Posts Tagged ‘pictures’
5 items.
Mar17
GUEST STRIP – BRANDON J CARR
March 17th, 2006 |- Comics »
- Comics »
- Guest Strip
(8 votes, average: 8.00 out of 10)
Do you have any idea how tempted I was to title this guest strip "Brokeback Victor?" But I guess Brokeback Mountain jokes aren’t cool anymore since the Oscars are over… Oh, well.
Quick question. Did you know that this guest strip done by my good Boxcar buddy and creator of web comic The Kenmore – Brandon J Carr – is, IN FACT, awesome? Cuz, guess what? It is!
I love the lead in panel with the strip name between the characters. I adore that there is no dialogue and everything is communicated crystal clear. And I am jealous with envy that Brandon uncovered a facet of Victor’s character that I might have to steal for future installments! This is a Grade A guest strip.
But really, should we consider anything less from the genius behind The Kenmore? Brandon’s comic is on hiatus for the moment as our good man moves into a new place. But don’t be sullen. Don’t be downtrodden. Instead, look at this as an opportunity to check out Brandon’s work from the very begining and read all of his stuff before he goes back to producing new material. You won’t regret it!
Thanks again, Brandon! MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
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Mar22
GUEST STRIP – FRED GRISOLM
March 22nd, 2006 |- Comics »
- Comics »
- Guest Strip
(7 votes, average: 7.71 out of 10)
Today’s guest strip comes from Boxcar buddy Fred Grisolm – the very excellent author of the equally excellent Hate Song.
Some of you might read Fred’s strip and say he was stealing a page from Brandon J. Carr’s guest strip from last friday. To which I would say "Stop flappin’ yer gums about things you don’t know nothin’ about!" Fred developed his comic totally independent of Brandon. They never looked over their desks to see what their classmate was doing. Scout’s honor. Just goes to show how great minds think alike!
Either that, or there is a powerfully strong undercurrent of homoerotic tension running through Theater Hopper that I’m totally unaware of putting out there.
I really like Fred’s strip because I thought he did a really good job of capturing my writing style. Something about the pace of this one felt right. Kind of like how I would write it. Fred is right on the money when it comes to serial killer movies with the newspaper clippings on the wall. Can we find a new cliche to exploit, please?
At any rate, thanks to Fred for an excellent comic. If you liked his work here, check out Hate Song where he consistently knocks it out of the park.
Changing gears, I’m back from vacation and it’s good to be home. Well, good and not so good.
The thing I hate about taking vacations is that time doesn’t stop on all the crap going on back home. When you get back to work there are a ton of messages to follow up on, you have to do all the laundry from the trip, catch up on the bills… all that garbage. Honestly, it stresses me out to the point I was stressed at BEFORE the vacation. Thank goodness it’s a short work week. At least I don’t have to do Friday’s comic, either. That gives me a little breathing room.
Walt Disney World was – of course – totally excellent. Although I’ll be glad not to have to side-step fat parents pushing double-wide strollers for a while.
WDW gets a bad rap for all the long lines you have to wait in to ride the attractions. And even though it was Spring Break, I think we got off pretty light. We didn’t have to wait in too many lines that were longer than 15 or 20 minutes.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the Magic Kingdom, but is there a more disproportionate wait time vs. ride time for any other attraction than Peter Pan’s Flight? Seems to take two hours to enjoy a ride that’s maybe two minutes long.
I’ll tell you something that really cheesed me off about our visit. Cami and I were really hyped up to ride Pirates of the Caribbean, right? We loved the ride when we went with our parents in our youth, but when we went 6 years ago for our honeymoon, the ride was closed down for repairs. So this time, we were ready to go. Guess what? It was closed down AGAIN! We found out later it was because they wanted to make the ride more like the movies and were adding in scenes with Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow. Double-ugh! That would have been really cool to see. But not this time. So now I guess I gotta wait until Cami and I have kids who are old enough to appreciate the expense and planning that goes into a Walt Disney World trip before I can see the ride again. Of course, by then it’ll probably be 2020 and the ride will be under construction again to replace the audio animatronics with holograms.
That’s another thing. For the life of me, I don’t understand why parents bring their babies and small children to Walt Disney World. I wanted to punch every sleeping child in a stroller. Have they no idea what their parents went through to bring them there?! When I have kids, I’m going to wait until they’re 20 before I take them. Then maybe they can chip in for a plane ticket!
I don’t mean to make it sound like we had a bad time. Far from it. Cami and I had a great vacation and it was really good to go down there any enjoy it together. We got to see everything we wanted to see and had a great time celebrating our 6th anniversary. I have some more to say about the trip, but nothing I really need to share in this space. Keep an eye out on my LiveJournal page for some extra thoughts about the trip!
Until then, see ya’ real soon!
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Mar24
GUEST STRIP – MITCH CLEM
March 24th, 2006 |- Comics »
- Comics »
- Guest Strip
(5 votes, average: 8.40 out of 10)
Give it up to my good buddy Mitch Clem for closing out this period of guest strips on a high note. He took the happy accident that occured when Brandon J. Carr and Fred Grisolm reached the same conclusion with their strips and turned it into a great running gag! I’m thinking this is probably something worth running with when I hop back into the saddle on Monday. At the very least to kind of prime the pump before I launch back into full movie commentary mode.
I must give sincere props to the others who helped me out while I was away. That includes Ali Graham, Joe Dunn, MadMup and Mike Morgan. These are all guys who have gone to bat for me before and I feel especially lucky and humbled that I have reliable friends such as these. Be sure to check out each of their web sites for a concentrated dose of their talents! Thanks, guys!
Being on vacation in Walt Disney World is sort of like being on another planet… or Texas. You feel totally severed from the modern world and the events that occur in it. Crap, even the TV stations piped into the hotel rooms are all Disney-owned. No cable except for The Disney Channel, Lifetime, ESPN and so on.
So shamefully, I didn’t have an opportunity to see V for Vendetta when it came out last Friday. I’ve been begging Cami to see it since we got back in town Tuesday night, but she’s been reluctant. Now she’s telling me she has no interest in seeing it at all and I can see it by myself when she returns to her night classes next week. Grr.
Oh, well. At any rate, Inside Man comes out today and she’s more in step with seeing that. I like to think it’s because she’s REALLY into Christopher Plummer, but I have a feeling it might have more to do with Clive Owen playing the heavy. Really, how can you NOT love Clive Owen.
Tossing in Densel Washington and Jodie Foster into the mix doesn’t hurt. What really surprised me, though was learning that Spike Lee was behind the lens on this one. You totally wouldn’t have guessed it from the trailer. That’s probably a good thing. The film looks like a straight-up-the-middle urban crime thriller. But I think we all know that Lee is a little bit smarter than that and reviews seem to indicate some really intelligent twists on the genre. So I’m looking forward to a good time.
I’ve felt way behind on movies all year. It’s not atypical for January and February to be slow. But now that we’re almost done with March, I feel almost starved. I think seeing these two movies will go a long way toward correcting that.
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I’ve taken a few self-portraits. Yes, I have. Yes, I have.
I know today’s comic isn’t exactly movie-related. Maybe you were looking for something a little more on-point, genre-wise this morning. But after all the homo-erotic goodness of the last two weeks, I had to take the joke and run with it.
Coming up with the punchline was kind of weird. Since the comic is a autobiographical exaggeration, I kind of resisted the idea of casting myself as vain or being more concerned with myself than Cami. I didn’t want to give you guys the wrong idea about out relationship because the joke is kind of at her expense. Truthfuly, I would rather stare at Cami for 100 hours that catch a passing glimpse of myself in the reflection of a storefront window.
But upon realizing that I didn’t want to portray myself as being vain, I realized… I was being vain. So I ran with the joke. More movie stuff later in the week. Cross m’ heart.
Cami and I saw Inside Man over the weekend and I really liked it. I mean REALLY liked it. As in, "Hey, maybe the situation at the multiplex isn’t as dire as the evidence would have led me to believe three weeks ago! There’s hope!"
I think we can all agree that there hasn’t been very many good movies in the theater since the end of the holiday season. It’s okay. It’s low tide on cinema. Happens every year.
But watching the crafty Inside Man was like a beacon saying "The salmon are returning to spawn!" With spring brings renewal.
The movie is as tense as you might expect and there’s always some kind of new twist being thrown into the mix. Each of the four leads – Densel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster and Christopher Plummer – all sink their teeth into their roles and bounce off each other well without being too showy. Densel didn’t launch in to Training Day level histronics. He actually milks a lot of comedy out of the tension just by being his usual, charming self. If anything, I thought Jodie Foster’s performance was possibly the weak link in the film, but that’s only if you’re going out of your way to complain about something.
The film was directed by Spike Lee, which I think made it even more impressive. A mainstream movie like this was something he needed to do a LONG time ago because I think the unfortunate truth is that people are more familiar with his politics than his considerable talent. There’s no reason he couldn’t tranition between these realms of Hollywood effectively. A movie like this might wake people up to his cannon of work.
If you’re dragging your feet on Inside Man for whatever reason, stop screwing around and go see it. I haven’t enjoyed a movie as smart as this one in what felt like an eternity!
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To follow up a little bit on the blog post from yesterday, I wanted to let all of you know how Pearl was doing.
Apparently, after being very cranky and moody at day care all day, she was telling us that her ear was hurting. Fearing an ear infection (and another night without sleep), Cami took her to our pediatrician and – sure enough – she had an ear infection.
This is the second ear infection Pearl has had in a month. She had one for Mother’s Day. Looks like she’ll have one for Father’s Day. Parenting is fun!
I don’t know what it is with Brazelton kids and ear infections. Between Henry and Pearl, I’ve lost track of how many they’ve had. They’ve both had tubes put in their ears. Henry’s ear infections were so bad, he eventually had his adenoids removed! I don’t know if we’re on the same path with Pearl or not. She just went to the ENT for a checkup last week and was given a clean bill of health. Just goes to show how fast these things knock the little ones out, I guess.
Anyway, I won’t bother you with that stuff anymore. Just wanted to give you a little background information.
I’m trying to move the ball up the field a little bit with today’s comic, getting closer to the finale. Feeling rejected, Victor takes out his aggression in the closet where he kept all his photos of Tom. This was a concept that was introduced in a guest strip by Brandon J. Carr back in 2006 and it totally changed the direction of the character for me.
I decided to adopt what Brandon had played off as a joke into the comic. Originally, I intended Victor to be a standard authority figure for Tom, Cami and Jared to play off of. But his secret infatuation with Tom made him more interesting. Can’t thank Brandon enough for that idea!
Incidentally, I’m still accepting guest strips from anyone who wants to say “goodbye” in their own artistic style. Keep it clean, 525 pixels wide and in a JPEG format and we should be cool. You can send it to me at theaterhopper@hotmail.com.
I’m trying my darnedest to increase the production schedule on the comic. I have the last few weeks plotted out in my head and I’m starting to worry I won’t make my self-imposed August 6 “deadline.”
I suppose if I go a little over, that’s not the worst thing in the world. But when I’ve been making the rounds since January telling everyone “I’m ending the comic on August 6! I’m ending the comic on August 6!” failing to hit that mark is kind of embarrassing.
I guess we’ll see how it goes! Keep your eyes on the site and I’ll talk to you soon!
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