Building a City

Yesterday, I told you how difficult it is for me to draw buildings in perspective. You may or may not like the first panel of the page, but I spent about five or six hours working on it. A better artist could have done way more than this in that time, but hey, I only had myself to work with. At any rate, I think it is kind of interesting to see what I drew first, and how things went on from there. Basically, I decided on a color for each side of the buildings (white, black, and two tones of gray), and then I drew all the lights and windows with a white pen to give the city some life, since it looked positively dead without them. Anyway, I hope you like it!

Worlds Collide #1

Here you have the first page of this eagerly anticipated story! Drawing it took me a lot of time and effort, and even though the results aren't as bad as I feared they would be, I guess it could have turned out better. Still, I'm very happy with it, especially because drawing buildings and perspective is something I find extremely difficult, and I feel like I accomplished something with the panels on this page. And since I'm willing to make the most out of this page, tomorrow you'll get to see a couple of these panels while they were still a work in progress.
Let me know what you think so far!

Desde Babilonia para esto

No es que Babylon AD sea mala… Bueno, vale, puede que sí sea mala, no voy a engañaros. Los efectos especiales son baratos, los escenarios y decorados son más baratos todavía, y la historia no es que sea exactamente original. (¿Y qué pasa con los anuncios de Coca Cola por todas partes? Si la refrescante compañía soltó pasta para hacer la película, tampoco parece que se estirara demasiado, y mira que hay carteles enormes anunciando el producto en Babylon AD de principio a fin.) La verdad es que no me extraña que el director, Mathieu Kassovitz, haya renegado del film, y aunque no sé cuan fiel a la novela original la película es, lo cierto es que no me sorprendería que el libro sea superior. Y pese a imaginarme todo esto a priori, el incomprensible carisma de Vin Diesel me atrajo irremediablemente a ver BAD. (¿Coincidencia que éstas sean sus iniciales?)

Realmente, y aparte de lo barata que parece, sólo tengo un problema con la película: que las cosas pasan porque tienen que pasar. Las relaciones entre personajes cambian, pero son cambios bruscos, hasta cierto punto inesperados (se los ve venir porque son predecibles, no porque se nos indique que van a tener lugar), motivados por una única razón: exigencias del guión. En ningún momento se nos muestra o justifica que dos personajes empiecen a resultarse atractivos, o a tolerarse, o a respetarse. Simplemente en una escena las cosas son de una manera, y en la siguiente son de otra. ¿Qué ha sucedido, cómo se ha pasado de A a B? No se sabe. O bueno, sí se sabe: porque el guión lo requiere. Una lástima que el todopoderoso guión no hay ido plantando las semillas del fruto que quiere recoger en previas escenas.

Aparte de eso, la peli es entretenidilla si no se es muy exigente, y siempre es estupendo escuchar la voz de ultratumba de Vin Diesel, incluso cuando está soltando topicazos y frases más que manidas. Y es que eso es lo que Babylon AD es: una sucesión de tópicos de ciencia ficción barata que sólo la inyección Diesel hace soportable. Hasta cierto punto.

Never Mind Sweet

I had been interested in checking out Pushing Daisies since it premiered in the fall of 2007. But then the writer's strike exploded and the show's first season was reduced to only nine episodes. Then the show came back for season two --but the audience did not, and Pushing Daisies was cancelled. Still, I was curious, so when I found the first season for fifteen bucks, I decided to give it a try.

The show's premise is sort of interesting: a guy that can bring people back from the dead by touching them. However, there are two caveats. One is that whoever he brought back will die when he touches him again. So why would he touch them again, you ask? Well, if he doesn't send them back to the Ever After one minute after resurrecting them, somebody else dies to preserve the balance. So what Ned, the guy thus gifted, does is pretty much avoid touching anyone. Then Chuck, his first love, is murdered, and he touches her to find out who killed her. But then he cannot bring himself to kill her again, so someone else dies and she gets to stay. So they can be together! Except for the fact they cannot touch each other ever again, or she will die for good. Oops.

The whole show feels like a fairy tale, with Jim Dale narrating the story from beginning to end. The look of the show is also fairytale-esque and clothes and cars and buildings look old and quaint, with bright colors and whimsical designs. The dialogue is quick, witty, and funny, and every episode is jam-packed with awkward moments, sweetness, cuteness, improbable names and outlandish events. To sum it up: imagine Tim Burton on a sugar high. Now add three thousand spoonfuls of honey, and you will pretty much have it.

Pushing Daisies truly is quite idiosyncratic and out there, an original mixture of noir detective stories (Ned works with Emerson Cod), fantasy, romance, and mystery seasoned with lots and lots and lots of sweetness and quirky stuff. And even though I like weird stuff and cute stories and love and fantasy and whimsy, I found the combination overpowering. It was cute, but I wasn't invested in the characters. It was entertaining, but the extremely episodic nature of the show makes it hard to commit to it long term. So while I enjoyed watching these nine episodes, I really don't find any reason to get season two when it comes out on DVD. But judge for yourselves, check out one or two episodes, and let me know what you think.

Countdown to Collision

Worlds Collide, Sunny Jhanna's new online comic book will be coming out next week! I know it's been a long time in the making, but I hope you guys like what you see. As I always say, being a team of one means lots of work, and even though I've worked as fast as I could (for the most part), well, it's taken a long time. On the other hand, it's pretty cool to work by yourself, since all the elements fit and evolve and change and adapt and fit again in your head, and I don't have to drive anybody crazy with what we'll grandiosely call "my vision". (I'm laughing too, don't worry.)

Worlds Collide will be eleven pages long, and it will appear every three days. In between pages, we'll have lots of extras to give you a glimpse into the creative process, which I hope you'll find as interesting as the story itself.

I guess you could think of these eleven pages as the first issue of the series, or, to be more accurate, as an issue zero or preview issue or origin story, whatever you want to call it. At eleven pages, it is obviously not exactly a standard-size issue, but this is the part of the story that "had to be drawn". The story has what has to be described as an open ending that, of course, I cannot discuss right now. There will be questions left unanswered at the end of the story, so please be prepared for that and don't complain too much about it. It is not that I ran out of space, out of ideas, out of energy, or out of paper. There is a reason for things to be this way, but I really cannot say anything else right now, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

I think the story turned out to be quite interesting, and I think I did some neat storytelling, at least on some of the pages. They are black and white pages with gray tones, and there really aren't too many panels per page. The only thing in color is the logo that accompanies this post, which I did in Photoshop in about ten minutes. I know it's not exactly awesome, but the idea for it came to me almost immediately after I got the title, and I think it looks kind of cool.

But enough talking already. Remember, Worlds Collide comes out next week, so it won't be long before you get to tell me what you think of this whole crazy idea!

Tu est une grande peeparollo

Right after reading Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, I didn’t know what to expect of his Dark Tower saga. As I already told you here, I found the first book on the series rather, well, disjointed. I tried very hard to like it, I really did, but its 336 pages felt to me like a trip through the desert. Which is more or less what the story itself was about.

Anyway, it was because of Finn5fel’s continuous praising of the saga that I didn’t even think of leaving it there. He kept telling me that the first one was the weakest book of the lot, that the complete adventures of Roland were actually nothing sort of amazing. Why shouldn’t I give then the next volume a try? We’re talking about Stephen King here. His most acclaimed saga can’t be so bad.

Or can it?

Obviously, it can not. I read the second book, and I got so enthusiastic about it that I really had to restrain myself from picking up the third volume from the shelf right away. Even though it’s almost five hundred pages long, The Drawing of the Three gets read in just a blink. And that is because of its compelling characters, the extreme situations they are faced with, and a gripping tension that kept me turning page after page in manic frenzy. High quality fiction on the part of Stephen King is what we’re dealing here with. And this time he made me care deeply for the characters, so it really didn’t bother me, like it was the case with the first book, that things were just happening without an apparent reason. Between you and me, that’s simply a fancy way to say that this story is really, really weird. In fact, it may well be the weirdest story I’ve ever read.

But it definitely is one well worth it.

Animated Dae II

This animation is part of something much, much bigger. Or it would be, if I wasn't so lazy. Just like I said a few weeks ago, I've had these pictures for a while, and they are part of a larger project that will probably never be finished. The artwork is a bit more elaborate than my previous effort, and in that regard I like it better than the other one. Still far from perfect, but I think it's kind of interesting. Enjoy!