Arnold Nazinegger

First California had the smoking ban and now this.

In the 90s, they use to show these Public Health commercials of (pre-California Governor) Arnold Schwarzenegger. He'd laugh maniacally as minority children were forced to do push-ups and jumping jacks on the White House lawn.

Seeing these two California bans under his regime, it makes me wonder was this all part of his multi-tiered, Nazi plan (He is Austrian. Y'know --- They liked Hitler).

He brainwashes an entire generation of potential future voters by becoming a motion picture idol in the 80s! Once he's housed enough blockbusters under his belt, he becomes rich enough and powerful enough to fix the voting process in California. We except him because we've seen him in two of the most powerful mediums ad nasuem (film and television).

Watch out America! First Arnold gets rid of smoking and fast food, then he'll demand executions for people who don't excercise 5 times a week. He's building a race of SuperMen! And he's doing it in California where people pay to become blonde-haired and blue-eyed all the time! He's trying to get the country up to his physical standards so he can crush his enemies, see them driven before him, and hear the lamentation of the women!

Crom!

Sympathy for Mr. Allen

The New York Times has this great article about how culture, sex, and economy can change the perception of vengeance. It's pretty damn interesting...

I recently (and secretly) came down from an anger-high because of some stupidity at a local-area club. I'd be lying if I said revenge wasn't on my mind since then. An overactive imagination and a familiarity with bullies can do that to a person...

Nevertheless.

Wolverine trailer!

Welcome to the internet! Where anything is possible and everything can be taken down within 24 hours.

Watch now. It may not be around later...





Revision:

It's gone.

Try this instead.

-T

Beer!

Just found this article about weight-lifting and alcohol (no not at the same time). It answered quite a few nagging questions...none of which were what I was hoping for. (I'm still waiting for the All-Corona diet that requires a lime for fructose):

CLICKITY CLICK:

http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/swordchucks3.htm

Now that's more like it...

I dunno if I can really call the New Punisher trailer "Safe For Work." It be mighty bloody:

Wah Wah Wooooooomp!

San Diego Comic Con went down this week but this is the only fanboy news that gave me pause really...

Warren Ellis does GI Joe

*Hmpf*

- Yesterday's Bamn meeting was the laziest assembly since the Global Marijuana March (sorry, I'm still scouring Wiki).

I was late and watched Fox News Bloopers on Youtube and played with Jay's dog. David showed up late and watched BatMan cartoons from the 90s. Jay was the most productive, he'd occasionally ink the same section of bristol board and then play WOW. Sad.

I think we are approaching exhaustion. But I can work through it. Especially, since the writing process is over.

I'm working on "lettering" Bamn during my lunch breaks (which turns into a two hour lunch break each time) and I will be back at Jay's on Saturday to make corrections to word ballons (Pages 1-14) I've completed.

- To make matters worse, I had to rescue my girlfriend's friends from the sketchy patrons of the local gangrape/night club. I was verbally assualted by a pack of bird-chested 21-year-olds who can't spell "Jedi." A male bouncer put his hands on my lady.

I found this all out after the fact. Naturally.

Seriously, during my "lost years" (known as 2006) I club promoted with a few familiars (a nice way of saying associates, not really friends --- actually, one friend). I truly figured out the mice from the men. If you ever want to see the deterioration of social values, then club promote.

I'm not a normal person by any means. I once wrote a college essay about eating the mentally challenge to stop over population --- I'm not right. But at the club, I saw stuff that really made me question why we are the dominant species. I've stopped men from hitting women (purely fueled by rejection), I got into it with a bouncer for assualting another female. I worked with/for some of the most exploitive, condescending, dishonest name brand wearing D!c#holes in the DC-area. It was a sobering wake-up call for my moral limitations as well as the type of people I hang around.

Last night bought it all back, physically assualting, morally ambiguous and with 4-letter words.

What is wrong with people?

This is officially putting a $#!+ streak on my weekend.

"That's no moon..."

Wikipedia ranks pretty high on my list of great things about the internet (next to Netflix and Freeones). Today, Wiki provided me with two links to ease my boredom at work.

First up, we have a detailed examination of the comic bubble. So simple and yet it can mean so many things. Here.

Then The International Space Station's wiki entry provided a link to Nasa's website. Here it gives you coordinates as to where you can see the ISS from Earth. The ISS is the governments $100 billion project to build a massive satelitte in Space. It's size, plus the large panels, allow you to see it from terra firma.

Bamn!

Things are progressing at a brisk pace….

- We aren’t too concerned about not having the book in time for SPX. It’s kind of thrusting at the divide of our brains, waiting to impregnate us with worry. Ah, we're fine for now. I’m more conerned about how I’m going to push this thing (I volunteered to market Bamn--- like a fool). We’re talking about bumper stickers, a girl dressed like one of the key characters, posters, and various wrestling crap to generate an atmosphere at our table for SPX!


- For the uninitiated, SPX isn’t the biggest convention in the world but it is definitely one of the best. Independent comic book creators from all over come to the Small Press Expo to peddle their books and various related merchandise. This isn’t the typical comic show. There are no overweight Storm Troopers, no crusty back issue bins, no exposed butt-cracks of vendors (okay, that may be a lie). What you have is a glorious assortment of fans and creators coming together to exchange freely for the sake of the comic book medium (as opposed to just the genre of superheroes which is what most shows seem to be). I’m really not doing it justice. Click here for a genuine (read: not sarcastic) fanboy experience...

- I’ll be back at Jay’s tonight arguing about Issue 2, drinking all his beer, and finalizing pages14 and 15!

The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Maggie Gyllenhall, Aaron Eckart, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Gary Oldman (whew).

I had already made this movie in my head. It’s a fatal thing to do with something you heavily anticipate. I did it with Spider-Man 3, I did it with Star Wars: Episode 1 and I did it with Indiana Jones 4. Needless to say, I was disappointed in all those.
Knowing this I was already becoming a bit skeptical and tense when I went to watch Dark Knight, the second BatMan film in a superior new series. The reviews had been glowing and in my head I had saw the impossible. I saw Jim Gordon cheating on his wife only to have the Joker shoot her in the stomach similarly to Killing Joke and BatMan: Year One. I saw Christian Bale’s BatMan, pushed to the brink of insanity, pummeling Ledger’s Joker to an inch of his life. I saw Alfred, fed up with Bruce’s obsession, walking out on the child he mentored into a man. I saw Joker burning the left side of Aaron Eckart’s face causing his character Harvey Dent to lose his mind completely. I saw Joker throwing Rachael Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhall) to her death forcing BatMan to spiral into a maniacal bloodlust. I saw it all. I went in tense and I left tense but for two completely different reasons.
The Dark Knight is a lot of things, but it is barely a superhero movie. Which is exactly how it should be. The emphasis is on crime and the moral ambiguity that comes with fighting it. We are made familiar to the three characters that will have their very fiber challenged: Lt. Jim Gordon, District Attorney, Harvey Dent and Industrialist, Bruce Wayne (superhero capitalist are so in this summer). Together they initiate a seemingly losing battle against a corrupt police force, a backended corporate entity, an over-anxious mob underbelly, and, a new player in town, The Joker.
Joker is a mystery shrouded in a face-painted mystery. He lies frequently about his past, has a back up plan for every back up plan and he’s an anarchist through and through.
“Some people just want to see the world burn,” points out Michael Caine’s character Alfred. He’s referencing Joker in a great anecdote that provides insight into Alfred’s personal history but also prepares Bruce Wayne for the task he is about to undertake. It doesn’t help.
Dark Knight deserves a lot of the praise it has been receiving. It’s bleakness is unprecedented for a summer movie of this scope (BatMan goes to Hong Kong!), and Heath Ledger is definitely better than Jack Nicholson’s overrated role in BatMan(1989). Ledger is completely lost in the character (“If you’re gonna go --- go with a smile”). Virtually unrecognizable, he’s funny in a “should-I-laugh-a-that?” way. He’s a greasy, asexual, mad man, licking his make up from his lips as he drives pencils into people’s eyes. It is the performance of a lifetime and I feel sorry for anyone who has to play the heavy in the 3rd BatMan film.
Director Christopher Nolan still manages to keep the plot organized, in spite of juggling many of them (there is no subplot in Dark Knight. It’s all the main story). He plays the exposition quick. Too quick at times. But with actors like these, scenes always carry gravity no matter how brief.
My only real complaint is still with Bale as BatMan (ironically, the title character). Bale is perfect but his costume is awkward-looking and his lispy growl sometimes comes off comical. Yet, it’s a quibble that can wait for a less incendiary movie.

Who watches the Watchmen trailer?

...Not me. They block Youtube at my job.

We'll see.

BAMN!

Haven't done this in awhile mostly because I've been eating, breathing and sleeping "Bamn" for the last few weeks. I didn't really feel like writing about it anymore.

Still, here are some updates:

- Half of issue 1 is completed (12 more pages to go). That is, pencilled, inked, scanned and word-balloned.

- We had the brilliant idea of loading Bamn's finished art to my laptop so I can dialouge ballons outside of Jay's house (which is what was happening to my social life every afternoon.).

- Editing never stops. I've accepted the fact that I will be correcting Bamn until the milisecond when the damn thing goes to print! Commas are moved, dialouge is reworded, baloons repositioned. It never ceases!

-Having a tough time explaining to my girlfriend why I didn't get to her apartment until damn near 1AM last night. How do you tell a female you were at your friend's house arguing with two of your co-conspirators, for an hour, about the importance of the main character saying "I'm trying not to piss myself?"

-Have to admit, I'm breaking a bit of sweat thinking about SPX in 2 months. That's our deadline. Which means our books have to be at the printer's a month prior. Argh!

-I'm staring to find that, artist, Jay Payne and I have quite a few similiarites. He's a logical Asian degenerate and I'm a practical African-American rabblerouser. Our similarities have served us well in being able to describe panels to each other. The only time we clash is when Jay tries to cut my dialouge (natch). Being an artist, he's very specific. He's very specific about the dialouge and I'm less stringent about it. He wants logic and I want natural progresion. It's been beneficial because when I let characters ramble, he hits me over the nose with a newspaper. When he starts showing more concen for issues of weight, shading and dimensions, I have to remind him that the story instead of art needs to dictate these things. Not the other way around.

-Got to contribute a bit of artwork myself now that I mention it. I F*cked around in Adobe Illustrator and created the credits on Page 8 of issue 1. I was surprised that Jay went for it.

- It took us 2 weeks and 18 afternoons to do the first 12 pages. Here's hoping the next 12 take less.

Damn. I gotta start writing Issue #2

Michael Bay's Dark Knight

Clickity-Split:

http://my.spill.com/profiles/blog/show?id=947994:BlogPost:355506

When you Assume...

Yesterday, a friend of mine asked me what the proper name for a fist bump was. I told him "Dap."

My community service has been fulfilled.




Every year politics get sillier and in the process voters get more distracted.

Try these on for size:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQfbbSQ5FXY

http://www.slate.com/id/2195387/?GT1=38001

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army
Directed by Guillermo Del Toro
Starring Ron Pearlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones, Seth McFarlane and Luke Goss


Hellboy 2 kinda reminds of what sci-fi/fantasy use to feel like. Y’know, many, many, many years ago in the 1980s. Physically, it has the same texture of movies like Return of the Jedi, Legend, Dark Crystal, E.T., Gremlins, etc. It might have to do with the usage of physical effects over digital. A fact that becomes very apparent in one scene of the film at “The Troll Market.” Puppets, costumes and latex tumors walk around in this Jim Henson Chinatown. It’s kinda romantic --- uh, in a monster movie way. It’s also starting to become, director, Guillermo Del Toro’s (Pans Labyrinth) calling card. Unfortunately Del Toro’s deft hand isn’t laid upon the plot’s mechanics.
Hellboy 2 brings us back to it’s Tecate-drinking, red-skinned, gun-totting, supernatural-stomping main character/demon. Ron Pearlman plays the lead with such ease that it’s hard to imagine him without the make-up and prosthetics. Not so easy is Hellboy’s home life and work. This time, a disgruntled Elf prince wants to reclaim Earth from the humans, breaking a centuries-long agreement that humanity has forgotten about. Meanwhile, Hellboy’s beauty and the beast romance with, firestarter, Liz (Selma Blair) is even more challenging, not to mention the fact that she’s pregnant now…which I don’t even want to begin to think about).
Del Toro’s role in Hellboy is indispensible but I think he’s so conscious of and accurate at creating the comic book aesthetic that he kind of denies the film. It treads too carefully. For that reason, it lacks energy. This is most apparent in the scenes of exposition, the bits in-between where the plot expands and the character’s have to turn around (though there is a bonding moment between Hellboy and Abe that is quite funny).
While I wish more comic films would throw their imagination around as casually as this film does, I also wish Hellboy 2 wasn’t so much in it’s own head. It is the film’s only crime, really.

The "Heath Ledger" thing

Much has been made about, actor, Heath Ledger's death. Specifically, how it relates to the Dark Knight movie released this week. Any type of publicity could easily lean in the "ghoulish" category but Warner's has managed to handle it well. Yet, undeniably, Ledger's death will benefit the BatMan film in that for it's entire running time of 2hours and 30mins the movie's obvious dark tone will be given an extra coat of black.

That said, while I'm not the one to get all sensitive about respect for the dead, I do kind of feel the level of speculation coming from outside Warner Brothers (I hope) is a little crass and all too familiar.

Much has been made about why Ledger died. Alot of entertainment news has been pointing to the concept that Ledger immersed himself into the role of Joker to the point that he started to believe it. But that's expected from the media. What's annoying is how quickly people latch on to that concept. "Oh, he's crazy!" It's the simplest assumption people can make and, by that measure, the worse. It's dismissive and lacks sensitivity even if it may not be intentional. It turns Ledger's death into the equivalent of an actor gaining weight for a role or learning to do Capoeira for an action film. It makes his death an after thought, his life a foot note and his career just a prelude to his death.

I'm just saying:
http://movies.ign.com/articles/832/832612p1.html

And...

CLICKITY CLICK:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/07/11/ST2008071102551.html

The American Dollar

I recently purchased a pair of clever logo shirts from Last Exit To Nowhere . With shipping and handling, it came to 35 in Euros. That cost me $80 American.

Unintentionally, I'm now just as bad as those Ice Creamers who walk into "Up Against The Wall" and pay $200 for Pharell's brand named socks!

If you don't think the American dollar is getting raped by the likes of China, The UK and (apparently) Russia, then you, sir, are a "Re-Re!"

CLICKITY CLICK:

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/StockInvestingTrading/americaonthedecline_article.aspx?GT1=33011#pageTopAnchor

Hulk vs. Wolverine

I worked at a comic shop for 5 years. And while I've prided myself on not being the irritable comic shop guy during that time, there were a few customers that always would test my patients.

There was the reoccuring customer who would insist his copy of SuperMan #75 was extremely rare. There was the Buffy fan who would have me order numerous TV-themed T-Shirts and not pick up for months (sticking me with "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" apparel.) There was the overweight, "Yu-Gi-Oh" fan that would always try to explain the logistics of the cartoon to me. There was this one guy who would go on and on about "Smallville" (even though I would always remind him I never watched the show) only to have his conversation constantly deteriorate into how big Power Girl's tits are.

Unfortunately, the only reason stereotypes exist is because they are usually true. There were times when my shop was no exception.

There was this one guy who claimed he was a writer. To hear him tell it, he had gotten an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" produced. Which could be valid (I think there was a time where quality submissions for sci-fi shows could get made) until he started getting into his diatribe on this character versus that character. The more animated and heated he'd become discussing the implausibilities of Thor vs. Darkseid or Hulk vs. SuperMan, the more damage he would do to his credibility.

I like a Superhero fight as much as the next man-child but I figured out in my teenage years that "dream matches" are just that. Dream matches. There is a whole legal and creatively limiting process to having two company's character clash. The end result will never satisfy. Not to mention there is something deeply geeky about the whole "versus" argument that I just won't allow myself to touch. In other words...who gives a #@c%?

So, I say all that to say...

Here.

Ugh.

I'm going to try and be really nice about this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSTpgR7FXO8

Ladies,

Understand something about men. Dogs, pigs, and men are the most simple creatures on the planet (it's the reason why we are referred to as all 3 at times). We require very little to make us satisfied. We don't need much from life but a bed, food, entertainment and booze. Sex is, in actuality, optional. We can handle that ourselves.

Why are wars fought by men? Because all wars deal with someone taking someone else's comfort zone away. A concept that can infuriate any man (how often have you heard a guy, in protest, say "That's not cool?"). Discomfort, for a female, is a way of life (periods, giving birth, heels, flat ironing/perming your hair, etc.). This is even more apparent in countries, where the concept of a subservient female was only lifted within the last century --- or not at all.

You take away a man's comfort zone, his simplicity and he would be...a woman.

The YouTube video above is an example of why a man needs entertainment in his life and how a woman has complicated his life by taking that away from him. I'm telling you this because it's the number one oversight from females that causes the decline of a relationship.

(More "Word Balloning" on Bamn tonight. #uc% this takes forever!)

Playing Catch Up...

First of All:

Damn.

Second of All:

Whoa.

Third of all:

What?!

I swear, I'll stop posting like 8 things in one day and start posting (semi)daily. As I'm approaching 30, I'm starting to realize the old tricks don't work the way they use to. I can't party Friday and Saturday, work at the comic shop on Sunday, go to work on Monday thru Friday, meet with my artists every evening, and make my girlfriend happy without being exhausted. So I tend to do things in spurts. Which is good for me but not in the least interesting for my blog. No wonder people take Coke.

Bamn's coming along. I've been at, artist, Jay Payne's house just about everyday. The @#$%er never runs out of beer or cigarettes.

I've collaborated with the right person.

Be Kind Rewind

I spent most of Saturday sleeping.

It's been a long week.





Somewhere in-between my obnoxious snoring (that, in the past, has been so loud I've woken myself up!) I finally watched, Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind.

Here's the review...

BE KIND REWIND

Directed Michel Gondry

Starring Mos Def, Jack Black, and Danny Glover

I was content with Be Kind Rewind after its first half. It’s understated nature had appeased me and it’s comedy, while not successive, had entertained me. I had the movie pegged. It’s at that point that it became apparent what the film was REALLY about. Like a revelation, its mission had become clear. And like its name politely suggest, I had to rewind it and watch it over again.

Surprisingly suitable, Mos Def and Jack Black play Mike and Jerry, two friends of circumstance, who are designated to run a local VHS store in Passiac, NJ. Jerry manages to erase every tape in the store and Mike concocts a potentially disastrous idea to make the rentals themselves.

director, Michel Gondry has edged this movie past “decent comedy” and into an inspiring celebration of two of America’s most romanticized art forms. The numerous amounts of “Six Degrees of Sepration” between the actual actors in the film and movies that Mike and Jerry make are quite fun. Not to mention, the bona fide ingenuity that is utilized to make their low budget flicks are part of Be Kind Rewind’s charm.

“Here is to movies with heart.”