Posts Tagged ‘brain’
3 items.
May12
So the full media assault for The Matrix Reloaded is in full swing. After spending months intentionally trying to save myself from any plot points, the coverage for the movie is unavoidable.
It’s on the cover of Time (where I guess they let some major plot points slip) and all over television. Everywhere from MTV, to E!, Access Hollywood – hell, I think even Dateline did 30 minutes on it this Sunday! It looks like I’ll be spending the rest of the week running around with my fingers in my ears yelling “LA, LA, LA, LA, LA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”
Still, despite the onslaught, I can’t contain my excitement for the film. I remember back in ’99 when Cami and I saw it with a bunch of friends. We both thought it was going to suck. That may sound blasphemous now, but think about Keanu Reeves’ record with sci-fi films. Remember Johnny Mnemonic? On second thought, don’t.
So, yeah. Look how right we were.
Expect nothing less than a week of strips relating to the new Matrix offering. It’s my duty.
Speaking of duty, I’ve taken the liberty to decrease the file sixes on some of the supporting images around the site. I was saving some of these files as .jpg when I could have gotten away with .gif. Most of these images aren’t even above 64 colors. It’s not a huge improvement, but hopefully the site will load a little faster. The background, which was around 33k has been trimmed back to 13k. You can barely detect the difference.
Of course, none of this will mean anything to you if you aren’t a web designer. But hopefully the site will load a little faster.
Two more things I’ll mention:
1.) I currently have another guest strip floating around over at Briworld to help him close out his last week of the strip. If you want to see it, you’ll have to go here. I guess Brian mentioned that his girlfriend is totally in love with Theater Hopper. I guess she must have received my bribe!
2. Your voting put us over the top this weekend and we’ve trumped No Pants Tuesday on the Top Web Comics Top 150 list. It’s a friendly rivalry, by the way. Zachary and I aren’t mad at each other, or anything.
But if you could twist the knife, that would be great! 🙂
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“Popcorn safety goggles?!” Oh, man! Where do I come up with this stuff?
I cop to a continuation of the joke from Monday’s strip, but I don’t feel bad about it. I have a joke in mind for Friday’s comic that I think will wrap this little arc up into a nice, neat package. Besides, it’s not like there’s anything else besides Premonition coming out this weekend.
Sure, there’s lots of advertising around Dead Silence, but I find I don’t have much to say about horror movies because they’re all pretty much the same. And then there’s Chris Rock’s directorial debut I Think I Love My Wife. Which to me looks like some kind of 1980’s situational comedy about the differences between men and women. I’m pretty sure I can’t make a joke there without getting in trouble with Cami.
So Premonition is the gravy train I’m riding for material this week. If you don’t like it, hang tight. TMNT comes out next week. I’m sure I’ll have some nostalgia-laced commentary for that little time warp.
Incidentally, the lack of interesting movies this week was something Gordon, Joe and I talked about in our weekly talkcast, The Triple Feature this past Monday at 9:00 PM. If you missed it, you can always download it from iTunes. We also talked about 300 and how it’s unprecedented success (the largest opening for film in March ever) might affect the production of the graphic novel gold standard, Watchmen. I thought it was a really good show. Check it out!
And while I’m slingin’ links, I have to give both Gordon and Joe props for their excellent 300-themed comics. You can view their respective efforts here and here. To be honest, I was jealous I didn’t come up with either joke myself. But it’s the kind of writing that would have required me to actually *ahem* see the movie. So I’m kind of wringing my hands over that one. By the way, did you know these comics were Multiplex’s 125th and Joe Loves Crappy Movies 300th? Milestones all around!
Switching gears for a second… I made a post on Monday that seemed to generate a lot of interest. Basically, I posted a drawing that I did of Sean Bean, but didn’t share that fact with you guys. I asked you to guess who it was because I was going to use the rendering as part of a t-shirt design that referenced an earlier comic and I wanted to make sure people could identify who it was supposed to be without being prompted.
The responses were really interesting. Some people knew right away that it was Bean. Others thought it looked like Ben Affleck or Ben Affleck (which was weird). Other people couldn’t make a guess because they’re really not familiar with Sean Bean’s body of work. A fair assessment. He’s not all that well-known.
So what did I learn from this feedback? I learned that if I produced the shirt, the majority of you would get the reference and that’s a good thing. But I also learned that because I used Bean’s IMDB publicity photo, I might be making myself vulnerable to some legal action. So what do we do?
Well, this brought to the fore something I’ve been thinking about for a while and that’s my caricature skills. They’re kind of bad. I mean, does this look like Samuel L. Jackson to you? Yeah, me neither. So I’ve decided to do something about it.
Yesterday I ordered a couple of
At any rate, I was really pleased to see the level of participation in the comments area from Monday’s post so I think I’m going to continue posting caricatures and let you guys guess who the person is supposed to be as a regular thing. It’s fun, it gives you guys something to talk about and it’ll help me improve my art. Sound like a plan? Let me know what you think in the comments! Natch!
What about the shirt design? I think I might still go ahead and finish it just because it was a very rich vision in my head and I’d like to see it completed. That doesn’t mean I’ll produce that version of the shirt. I might swap out the image of Bean from Monday’s post with another once I start to get a little better with the caricature. We’ll see. In the meantime, I have other designs I want to try. So it’s no big deal.
That’s it for today! See you Friday!
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People who travel in geek circles are already aware of the Batman / Iron Man comparison and where you fall on that divide basically depends on a handful of factors. But, truthfully, in the early days of comics, you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a super hero with a large bank account that he used to fight crime. Green Arrow was basically a direct rip-off of Batman. He had an Arrowmobile, people. AN ARROWMOBILE.
I took the opportunity to address the concept of the idle rich using their deep pockets to better society once before – back when Batman Begins was in theaters. Personally, I find it funny that Cami still has to take pause and verify Batman’s character arc in both the previous strip and this one – just to make sure she’s right.
I like that strip a lot and I wish I could have reused the joke. Because, truthfully, I had a hard time picking a direction in regards to my week’s worth of comics for The Dark Knight.
I guess what I’m saying is that it’s really hard to make fun of The Dark Knight. It’s easily the most anticipated movie of the summer, looks excellent and features amazing, much buzzed about performances. Really my only “in” is to poke fun at the over-the-top natures of The Joker, but after Heath Ledger’s passing, that would just look tasteless.
So, in turn, I decided to use The Dark Knight as the background of a larger story and Tom’s established history as a hard core Iron Man fan as the catalyst that kicks things off. It’s nothing epic, mind you. But these comics will be more about Tom and his geeked out brain than they will be about The Dark Knight specifically.
Trust me, it’s going somewhere. That’s why I put that little "To Be Continued!" in the corner. See? I’m always thinking of you!
That does it for me today. But if you’re looking for more grist for the mill, watch these videos that outlines the differences AND similarities between Batman and Iron Man. It’s all part of the hilarious series of “I’m a Marvel… and I’m a DC” clips that can be found on YouTube.
ENJOY!
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