Birthday Bash

I’m gearing up for my ten-day birthday event (read: cleaning my house, the dishes, some drawing…balance my checkbook) and the construction of a mayonnaise cake (you have no idea so don’t even open your mouth, idiot).

Originally I was going to go to Maine, but that bottomed out.  Then I was going to go to Ponderosa with a bunch of friends, but that shit the bed.  Then it was a BBQ idea, but…well you see the trend.

As far as I see it, doing nothing for my 25th birthday is a perfect representation of what I’ve DONE with my life so far.  Nothing.  I regret never doing drugs or smoking or drinking or being a bully.  I wish I had been that drugged out idiot girl that everyone wants to fuck and does and attends the parties of.

With any luck, the LHC will take care of things in October.

It Does WHAT?

Does the LHC make anyone else just a little bit nervous?

Welcome Back, Go Fish

I started updating again.  I’m going to try and maintain a MWF schedule, because I NEED structure in order to work, but if I miss an update, it’s because I’ve just simply decided not to update.  Possibly to work on the page.  Who knows?

Anyway, enjoy it while it’s around.

And YES, for the love of God, I have every intention of finishing the story online.  No worries.  You’ll never need to pay me for anything.  Rend my artistic loins in twain with your insatiable reading.

You could at least buy a sticker…

Also:

Psionics and Psychos

Well I’m back online.  I never realized, and neither will you, how addicted and dependent you are on the internet until it’s gone.

Fortunately, I have amazing friends.  One of them lent me a shopping bag full of comics.

The majority of the bag was Akira, the manga.

Now…when I was much younger, the second wave of “OMFG JAPANESE CARTOONS YAY!” phase was just coming to light.  I was too busy playing in dirt and clay to watch TV.  My first anime was “Robot Carnival”.  And it’s funny how much of my childhood I don’t remember…at all.  My memory of “Akira”, the anime, went about these lines:

Somebody in a white cloak gets hit by a flaming car, people explode…That’s it.

My memories of “Robot Carnival” were tamer, but still vague.

“Akira” was HUGE back in the day.  It held a tiny bit of nostalgic gleam for me.  So when I got handed all six books of the manga, my brain set into motions a sense of “this is going to be awesome because people blow up”.

The manga Akira is ASTOUNDING.  Just it’s size is amazing.  Two thousand plus pages.  The art is classic (well, I guess that’s a given for manga…) and the sound effects are hilarious.  In case you’ve never read/seen/heard of Akira, here’s the summary:

A bike gang, fueled by capsulated drugs, meet with fate one day when young Tetsuo, a typical emo kid who only wants to be top dog, crashes his bike in a mysterious circumstance.  He is taken to an unknown location where they treat him with an experiment to “awaken something inside of him”.  The reasons are vague.  Either way, Tetsuo is never the same.  He returns to his bike gang at school and things start to go awry.  Long story short, Tetsuo finds he has unbelievable abilities and mind can kill a yak from two hundred yards…with mind bullets.

That’s telekinesis, Kyle.

His schoolyard and nearly-life-long friend Kaneda goes all out to try and stop Tetsuo from destroying the world.

I got sucked into the manga; I read a book a day.  I took it to work and got heckled and I’d stay up late trying to finish it.  I got obsessed.  But something curious happened.

In my obsession to find an Akira desktop for my computer, I noticed there were barely any images…anywhere.  In fact most information and fan sites were simple and few in number.  Like someone waking up to a Neo-Toyko in Akira, I was stunned and wandered around to learn more.  What happened to Akira?  As far as I knew it, Akira was the most popular, celebrated and swooned over anime EVER.  Where was the magic?

Akira was the most popular and celebrated anime OF IT’S TIME because that’s all there was besides “Robot Carnival” and random Sci Fi Channel specials.  It was the newness that made is amazing.  The excitement of something from a foreign land.  And the movie’s production is impressive.  160,000 cells gives the animation a smooth flow and allow for great movement variations.

But “Akira” was awful.

A horrible realization at 3am for me on youtube in 13 parts.

I haven’t finished the last book of Akira.  My curiosity to refuel my distant memory made me look up the anime.  I hated it.  Most of it.  If there was any shittier translation between book and movie, I don’t know it.  Characters were flawed, their personalities completely different from the book, and some of them were swept under the rug.  Remember that cioffed radical with the beads?  She’s a HUGE character in the manga.  Super important, super powered and super sweet.  She gets turned into a screaming Akira-lover and then hit by a flaming car.  It was like someone raped my brain.  Also, Tetsuo wasn’t out for power originally.  The main idea of Akira, the manga, is that he’s in constant pain, his body can’t contain his energy and all he wants is either for things to go back the way they were or to get rid of the pain and rule the world with the little boy Akira.

That’s right, Akira is a little boy.  Not a collection of jars.  HE WALKS AND EVERYTHING.  I almost threw my computer out the window when I saw he was a collection of jars.

Alone, the anime is still bad.  Disjointed and hurried.  But beautiful.  I’d recommend the manga series except 1) it’s probably expensive and 2) the memory of the movie has put a bad taste in your mouth and you aren’t going to listen to me anyway.

I think the biggest pisser is that the guy who wrote it worked on the movie.  Unless he was at gunpoint to make a shitty movie, there’s no excuse for what he did.

Welp, I’m going to go drink some coffee and whatnot before Tlaloc stomps through my region again (Helluva deadly thunderstorm this morning…I think he’s angry with me because he’s dead).

Fill in the Blanks

Seeing as how I’m still on a break from a schedule, feel free to make a comic page or book or whatever.  Email it to me at james2battle@(removethis)hotmail.com and I’ll post it.  I’ve no reason not to.

This way you readers can amuse each other.

Play nice, kids.

Double Edit: I’m back, bitches.  No thanks to my ISP (no names, VERIZON…), but the important bit is that I’m back.  Now because I got up at 8:30am and it 3:34pm and I still haven’t eaten, I’m going to go get some food and try not to pass out.  IM me!

Roll Out, Homies

For the few that check this blog AND my dA account, you’ll be happy to know I’ve kicked my own ass into drawing (since no one else will).  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I’m spewing shitty art like some kind of Dadaist geyser who hates sunlight.

I get an idea, I slap it down faster than the idea can be completed and if I like it, I keep it.  If not, I move on.  It’s like a fucking factory line in my brain right now.  The Illustrator ideas come slower because I DO technically have Illustrator, but it’s on my lappy.  And since my desk/house isn’t big enough for two computers, I have to use the lappy (named “Tinkerbell”) in the living room and either lean from the couch to the coffee table or wear my ass out on my wood floor with the screen somewhat above me.  I do have more ideas, but screaming a mechanical pencil across a piece of recycled computer paper is much…much faster.

I’m thinking of compiling an artbook with these newer images I deem worthy.  I don’t know how to publish or anything (at least without screwing you guys over), but if anyone has any ideas…

I was actually sitting at my desk today and I felt an aneurysm coming on.  My brain was screaming ideas, but three other halves were busy telling me that I wasn’t any good, I should work on my comic or I should try and do something experimental.  Before they could come to a vessel-rupturing crescendo, I put the brakes on.  I want/need to experiment.  I want to have my characters involved in backgrounds or do random characters I’ve never drawn or want to draw again (THAT’s almost impossible which is why you see so many recycled characters…I love my babies…).  I want to be that person people say “hey I WANT to buy something from you!”

So far, I fail.

BUT I guess my goals are founded or something.  I was hoping people could give me ideas, free commissions as it was, but nobody’s really interested in that because there are better artists to draw their fursona humping some tickle-foot fetish raccoon elsewhere.  Go figure.

As for the comic, I actually did do some inking on it a week ago at the laundromat and I probably will again this week at the same place because it’s a good environment.  Nobody really bothers me and can see I’m a talentless hack so I don’t get interrupted with dumbass questions like “if I gave you a picture of my grandson could you draw him so I could get it tattooed on my ASS?”.

Also, I’ve been consuming music like it’s going out of style, which, if you know my music, is.

You and the Clouds

It’s a very strange day.  It’s like the beginning of a horror movie or some sci-fi bullshit.  The sky is overcast, but glowing in some areas where the illuminated puffy white clouds show through.  The air is still and humid.  It rained earlier, giving everything that sort of “just woke up” atmosphere.  Very green, lush and calm.  Like Vermont is breathing in.

I had to drive down into town to buy a TV dinner for lunch.  I noticed my fish were ALL acting strange.  I noticed the rain beaded up on my neighbor’s car, but not mine.  I only had $14 for milk, lunch and a snack.  The whole town is dead silent.  Very little traffic, very few people; not a lot of noise despite the train moving through town hauling oil tankers.  The people at the store stare forward at nothing and say little.  They want their food and to go home, just like me.  Now the wind is moving a little and the sumacs outside are waving with a breeze that I hope will bring in some rain.  I’ve got to go to work soon and I don’t want to.

I realize now that I haven’t made a single piece of art in about three weeks or more.  Not a sketch, a line, a note.

Yesterday I was in the middle of a humvee procession and it was cool.  I really hope someone on the interstate could see my car over the cow pasture and thought I was some kind of national criminal in a tiny red Prizm.

I wish I had Illustrator, a creemee and ambition.

(It’s called a creemee here.  Deal with it or STFU)

Projects

So as it may or may not be known, I’m on an artistic hiatus…Okay, not a hiatus from art, but a hiatus from GF.  I’ve explained myself in the forum.  I’ve got a lot of ideas I want to get done or start or attempt.

deviantART has this “100 Art Challenge”: 100 words, 100 images.  I’ve been wanting to do this for some time.  I’m obviously not going to take ALL the time from GF to work on this, as I’d be gone for YEARS.  But I’d like to start it.

Musical images: I’ve been collecting piles of songs on my iTunes and am planning do to one page strips based on some lyrics from some songs.  It sounds hokey, but most of the lyrics won’t be said, but acted out.  Maybe you can guess what song they are from if you study it long enough (or cheat and Google it, you son of a bitch).

Artbook:  Everyone and their mother make artbooks nowadays and I’d like to be paid for some art as opposed to putting it up on dA where, technically, it’s unprotected and unpaid for.  I’d like to compile a digital artbook, mostly Illustrator trials I’ll be doing during this downtime.

Losing weight: I’ll be doing some anatomical study using stock photos and stalking procedures to thin down characters that have since been sort of average.

I know there was some more stuff I wanted to do, but I thought I’d post this in case you were wondering what I’ll be doing.

Hello.

Yes. I restarted my blog. This means all those dream journal entries and events and people I wanted to remember are now gone forever (well, the people are still around…). My bad. I blame 2am and public television.

Welcome!

I have no idea what to do with this blog. I’d rather not have another rant/emo/PMS journal again, my reviews are in my Forum and my alarm clock destroys any chance of remembering dreams other than nightmares.

Man, I’m really bummed about losing all those entries.