my new skull-and-crossbones socks for luck (with no idea if they were lucky). I did fairly well to start, but some of the gals were brand new to the game. We bent the rules a bit initially to make it fun and more than fair. They picked it up quick, and Mike helped me with some bet strategies. He was the first one out from our table, by the way. Then we lost two more players, and the players spread out again among the two tables. And we kept playing. And playing.

Long story short, we played for six straight hours. We started right before 7 p.m. and ended about 12:45 a.m. I stayed at my table and snacked throughout. I drank two of my beloved Smirnoff Ices early and then switched to soda to stay sober during the big bets. When the game ended, the minimum bet was $1,00 dollars. And I was one of the last three, which meant I would get a piece of the tournament pot. There was $130 to be given to the last three players. Last place got $26. First place got $64. I played pretty conservative but did pursue some hands foolishly, hoping for luck on the last card. Sometimes I got it. Sometimes I thought I got it until I learned what the other players were holding.

My best hand was a full house, the fourth best you can get. I also won a hand with the high card, the lowest victory you can claim. But I got to the last three, and then we played against each other for about half an hour, just picking away at each other's stacks. I did bet everything on one hand(which we could only do later in the tournament), but the other player folded. And then we lost a player, and it was just two of us, me and Big Mama. And after six fucking hours, we decided to split the pot. We played a game only for bragging rights (I lost to a high card), but walked away from the table with $52 and a nice showing for my first time with them. I drove home blasting my radio to stay awake and got home at 1:40. I did get to hear the late-night conspiracy radio show, and that's always fun. Did you know gray aliens talk to humans telepathically? Did you know the FAA is hiding evidence of UFOs? Did you know that when I was 10, I would have sworn these were so?

I was dead on Sunday. I barely slept because I chugged soda to stay awake for the game, and couldn't rest at home with that lingering buzz. I drew a bit, bought lunch with the poker winnings, got groceries with Your Sis and that included the weekly crackuccino to help me remain standing (also bought with poker winnings). She worked on school stuff, and we split the laundry while I did research for the comic. I thought I only had a few panels left. But I can't find a decent painting of Norse apple imagery. It looks like I'll need to draw that particular panel, and I'm inclined to work in the intricate Norse patterns. Maybe I can escape that. I also may need to draw the Arthurian panel after all. I'll definitely finish the pencil work this weekend and then start inking. I may scan the pencil work, get the lettering out of the way on the PC, and then scan the inked pages and place them under the word balloons. I want this to look sharp, I want to improve on what I've done before. and I have exactly four weeks to do it. That should be plenty of time. I would have worked more on the comic yesterday, but I didn't trust my addled brain.

Picture of the Day
This has been called a new Spidey 3 poster, but it's missing all the text. It's still cool. Can the filmmakers make a third film that stands well along the first two. Can it possibly be better than the second film?

The black costume -- and the villain that adopts it later -- is almost a franchise unto itself, and the comic fans are soiling themselves with glee. I'm from the generation before the black costume, so I maintained an arm's length from it. There was no reason to move away from the classic outfit, reasoned my young mind, and that conclusion stands. Peter didn't even initially change costumes for psychological reasons; his old one was shredded and an alien costume machine gave him a new, different one. And then he found out it was sentient and nasty, and it moved to someone who had a reason to hate Peter and a new villain was born. The trailers suggest that's what's going to happen onscreen. And I must need more sleep because I am making with the blah-blah something fierce.

Oscar Weekend

A very stupid thing happened at the school Friday. The school just started the obligatory daily pledge this year. A known outspoken teacher was asked to lead the school in the Pledge of Allegiance via the intercom. She did, and left out "under God." Kids were so upset they called their parents via cellphone to stone the heathen. The principal added a formal letter of reprimand to her permanent file. Your Sis is so pissed she cleaned her home office. The teacher is understandably upset, and other teachers are debating legal recourse. I'm not surprised she chose to say the original version of the pledge, nor am I surprised that the principal brought down the disciplinary hammer.

Who's to blame? Everyone. She called down the thunder, he overreacted, and the kids are a buncha knee-jerk tattle-tales. I'm hoping the principal and the teacher have a calm meeting next week when tempers die down, because ultimately, the lesson learned is that the omission of "God" in the formal pledge to the flag is actionable. And that's quite the high-horse hick indignation we can live without. I also have a problem with pledging allegiance to a flag instead of, say, laws and principals. But the thing was written to sell flags and later adopted by Congress.

The comic took on big momentum Saturday as I paneled out the artboards and started penciling panels. Instead of working on page one, panel one, I skipped around based on my sketches. The linework came out pretty clean, much to my surprise, and I suspect I can forgo inking if I go over the work with darker pencils. By Sunday evening, I had most of the thing drawn. I put in the extended Lord of the Rings DVD to listen to commentary as I worked and I got through all of that and half of the Sin City commentary. So I know I put in at least 6 hours. I still need to do two panels, but I find myself past most of the hard work. I just got word that the art deadline is March 26. A full month away. I can handle that with no problem. I was scared it would be this weekend or something. Jesus, a month. I feel like I won a lottery.

We watched the Oscars last night, and I was most happy with seeing Scorsese win for Best Director. I remember watching while at Brevard College and seeing Kevin Costner take the award for Dances With Wolves instead of Goodfellas. That was a Big Wrong. I thought the show focused a bit much on An Inconvenient Truth and Al Gore, and I didn't care for the dancers making silhouettes for the Best Picture nominees. But the Jack Black/Will Ferrell/John C. O'Reilly song was good as was the performances for the Dreamgirls nominated songs. Celine Dion just makes my ears curl up and scurry back into my skull, and I don't why they made a big deal about her singing lyrics over a Ennio Morricone song. He's a composer. And she's cooing over his work. The best bit was the sound effects choir.

Picture of the Day
I gave Your Sis her new mix CD Friday before she started slaving away at school work. She listened as she cleaned Friday night and seems to dig it. It makes for good driving music, and she's going back to Greenville this weekend.



You Give Love a Bad Name -- Bon Jovi
Le Disko -- Shiny Toy Guns
Welcome to the Black Parade -- My Chemical Romance
This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race -- Fall Out Boy
Knock 'Em Out -- Lily Allen
Listen Up -- The Gossip
This Fire -- Franz Ferdinand
World -- Five for Fighting
Mad World -- Sacre
Alison -- Elvis Costello
Little Northern Bird -- Dream Academy/Annie Lennox
Put Your Records On -- Corinne Bailey Rae
Thundersexy -- ACDC/Justin Timberlake
Tears of a Rock -- ACDC/Smokey Robinson
Bombs Over Baghdad -- Outkast
Warning, Rush Where It's At -- Big Audio Dynamite/Beck/Green Day
Sober -- Half Cocked
Jack And Diane's Last Episode -- Snoop Dogg/Dr. Dre/John Cougar

In the News (sorta)
The NY Times reports that Christopher Plummer, Captain Von Trapp himself will play one of the leads in a new stage production of Inherit the Wind. Wow.

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DirecTV will provide Ovation (an arts channel) and Chiller (a horror channel) this year. Chiller could start as early as March 1. I hope this leads to a renaissance of '70s and '80s films which have yet to get a decent DVD release. Your Sis is going on a work trip tomorrow, leaving me a bachelor for the night. I intend to rent myself some horror films that I know she would never watch.

The Vonnegut Moment

In the classic Annie Hall, Woody Allen argues with a fellow movie patron about Marshall McLuhan. To hammer home his point, Woody brings the McLuhan from off-camera, and he destroys the other guy. It's one of those surreal comedy moments Allen excels at.

There's also a nice, little Rodney Dangerfield movie called Back to School. HBO used to show it roughly 30 times a day. A rich businessman goes to college to show his show how far he's willing to support him. The teacher assigns a paper on Kurt Vonnegut. The dad hires Kurt Vonnegut to write the paper. The writer shows up at the dorm room to get started. The teacher later accuses the student of cheating and says whoever wrote the paper didn't know anything about Vonnegut. And then Dangerfield chews out Vonnegut over the phone.

The scenes are similar enough that I lump them together in what I call the Vonnegut Moment. And I had one yesterday. This goes back to the continuing row over comic readers sharing their interest with women.

In the first indignant hysteria bomb that started this mess, the blogger cited my mention of Frank Miller and was aghast that I would suggest any woman read his material. She went on to say this: That sound you hear is Lea Hernandez's head exploding at the notion of Frank Miller as the perfect female-friendly cartoonist. When I responded, I cited this attitude attributed to Hernandez. And then she, or someone claiming to be Hernandez, appeared and called me out on it. I was Vonneguted. I told her that I was merely repeating what was said originally, and we've since drifted into a conversation about the growing trend in comics toward pure cheesecake art.

She has a point, and I agree with her. No one who's read comics for more than ten years can argue. What used to be all-age comic material (Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, etc.) has devolved into softcore as artists abandon storytelling for titillation. But my argument was to say a Frank Miller book like Sin City can't be lumped in with the current hero cheesecake. They aim for different audiences and tell different stories. At least they used to aim for different audiences. When Your Sis or you open up a Sin City comic, you would expect to see material that you might not expect from a Spidey comic (However, a recent comic displayed full frontal Spidey, and Marvel insists no one noticed until the book was printed and shipped). But the sad reality of comics is that kid readership has plummeted, and publishers are trying to win over the predominantly 20-something readers with lowest-common-denominator tactics. Ergo, tits a'plenty.

It's gotten so bad and artists have gotten so lazy that Marvel had to issue a memo demanding their people stop copying images directly from sources such as porn films, gossip magazines, and movie stills. It's really distracting to open a comic and see the artist has cast celebrities as certain characters. Samuel L Jackson, Eminem, Gene Hackman, Brad Pitt, Sawyer for "Lost," Lucy Liu. I've seen 'em with my own surprised eyes.

Hernandez railed against tit-and-ass in traditional superhero books, and she's right. You can't argue anymore that men are just as abstracted to physical perfection in comics, because artists aren't presenting male characters in such a blatantly exploitive way. We agree on that point, but I can't agree that women should be given only a certain type of comic or discouraged from reading other comics, because of their assumed delicate constitutions. And that's what I was saying when Hernandez (or someone claiming to be her) popped in to set the record straight.

What started as cliche internet rambling has become a chance to talk with a comic creator (or someone claiming to be her) about a pernicious development in the medium we work in.

And speaking of which ...

Picture of the Day
These are the thumbnails for the food comic. It's three pages. I always work thumbnails this way -- in ink and very small. You can see where I redid a panel or two and moved one strip to the top of the next page. Thumbnails allow the page architecture to develop before you commit to drawing. You can compile panel angles and cropping of bodies with an eye for word balloons and redundancies. I hammered out a quick script to be followed by a quick art session. I still don't know the deadline so I have to assume it's soonish. To save time, I'm going to run fine-art images in panels; that's why some panels only have words in them. You can click the image here for a larger version. You can do that with all my pictures. You knew that, right?

Charlotte's Web of Needless Drama

I read Charlotte's Web for the first time at the request for Your Sis. She bought the book at Best Buy the weekend before Valentine's Day. She loves it and apparently has since she was young. I was always told it was a girls' book, and our purchase experience cemented that. As Your Sis read the first chapter to me in line, the lady in front of us turned and said she had memorized that chapter as a girl. And then the cashier told us how she worshiped the book as a girl. So, yeah, it's not a boys' book. I was reading Encyclopedia Brown and Judy Blume. OK, and as many comics as my tiny hands could carry. Point being, this was always in the library stack of Books Girls Should Read, and I was not to touch those lest I got the cooties.

But I did read it starting this weekend. As a kids' book, it stays within its own universe very well except for the part where Charlotte, after securing Wilbur the Pig's new destiny and laying her eggs, dies and dies alone. The author makes sure we understand that this saintly spider is completely unnoticed, unattended, and unmourned as she dies at the abandoned fairgrounds. This is sure to crack the heart of a child, many of whom fear solitude. This smacks of cruelty. But at least it doesn't commit the cardinal sin of so many -- and I feel secure in saying "hundreds" -- of children's stories from the '80s where children watch a beloved thing die, weep for the loss, and discover the thing resurrected thanks to magic and love. That's cruelty as well. It sets them up for a crash of reality later on. We boys didn't have that. When Optimus Prime dies in the '80s Transformers movie, he didn't come back in that movie. When he was revived years later for the cartoon series, it felt cheap. Manipulative, even. And we youngsters booed en masse.

I believe such a reliance on death in these stories is a genesis of the goth lifestyle. I remember many adventures involving my toys that ended in death and a funeral. Minutes later, the toy would be unearthed and cleaned and put back with the rest of them. But there would be a good five-minute blanketing of sorrow I would relive week after week. I can't tell you why I did it. But it happened, and no one ever knew about it until you read this. This is what the book sparked in my memory. I liked feeling dark. It was a calming, temporary mindstate. And maybe many of us don't want to give that up as we mature. Maybe it's their one pure feeling that isn't diluted by incidents later in life. It's a comforting constant.

I did like the book, mainly because of the dialogue. My favorite quote is from the rat: "Is your appetizing yarn true? I like living high, and what you say tempts me." I think I'll spring this on telemarketers.

We watched a re-jiggered original "Star Trek" episode last night. Paramount has replaced the original special effects with new CGI material. The old, blueish white Enterprise is now a sterling gray ship and the space shots allow richer planet images. It doesn't at all affect the charm of the original series, and we caught a great installment: Spock goes into heat. This is classic geek stuff, as we see the planet Vulcan for the first time and witness a campy fight to the death between Kirk and Spock. The fight music is legend in nerd circles. Hum it at a convention and a chorus will break out. I TiFauxed it when it ran Sunday to watch next week when Your Sis is out of town. To my surprise, when we were couched in front of the TV last night, she said she wanted to watch it. So we did.

Speaking of geeks, you might want to know about this. I posted on a message board about how Your Sis likes Frank Miller comics. You know, Sin City, 300, etc. The message thread was about comic readers who had introduced their girls to comics. This lit a fire under some folks online who think we're trying to "trick" our women into -- here, you can read the start of something needless right here. Amid the protests about us sad geeks trying to foist comics onto our women, my example of Miller material is considered inappropriate for women because he's not a "perfect female-friendly cartoonist." Keep in mind, this is a woman writing this. She's saying Your Sis and you should be offended because the comic includes violence, bad language, and various nipples.

Seriously, you -- YOU, the Peace Corps grad student -- need to be protected from this because you're a girl. You can't enjoy it because you're a girl. And this is a woman saying this. I responded that Your Sis could choose and read what she liked. It's a backward-ass feminism that limits what a woman can choose to like and a rank paranoia that says geek boys will bury their defenseless, mindless gals in things the latter won't like. Jesus, of all wives, Your Sis is hardly a welcome mat. People we don't know are saying she should stick to Charlotte's Web and can't possibly choose to watch "Star Trek." We get enough shit from people who think all pop culture is worthless and juvenile. We don't need this shit from our fellow connoisseurs.

Picture of the Day
It's enough to make the Butter Jesus cry.

A Quiet Night

Your Sis overdosed on chocolate and went to bed about a half hour after I got home. I had hoped to take her out for dinner so I could tell her about the new comic, but that will have to wait for sometime this weekend. While she was in her coma, I stayed in the workshop to finish Travis's CD (see below) and start research on that comic story. I have an idea that can easily fill the three allotted pages, and now I just need a deadline.

The blog labels aren't showing up on the posts although the blog database is cataloging them. I also can't get the archives to use the date format I prefer. Still, the blog offers what I most require for now.

Picture of the Day
The Travis mash-up CD. The pic is a desktop image I found online.


1. Killing in the Boom - Shaggy/Rage Against The Machine
2. Dirty Girl - Christine Aquilera/Redman/Jet
3. When God Breaks - Led Zeppelin/Johnny Cash
4. Only Boogie - Nine Inch Nails/Kool and the Gang
5. Superstitious Jolene - Dolly Parton/Stevie Wonder
6. They Might Be Starting - They Might Giants/Will Smith/Pink
7. Sweet Country Grammar Nelly/Lynyrd Skynyrd
8. Put On The Super Freak - Police/Rick James
9. Black Sabotage - Led Zeppelin/Beastie Boys
10. Take Me Without - Franz Ferdinand/Eminem
11. The Tide Is Not Unusual - Blondie/Tom Jones
12. Big Time Dare - Gorillaz/Peter Gabriel
13. Free ADIDAS - Tom Petty/Run DMC
14. Crazy Logic - Supertramp/Gnarls Barkley
15. Surf Wax Off Your Shoulder - Jay-Z/Weezer
16. Get Rhythm - Johnny Cash/Wu-Tang Clan
17. Regulate the Dust - Warren G/Kansas
18. Rush Where It's At - Big Audio Dynamite/Beck/Green Day
19. Always With You - Willie Nelson/U2/MARRS

In The News
Let's be clear on Anna Nicole: She was an air-headed, drug-addled, attention-needy strumpet. I've seen comparisons in the last 24 hours to Marilyn fucking Monroe, and that analogy works only in the most shallow of ways (blonde, centerfold, dead). She's not a sad poster girl for desperate dieting, a Little Girl Lost in the depravity of Hollywood, nor a symbol of our consumer times. She's a third-generation Xerox of Pamela Anderson, and that's it.

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The new Secretary of Defense claims weapons in Iraq are coming from Iran. What can't be proven is that the material is from the government of Iran, just that they may be are Iranian in origin. The movement for attacking Iran is not new, but the debacle of altered evidence against Iraq has to minimize that anti-Iranian effort. Right?

Sushi and Comics

I made my house-famous stir-fry last night, and we ate it using the sushi bowl set Your Sis got me for Christmas. I discovered we still have sushi rice leftover, and that immediately reminded me of the "It's a Wonderful Tuna" night we had. I'm hesitant to make sushi again because I'm sure it can't be as good as what you made. We polished off the merlot last night, making a suddenly spooky four straight nights of alcohol. That's not a pattern this Irish-German-Cherokee needs to establish.

"Lost" was good last night, thank God. Time and a weak fall run has made me suspicious of the show's direction. This new episode had definite movement and development, and that's what we loyalists need. Once again, Sawyer brings the pop-culture references, and he and Kate recreated the Star wars prison rescue.

I talked to the guy who published the comics anthologies again, and I'm in early talks to make another short comic for Free Comic Boom Day. This is a new annual event where publishers and stores hand out special issues. It used to coincide with a summer blockbuster comic-movie adaptation, but this year, I think the day falls between such releases. Regardless, I'm gonna make another comic story in addition to the mini-comics I'm making for him to sell at conventions.

Picture of the Day
It's a small closet made to look like a socket. In college, I had a fridge made to look like a bank vault.