Archive for May 5th, 2014

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R.I.P. Eddie Valiant

by admin on May 5th, 2014
Posted In: Blog

I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m not really familiar with a lot of  Bob Hoskins’ work – it’s not like the man didn’t have a substantial resume on his IMDb page.  In all honesty, I think I avoided looking up a lot of his movies because I didn’t want anything to change the first impression I had of him as private detective Eddie Valiant from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?   For me, Bob Hoskins is and was Eddie Valiant, in the same way that Bob Denver will always be Gilligan.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? may seem a little dated and the mix of animation and live-action may seem occasionally awkward by today’s exacting CGI standards, but at the time that it first hit the screens, it was amazing.  And it arrived at a time when it seemed like feature film animation was dying out and the once-mighty Disney corporation might be divided into  different business components and sold off like cuts from a fresh side of beef.

But the arrival of Roger Rabbit,  together with Disney’s Little Mermaid revitalized animation and helped to bring back excitement for the medium.  And at the narrative center of all the excitement, providing the human face and point of view in contrast to Roger Rabbit’s zanyness was Eddie Valiant.  I had always been in love with animation, but Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Bob Hoskins’ surly private detective brought the rest of the world around to see what I was so fond of.

Thanks, Mr. Hoskins.  It may take me a moment to remember your real name, but you’ll never be forgotten.

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The Agents of Shield we’ve been waiting for…

by admin on May 5th, 2014
Posted In: Blog

I’ve been watching Agents of Shield since the first episode, and like a lot of other folks who have been watching, I had been disappointed for the first half of the season.  From the beginning of the series, I had been wanting this show to be good, and while there were occasional moments when it seemed that things might come together, overall the show was an unfocused ‘monster of the week’ exercise with uninteresting main characters, boring villains and no discernible overall story arc.

The premise behind Henchmen for Hire is very similar to what I expected from Agents of Shield – I expected it to be a look into a superhero universe from the perspective of some non-superpowered humans.  I think some of the lessons I learned from when I started the comic are probably lessons that the ‘Shield’ writers learned as well.  I found out very quickly that even though the main story is about normal humans, it’s their interactions and response to the super beings that drives the narrative.  Even when the super-beings aren’t on stage, the audience needs to be aware of them.  The world should feel different, even when the cast on the screen is merely mortal.

It may just be that Agents of Shield was sort of spinning it’s wheels until the Captain America movie could hit the theaters and provide the dramatic threads that have pulled the TV show together.  The last four episodes have been great.  If the show was just biding it’s time until the movie release, then shame on the producers for putting out a subpar product before then.  If I hadn’t wanted so badly for the show to succeed, I would have abandoned it long before the big payoff.

So now Agents of Shield is finally the show I’d been waiting for.  I don’t know if I will buy the DVD when it comes out (yes, I still buy DVDs) just because I don’t think I would ever want to revisit the first half of the season.  I suppose if nothing else, it can serve as an example of what not to do as a storyteller….

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Lazarus Rising – With Fancy Fonts

by admin on May 5th, 2014
Lazarus Rising – With Fancy Fonts

As a couple of the characters and several readers have noted, NanoMan probably wasn’t ‘alive’ in the first place, so he isn’t ‘dead’ at the moment.  I was going to have him launch into this big speech about how the last bits of his organic self have been killed, but I get the sense that regular readers out there have figured that out already.  So, to keep the story moving, I’m going to skip that chunk of exposition and continue forward.

I am going to have NanoMan speak in a different ‘robotic’ font to emphasize his now non-human aspect (it’s called Area51 from Comicraft for you font fans) so if you’re the kind of person who hears the character voices in your head, it should be a colder and more robotic voice than before.

Regular readers have probably also figured out that I am a big fan of fancy fonts.  I think the biggest inspiration for that is the old Walt Kelly comic strip Pogo, which is one of the all-time great comic strips.  Walt Kelly was not only a great cartoonist, but a gifted calligrapher, and when one of his characters spoke with a fancy affectation or a pretentious tone, Kelly would fill his word balloons with wonderful hand-crafted dialog.  If you’ve never read any of Walt Kelly’s work, you should check it out.

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