Kevin Sites

The Kevin Sites blog is alive again. Now that he is no longer working for CNN and is now freelancing for MSNBC, the restrictions that kept him from blogger no longer exist. This is good stuff, and I’m glad it is back. His entry about his return to Iraq includes this bit from a press conference there:

Another Senator, Greg Thomas from Wyoming, chides the media for not doing enough positive stories on Iraq. It is a common criticism, though one I have trouble digesting. The media frequently obliges the accomplishments of the CPA. Every American television network covered the on-time opening of the Iraqi school year with thousands of students treated to rehabilitated buildings, new desks and textbooks. But when American troops are killed in IraqŽâ€”no one can argue which story should take precedence. It is the first principle of journalistic ethics, Žâ€œlearn the truth and report it.Žâ€ Responsible media donŽâ€™t pursue these casualties as just a policy scorecard, but as an indication of the actual human costs of this endeavor as well as a documentation of the sacrifice made by those individuals.

Good stuff. I’m glad we have his voice again.

PS – looking at his bio I see he is an alumnus of the Northwestern journalism school. It wasn’t till I had some connection to the school that I noticed its alumni are everywhere!

Neil Gaiman and the Daily Northwestern

This is odd, as the Neil Gaiman weblog has a link to an article in the Daily Northwestern! He says he likes the article in general but points out the very large error in the assertion they make with:

In the past three years alone, novelists such as New York Times bestseller Neil Gaiman (“American Gods”) and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon (“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay”) have been lured into comics to add a dash of proven literary talent.

In fact, I remember reading on Chabon’s website many years ago about how he was deeply into comics and had written one of the screenplays (not used) for the X-Men movie while it was in development. I don’t think either claim is accurate.

The paragraph that precedes that one is this:

“The perception of comics is getting better due to major media events,” claims Jeff Zwirek, Assistant Manager of Evanston’s Comix Revolution. But there is a simpler reason why graphic novels have now suddenly been embraced after such a long dry spell — they’re good again.

I also don’t agree with the assertion that graphic novels were once crap and are now good again. By and large, since Will Eisner more or less invented the form (and coined the term) with A Contract With God, the stories that appeared in graphic novel format were always of generally higher quality than what appeared in the pamphlet sized comics. I’m not sure what would be an example of the dark days of graphic novels. They were a fairly rare format until the last 10 or 15 years. They collect the best of the pamphlets, and the work that appears originally in the form tends to be more adventurous and accomplished. It only makes sense – the economic stakes are higher so you go with the best material. As an aside, the guy quoted is from one of the two comic shops I’ve frequented since moving into Evanston. I think he’s the guy who was such an ass when I tried to buy the last copy of Fugitives and Refugees, sending me on a goose chase around the story for nonexistent copies to avoid having to get the one out of the window display. Way to make me want to spend my $15 somewhere else next time.

Jaime Hernandez Interview at SuicideGirls

Jaime Hernandez is interviewed at SuicideGirls.com. I like Jaime and have for most of the 25 years they’ve done Love and Rockets. As I drift in and out of the world of comics, and have the ever more frequent experience of walking into a shop with lots of money in my pocket and leaving empty handed because I don’t know what I want, I have always stuck with Los Bros Hernandez. I still need to get a replacement for the threadbare “Maggie the Mechanic” L&R shirt that I finally through away, after wearing the hell out of it for 17 years.

I can definitely trace part of my fascination with Mexican and Latino pop culture back to them. I found Lucha Libre through their comics, first read One Hundred Years of Solitude because the characters talked about it. I was a little surprised to find that Jaime doesn’t speak or read Spanish fluently. It’s a good interview, but looking at the text with my interviewer hat on, and looking at the ratio of question to answer, what I see is a poor schlub interviewer working his ass off.

Orycon Schedule

Today I saw my program schedule for this year’s Orycon. I have not been 100% if I would make it although I really want to, if just to hang out with Portland buds, go to Powells and see Kelley Eskridge at the Endeavor Award ceremony. This program schedule rocks! I would have been up for more, but I like all three panels. Two of the three were based on my suggestions, so it is poetic justice that I’m on them (solo at the moment.) This makes it much more likely that I’ll go, because it is cool good programming, which if the program is this organized to have a solid schedule together 2 months before the event, that suggests that maybe the convention will be quite good. I always have a good time there, even when everything falls apart, just because of hanging out with fun people. Now, even better than last year I have months to prepare for these two solo panels. I can bring an iRiver full of good OTR stuff for the Old Time Radio on MP3 panel, I can think about the Golden Age of SF panel and possibly try to recruit some other folks. Robert Sheckley will be there and I know him a little, maybe I can get him on the panel. Hell, even Hank Reinhardt of Museum Replicas will be there – he’s another person I have met in Georgia fandom. This is shaping up to be fun, folks!

Desperados Under the Eaves

Warren Zevon lyric of the day, from “Desperados Under the Eaves”:

Don’t the sun look angry through the trees
Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves
Don’t you feel like desperados under the eaves
Heaven help the one who leaves

The French Inhaler

Warren Zevon lyric of the day, from “The French Inhaler”:

And when the lights came up at two
I caught a glimpse of you
And your face looked like something
Death brought in his suitcase
Your pretty face
It looked so wasted
Another pretty face
Devastated

Graded on the Curve

Sometimes I feel like I have gone overboard in my life as a science fiction fan, comic book nerd or whatever. As a centering exercise, I present this link to a site called Rom & Me, about a guy who so loved ROM the Spaceknight that he wrote stories of himself interacting with him and such. The worst realization was when I looked at the sketch of the guy with ROM (I’m assuming that’s him) and I realized that it looked a lot like me. Yikes.

Found via Warren Ellis’ Die Puny Humans.

American Splendor

First off, let me say that “Holy crap, Harvey Pekar has a weblog!!!. OK, with that out of my system, I’m guardedly looking forward to the film adaptation of American Splendor. I’ve loved the comic for at least 15 years now. I believe I have all but one or two of the self-published big sized issues from the 70’s and 80’s. I read and enjoyed (if that is the right word) the graphic novel of Our Cancer Year, enjoyed Harvey’s appearances on Letterman and so forth. The only reservation I have is that I have thus far always disliked Paul Giamatti as an actor. I thought he was a complete overacting hambone in Duets and I’m worried he’s goiing to bring that to this movie. I haven’t seen Man on the Moon with him playing Bob Zmuda. Maybe he did a good job in that. I knew they were adapting this, and I was hoping that Dan Castellaneta would play Harvey, as he did in the stage play. Oh well. I’m hoping that its good. Damn, Harvey has a blog. That’s one of the more surprising things I’ve run across.

The World’s Worst Leaders

I thought I posted this 2 weeks ago, but by not naming this as a *.txt file, blosxom passed it by. Better late than never is this link passed on to me by my brother – it’s a music video called “The World’s Worst Leaders”, utilizing lots of found audio and video to demonstrate an important point. Watch what people accuse others of, because there is often a reason why that issue is on their mind. The music is unusually good for this sort of thing, and Bush’s singsong oblique way of speaking makes it great fodder for this kind of treatment. It is offered in a variety of formats and bandwidths, so there is something for everyone. It reminds of the best of old Devo videos.

Blosxom Plugins

I’ve been playing with the blosxom plugins I wrote and/or modified. I guess it is about time to actually release some of them to other people. First, I’ll do the simplest one, the one that adds a title to the page header based on the very newest post title. I want to release my clicktrackMinus, but I think the cookie handling needs a little more testing. After I’m done with these, I think I’m going to implement a plugin that will use the Technorati API. I see a dude created a Perl module that implements the API but I’m probably not going to use it. I don’t want to require people to install a module, considering that many blosxom users probably are on a hosted system and don’t have easy access to that. Instead, I’ll just more or less duplicate what he’s done. Since it doesn’t have to be as general, it should be allright.

Hornbuckle

It’s been so long since I’ve done a band of the day, I don’t even want to check to see what the last day was. I found this group via the GeoURL, since they are within a few miles from me. I ran across April Hornbuckle’s site and then her husband David’s. Turns out he is a musician. I like his song “Sunburst Goddess”, which you can download here. This song reminds me of Make Believe, a band I really liked.

Get Rich Slow

Excellent Dave favorite comic book writer/artist Scott McCloud, a guy I have long read and admired and was lucky to once interview, has talked about the lack of good micropayment schemes. He seems to have found one he likes, and is giving it a shot by releasing a three chapter comic at $0.25 a chapter. I just might fire this up. When I was 16, I went nuts for the then brand new Zot! comic. One thing to point out, Fictionwise has a fine micropayment scheme that I use all the time, so such things do already exist. I think he really means a generalized one that can be used across multiple retailers.

Via Boing Boing

Fantagraphics needs help

Fantagraphics Comics has a note on the front of their website saying that they need to raise $80K in the next month or risk shutting down. They have a lot of good karma with me just from publishing Love and Rockets for all these years. I’m being forced to retire some t-shirts that are now rags with armholes, and that includes my beloved “Maggie the Mechanic” L&R shirt. Perhaps I’ll buy a replacement. I also have gaps in my run of The Complete Crumb, so I’ll buy the ones I missing and that they have.

A few months ago (was it a year ago already?) Top Shelf Comics had a similar appeal for similar reasons – the bankruptcy of a distributor leaving large checks unpaid – and they made the money they needed in the first few days. Here’s hoping something similar happens with Fantagraphics. If you were thinking about buying any of their stuff, now would be the time to do it.

All Style

I spent a little time untangling the mess of tables in my template and thus was able to move the calendar off to the right like it used to be. I had a hard time getting it to look the way I wanted, so I lifted the CSS bodily from the Tony’s Dream weblog and edited it from there. Now I’m back to the three column look, links and blogroll and stuff down the left, calendar down the right. If I add any more goofy stuff like a “now playing” or “now reading” list, I’ll add them to the right. Already, if you were to navigate to a day or category without many entries, the amount of stuff in the left column forces the page to be really tall. I did bump the referers list to only show hosts with 2 or more referes, which cut that down by half and makes it less chaotic. Otherwise, every weirdass Google country mirror shows up, google.tz or google.vc or whatever. I keep saying that I’m done fooling with the template, but then some thing pops up and I fool with it. Such is my prerogative.

Farting Preacher

This one is making the rounds at work and completely destroying our productivity (what little there was to destroy in the first place.) It’s the Farting Preacher movies, featuring footage of Robert Tilton (the richest televangelist there is) augmented, shall we say, with extra noises on the soundtrack. “Can you feel it? That’s Jesus.”

Gentleman Gene

Mark Evanier reports about an interview with Gene Colan being posted at Slushfactory. I liked the interview and as a kid in the 70’s was absolutely gaga over Gene Colan’s art. I loved his Tomb of Dracula work, Iron Man, you name it I liked it. In the 80’s when they became able to print comics directly from his pencil art like in Nathaniel Dusk, that was purely awesome.

From [news from me]

Sonia Rocks

I’m still in a good mood from rocking out last night. I wished I had
more rock ‘n roll stamina on the weeknights, as I was liking Zen
Circus. I’ve listened to one of Sonia’s CDs all the way through and I
like it. This is just her and her guitar, all recorded live to 2
track. It has a lot of immediacy, kind of that Exile in
Guyville
in your face-ness. It sounds a lot like the show I
saw last night, her making a joyful noise. I dig it.

Steve Rude

It’s stormy around here lately, and I wish it were just the weather. My office is, to say the least, a tense place lately.

Last night I had occasion to view a website I’d never seen before, that of the artist Steve
Rude
. I’ve long been a fan of his since I was a teenager reading Nexus. I’m old enough that I started with the last of the big black and white issues. If you browse around the site, there is a place where you can download a one minute demonstration piece
from a proposed Nexus animated series. I really liked it and think it could be very cool. Of course, I am biased by having enjoyed this character for 20 years now.