(drumroll)
...I will be asleep before the end of the ceremony.
-EB
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Saturday, February 21, 2009
The Package - In Progress
Illustrator Alexis Ziritt has been hard at work on our crime comic collaboration, The Package, and he sent me a preview of page 1, in progress (click for larger image):
This is going to be gorgeous comic, done in a European pulp style. To merely say I'm excited about it would be an understatement. For more amazing work by the talented Mr. Ziritt, check out his Flickr photo stream, and this website, Perro Tureco.
-EB
This is going to be gorgeous comic, done in a European pulp style. To merely say I'm excited about it would be an understatement. For more amazing work by the talented Mr. Ziritt, check out his Flickr photo stream, and this website, Perro Tureco.
-EB
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Decatur Book Festival 2009
I had such a good time last year being part of the Decatur Book Festival as a professional writer that I decided to volunteer this year to help with programming. We're trying to get Neil Gaiman, the brilliant author of novels (American Gods), comics (Sandman), and children's books (Coraline) to come this year, and you can help by clicking on the widget below:
Go ahead, click it to show Neil how much we want him to come to Decatur, even if you don't live in here. It's a tremendous event.
-EB
Go ahead, click it to show Neil how much we want him to come to Decatur, even if you don't live in here. It's a tremendous event.
-EB
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Late to the Game
I admit it, I was late to the game on this whole Obamicon thing. Created by the fine people at Paste Magazine (headquartered right here in Decatur!), this web application allows you to put yourself in the now iconic Obama poster created by artist Shephard Fairey. You know, this one:
Great poster. Here's the Elliot version. Well one of two Elliot versions, depending on how I feel at any given moment:
I'm either "The Man..."
Or "Dope."
And of course by dope, I mean "dope" like "cool." Not dope like "dumbass." That would be an admission my twelve regular readers - you know who you are, kind people - would not want to hear.
-EB
Great poster. Here's the Elliot version. Well one of two Elliot versions, depending on how I feel at any given moment:
I'm either "The Man..."
Or "Dope."And of course by dope, I mean "dope" like "cool." Not dope like "dumbass." That would be an admission my twelve regular readers - you know who you are, kind people - would not want to hear.
-EB
Sunday, February 15, 2009
An Apology To My Blog and Random Notes
Hi, elliotblake.blogspot.com -
Elliot here. Clearly, I have been absent from you over the past week. And it occurred to me that perhaps you feel neglected. I don't have a great reason for my delinquency - I just haven't much felt like posting, which I realize is not a great way to keep up traffic to the site. I'm sorry. But hey, I haven't felt much like twittering either, so, y'know it's not you - it's me.
Oh, and about Twitter - I don't want you to get jealous. It's just a way for me to get some of my more random 140 character thoughts out there to the eight people who are dying to know what I think at any given moment.
Look, elliotblake.blogspot.com, I know you rely on me to update you - if it's not me then who, right? - so I'll try and do a better job of it this week. And just to make it up to you, I'll start here with some short notes about a variety of subjects:
-Big, big congratulations to my friend Jay and his wife Jen on the birth of their son Lucas!
-The Watchmen movie is coming out in a few weeks, and a friend of mine from college, photographer Clay Enos, was the on-set photographer, as well as the guy who shot all the photos for the movie posters. He has a book out now of his portraits from the set, and you can find here on Amazon. I saw the book in the comic shop the other day, and it's gorgeous. Clay graduated from Ithaca a year or two ahead of me; he was one of those cinema-photo majors that I and everyone in my class looked up to. We reconnected recently via the Facebook, and it's nice to see him really hitting the big time. Clay is also the mastermind behind the Organic Coffee Cartel, which is single-origin, specialty gourmet organic coffee. I hear it's good stuff. (I need to order a can.)
-Baseball is back. I am prepared for another rough season following the Orioles. Why do I continue to punish myself like this? I haven't lived in Baltimore since 1993, so I should give it up right? Nah. Not gonna happen. Cut me, I bleed orange and black. I guess you could call it a malady; I call it O's Fever. It could be worse - I could be a Cubs fan. My pre-season picks for division winners and the wild card slots in the AL and the NL coming in March. Watch for it!
-My cell phone screen cracked last week, and now most of the screen is completely unreadable:
I can just about make out who's calling, but the phone book is a problem and dialing is dicey. Worse, I can't read or respond to text or multimedia messages. Example - today, I got a picture of Jay's son on the phone. Couldn't see it at all, but somehow I managed to forward it to my email address. Not so easy. I need a new phone. I'd like an iPhone - I'm a Mac guy, it would fit in nicely with my hardware profile - but I am very much intrigued by the Palm Pre, which isn't out yet, but sure is purty. It has a physical keypad that slides out very elegantly from under the screen, and as a former Blackberry user, I like a keypad I can touch. Sure, I could go back to a Blackberry, but after playing with friends' iPhones, that's unlikely to happen - I'm too much of a gadget geek and the iPhone is the gadget geekiest. And frankly, so is the Pre (at least at first glance). Right now, though, I'm trying to hold out with the busted screen phone until some external issues stabilize.
Okay, blog. Do you feel better now? That's a lot of words up there. I hope you no longer feel neglected.
Sincerely,
EB
Elliot here. Clearly, I have been absent from you over the past week. And it occurred to me that perhaps you feel neglected. I don't have a great reason for my delinquency - I just haven't much felt like posting, which I realize is not a great way to keep up traffic to the site. I'm sorry. But hey, I haven't felt much like twittering either, so, y'know it's not you - it's me.
Oh, and about Twitter - I don't want you to get jealous. It's just a way for me to get some of my more random 140 character thoughts out there to the eight people who are dying to know what I think at any given moment.
Look, elliotblake.blogspot.com, I know you rely on me to update you - if it's not me then who, right? - so I'll try and do a better job of it this week. And just to make it up to you, I'll start here with some short notes about a variety of subjects:
-Big, big congratulations to my friend Jay and his wife Jen on the birth of their son Lucas!
-The Watchmen movie is coming out in a few weeks, and a friend of mine from college, photographer Clay Enos, was the on-set photographer, as well as the guy who shot all the photos for the movie posters. He has a book out now of his portraits from the set, and you can find here on Amazon. I saw the book in the comic shop the other day, and it's gorgeous. Clay graduated from Ithaca a year or two ahead of me; he was one of those cinema-photo majors that I and everyone in my class looked up to. We reconnected recently via the Facebook, and it's nice to see him really hitting the big time. Clay is also the mastermind behind the Organic Coffee Cartel, which is single-origin, specialty gourmet organic coffee. I hear it's good stuff. (I need to order a can.)
-Baseball is back. I am prepared for another rough season following the Orioles. Why do I continue to punish myself like this? I haven't lived in Baltimore since 1993, so I should give it up right? Nah. Not gonna happen. Cut me, I bleed orange and black. I guess you could call it a malady; I call it O's Fever. It could be worse - I could be a Cubs fan. My pre-season picks for division winners and the wild card slots in the AL and the NL coming in March. Watch for it!
-My cell phone screen cracked last week, and now most of the screen is completely unreadable:
I can just about make out who's calling, but the phone book is a problem and dialing is dicey. Worse, I can't read or respond to text or multimedia messages. Example - today, I got a picture of Jay's son on the phone. Couldn't see it at all, but somehow I managed to forward it to my email address. Not so easy. I need a new phone. I'd like an iPhone - I'm a Mac guy, it would fit in nicely with my hardware profile - but I am very much intrigued by the Palm Pre, which isn't out yet, but sure is purty. It has a physical keypad that slides out very elegantly from under the screen, and as a former Blackberry user, I like a keypad I can touch. Sure, I could go back to a Blackberry, but after playing with friends' iPhones, that's unlikely to happen - I'm too much of a gadget geek and the iPhone is the gadget geekiest. And frankly, so is the Pre (at least at first glance). Right now, though, I'm trying to hold out with the busted screen phone until some external issues stabilize.Okay, blog. Do you feel better now? That's a lot of words up there. I hope you no longer feel neglected.
Sincerely,
EB
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Motion Comics Are Here
The big news coming out of the New York Comic-Con this weekend - mainstream superhero comics news, anyway - was the announcement of in-continuity Spider-Woman motion comics by Marvel Comics' top writer, Brian Michael Bendis, and his brilliant long-time collaborator Alex Maleev. You can read interviews about this new venture here and here. I was particularly encouraged by what Bendis had to say; he recognizes that motion comics are neither comics nor animation, but instead something somewhere in between, and perhaps a totally new form of graphic fiction. And not without their challenges, as I wrote about recently. I'm going to write more about the topic this week when I've had a little more time to digest this news and do some additional research, but having Bendis tackle this nascent form of sort-of comics storytelling is a good thing. He's a smart writer, his work I think is ideally suited to this kind of limited animation, and he's a mensch. Which is neither here nor there, but I had the pleasure of interviewing him once for pilot I shot for GameTap TV (you can read about that experience here), and he was a mensch.
More on this soon.
-EB
-EB
Thursday, February 5, 2009
The Meaning of Bipartisan
From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
bi·par·ti·san: of, relating to, or involving members of two parties ; specifically : marked by or involving cooperation, agreement, and compromise between two major political parties
The new meaning of "bipartisan," based on the actions and complaints of the Republican congressional leadership:
Compromise? Hah! Do it our way, or we're not going to vote for your package. And if you don't do it our way, you're not being bipartisan. Take that, Democrats!
It's become painfully clear that the Republicans have not realized that they lost the last election. They have reduced numbers in the House and Senate, and they no longer control the White House, because the majority of the American people did like the way they had conducted business over the last several years. That doesn't mean they should lay down and play dead - although I would prefer that - but it does mean that they need to compromise. President Obama, in my opinion, has been very accommodating to the Republicans, and very open to their suggestions. Which is why I completely reject the following statement in a New York Times article about the stimulus deliberations in the Senate:
But while the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, has sought to lower expectations in recent days, winning passage of the stimulus with just 60 or 61 votes would be a clear setback for Mr. Obama, who has pledged to bring about a new spirit of cooperation in Washington.
The Times seems to have bought into the Republican argument that it's President Obama's fault if the bill doesn't get bipartisan support - and that's just a load of crap, because, as the cliché goes, it takes two to tango. If the Republicans aren't willing to accept some things they don't like, then they are not compromising, unlike the Democrats, who have loaded the bill up with far more tax cuts, etc., than they would prefer, in attempt to win Republican support. So it's not a setback for Mr. Obama if he only gets 60 or 61 votes, because you can't play ball if the other team won't show up.
-EB
UPDATE 1:25pm: Just read an interesting post on Talking Points Memo about this same topic, and the four Republican Senators who seem to be willing to work with the President, while the rest are following Jim DeMint, who last night proposed an alternative stimulus bill, with absolutley no spending. None. Only tax cuts. Completely rejecting or ignoring (as Josh Marshall puts it) "what conventional macroeconomics suggests about how to combat the problem."
The new meaning of "bipartisan," based on the actions and complaints of the Republican congressional leadership:
Compromise? Hah! Do it our way, or we're not going to vote for your package. And if you don't do it our way, you're not being bipartisan. Take that, Democrats!
It's become painfully clear that the Republicans have not realized that they lost the last election. They have reduced numbers in the House and Senate, and they no longer control the White House, because the majority of the American people did like the way they had conducted business over the last several years. That doesn't mean they should lay down and play dead - although I would prefer that - but it does mean that they need to compromise. President Obama, in my opinion, has been very accommodating to the Republicans, and very open to their suggestions. Which is why I completely reject the following statement in a New York Times article about the stimulus deliberations in the Senate:
But while the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, has sought to lower expectations in recent days, winning passage of the stimulus with just 60 or 61 votes would be a clear setback for Mr. Obama, who has pledged to bring about a new spirit of cooperation in Washington.
The Times seems to have bought into the Republican argument that it's President Obama's fault if the bill doesn't get bipartisan support - and that's just a load of crap, because, as the cliché goes, it takes two to tango. If the Republicans aren't willing to accept some things they don't like, then they are not compromising, unlike the Democrats, who have loaded the bill up with far more tax cuts, etc., than they would prefer, in attempt to win Republican support. So it's not a setback for Mr. Obama if he only gets 60 or 61 votes, because you can't play ball if the other team won't show up.
-EB
UPDATE 1:25pm: Just read an interesting post on Talking Points Memo about this same topic, and the four Republican Senators who seem to be willing to work with the President, while the rest are following Jim DeMint, who last night proposed an alternative stimulus bill, with absolutley no spending. None. Only tax cuts. Completely rejecting or ignoring (as Josh Marshall puts it) "what conventional macroeconomics suggests about how to combat the problem."
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
The Truth About "Lost"
Back when Lost first came on television, I watched it with my lovely wife Laura. She quickly gave up on it because it just wasn't her thing. But between the two of us, we quickly came to the conclusion that Lost was really an updated, much more complex Land of the Lost, the Sid and Marty Krofft show from the 1970's that has now been made into a Super Bowl-promoted Will Ferrel feature. After all, the characters of Lost were lost, in a mysterious realm, with weird things happening, and strange creatures making their lives difficult - like the smoke-monster. "Well, that's a load of crap," you might say, because, "Where are the Sleestaks?" And that's where things get more complex, because there are Sleestaks on Lost, masquerading as the inner-demons of each character. Sleestaks of...the soul.
Also, look at Ben. Big eyes, a little bulgy in nature. Sleestaks? Also big eyes...
Sleep on that, my friends.
-EB
Also, look at Ben. Big eyes, a little bulgy in nature. Sleestaks? Also big eyes...
Sleep on that, my friends.
-EB
And Another Thing About Obama...
He should “would wear a suit coat and tie.” This from Andrew Card, former White House Chief of Staff for former President George W. Bush, on the syndicated "news" program Inside Edition, as reported on the New York Times blog The Caucus. With all that's going on in the world, I think it's important to pick on our new president for choosing to take off his jacket and actually do some work while he's in the Oval Office.
My unsolicited advice to Mr. Card: if you don't have anything useful or constructive to add to the national discussion about how to get out of this economic mess, maybe just go ahead and take the rod out of your bottom. The White House is no longer controlled by the Bush administration and its formal dress code, so while you can act all offended by the site of President Obama without his jacket on, you just come off as a...what's a nice way to put this? Ah, I know. You come off as a fuddy-duddy.
-EB
My unsolicited advice to Mr. Card: if you don't have anything useful or constructive to add to the national discussion about how to get out of this economic mess, maybe just go ahead and take the rod out of your bottom. The White House is no longer controlled by the Bush administration and its formal dress code, so while you can act all offended by the site of President Obama without his jacket on, you just come off as a...what's a nice way to put this? Ah, I know. You come off as a fuddy-duddy.
-EB
Monday, February 2, 2009
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