Anya's Ghost

This is a simple story of a few days in the life of a girl as she matures a little intellectually.  It is a cute story with an unusual vehicle, but travels a very familiar path in that.  And somehow, although she's grown by the end, I was left with a sense that she hadn't actually done any growing.  She has determinedly turned a new leaf, but it is somewhat abrupt.

The art is solid and expressive and cute.  It is a little cartoony, but that's the way I like it.  The whole is somewhat bland, but pleasant.

Incognito

 There's the anti-HERO, the one who is imperfect and brooding, but in the end, heroic, and then there's the ANTI-hero, the one who may have done something heroic, but it is a side effect of some decidedly unheroic motivation.  I seem to be happy with the first, but not the second.  The hero here is decidedly the second.

Had I read this as issues, I doubt I'd have gotten past the second.  Our protagonist manages to masquerade as someone else to have sex with a woman he works with just a few pages in.  Yep, rape.  How endearing.  Then there's a bit of heroing for his own twisted unheroic reasons that actually gets a bit boring.  Superpowered guy beating up random street thugs.  Meh.

But I have six issues in a cover in my hands, so it doesn't end there.  Luckily, that is all just introductory stuff.  The story does pick up into something far more interesting and ultimately moves him along the scale toward the first, the anti-HERO.  Likely not enough for my own tastes, but not everything has to be written for me.

Sita Sings the Blues

Here's a movie following some very odd distribution. It's all got to do with rights to music as well as its own licensing. The end result is free and legal downloads of the official DVD. Which are finally available now. Various other watching methods have been available for a while now, so I've seen it already anyway.

Sita Sings the Blues is a weird and wonderful retelling of a main Indian myth. Animated art reminiscent of painted shadow puppets adds great character and charm to the telling.

yuck

Speaking of drawing grotesque for sexy:
http://www.comixology.com/articles/229/Adding-Incompetence-to-Insult

Which I think was a complaint of mine in a few previous posts.

three free

Another May, another Free Comic Book Day.

From AdHouse, there's FCHS. And no Priddy. Boo! Although it was expected. Still, boo! I found the feature teaser for FCHS to be bland. I'm just not that into that sort of thing. There's also a teaser for Remake. Every time I read about Remake, it sounds interesting. Every time I actually read the bits of Remake, it stops. Everyone else seems to be getting it, but not me.

From AP Entertainment, there's Gold Digger. This was a silly and fun story "about archeology". In quotes because it has less resemblance to archology than Indiana Jones. The only thing is, why do the characters seem obsessed with wearing clothing that's three sizes too small? You'd think comic characters would be able to find their own size of drawn on clothing. Is it just to show off their oddly rounded rumps? And why would a "werecheetah" become shaped more like a Barbie doll as she goes toward cheetah form? It's not exactly the female ideal of a cheetah. I'm sure it's drawn only thinking of those who think an exagerated loose approximation of the female form is hot and not even thinking of all those for whom it is just jarring.

From Bluewater Productions, there's William Shatner Presents. I picked it up thinking, "I must not have learned from the Action Pack." Indeed, if you miss the Action Pack, the first two in this will help ease the pain. The first writer needs a better editor and it's all "story by" Bill, it'll feel just like home. They go with a different character of art in all of three stories. The first is more Tek War and not entirely bland, a bit like Tek War. Second is a grimy future with some grimy art. Sometimes the artist carries it off and sometimes not. The splash page it opens with is an example of not. The last story is aimed squarely at your younger teens that won't remember the Action Pack at all. Art and colors far more cartoony, as is the action. And they all get to do stupid deadly illegal fun, have accidents, get caught by authority, and then have everyone pat them on the back saying, "Well, that's alright, you can get away with anything today." Brilliant. By which I mean lame.

James Kochalka's The Sketchbook Diaries

These are a bit of fun, if not particularly informative on a life or interesting. It was meant to be informative to the author, but as he points out a few times, it isn't. There's really to many meta moments of wondering what to draw or a moment revealing that the last few days had a little bit more invention in them than usual to do so. He seems to focus on the moments of non sequitur, perhaps liking the moments of nonsense the best or perhaps his life is all nonsense. Even when there's some event going on like a vacation, the format of a single moment from each day (mostly, there was at least one set with the same date) does not lend itself well to any sort of story arcs and has certainly not been approached as such.

Still, I did find one comic to be particularly informative about an element in Magic Boy & Robot Elf.
This makes the pieces fall into place a little. Really.

It's also rather representative. They're actually all online here if anyone wants to see more.

More water brushes!

I got some new Kuretake water brushes in the mail today. Previously I only had the Kuretake "petit set" that consists of a brush with a very small reservoir that folds into itself to protect the brush when stored. It's a set because it also comes with a little water bottle for filling the reservoir when needed. This has been a good set for tossing in the bag to add a little color to sketches when out in the wild.



The new brush pens come in three brush sizes. They also come in two lengths, I chose the shorter ones because they fit better wherever I put them and the barrel would hold plenty of water for my purposes anyway. The small brush is the same size as the one in the petit set. The medium one is as long as my Pentel pocket brush pen, but a little wider and the same size as my Kuretake brush pens loaded with paint. The small one is narrower than the pocket brush pen. The large one is slightly larger than the Pentel color brushes I have, it's really quite large.

These new pens have a bit more to their mechanism than the petit one. In fact, they look all around suspiciously like the loaded brushes. This makes me think I could probably load them up with something with more staining power than water and it would be alright for the most part. Here all the water is forced through the brush to get to your paper or wherever you want it to go.

So far I have tried the small one out for a few strokes. Like the petit, it will dribble if squeezed hard enough as there are grooves to allow water out near the top of the brush. However, in usual operation without hard squeezing everything reliably passes into the top of the brush. Like with the petit, I sometimes felt like the water was flowing too quickly so I guess the different structure doesn't have a different result.