It Came From The Cineplex: X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Star Trek, Terminator: Salvation, Drag Me To Hell, The Hangover, Land Of The Lost, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen

Believe it or not, summer's almost over, and with it the big summer movie blockbuster season.

Due to production schedules, we're just now feeling the effects of last year's Hollywood writer's strike. Many, if not all of the movies at the cineplex this summer suffered from the strike, as films were rushed into production with weak and hurriedly finished scripts. It's even been rumored that a certain quiet little film about robots that turn into vehicles started filming without a finished script (based on the final result, I have absolutely no trouble believing that).

Anyway, for good or ill, I thought I'd run through the movies I've seen this summer, and let you know how I think they stack up, because I know how much the rest of the world is interested in my opinion. I'll try to keep my reviews as brief and to the point as possible.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Dear Hollywood:

Please stop making prequels.

signed, the World

The Summer Blockbuster Season was kicked off this year with the premiere of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The movie made quite a splash in the news, not because of its storyline, but because a near-complete print of it was leaked to the internet some months before it was released. Fox bigwigs stood wringing their hands in anguish, fearful the leak would affect box office returns. It in fact did no such thing, and the movie went on to gross as much or more as it probably would have without the leak.

But on to the movie itself. Wolverine is OK at best, a bit below par with the rest of the X-Men movies. This is the fourth time Hugh Jackman has donned the claws, and honestly there's nothing much new to see here.

The main problem with Wolverine is that it suffers from what I call prequelitis. What does a studio do when its profitable film franchise runs out of steam and can no longer move forward? Why, it moves backward of course, toward the beginning. If you've no more new stories to tell about your hero, then tell an old one. Go back to the beginning and tell how he came to be.

The problem with prequels though is nothing of any consequence can happen. The screen writers can throw all the peril they can imagine at the hero, but none of it can ever stick. Since Wolverine is set before the X-Men trilogy, we know that no matter what happens, no matter how great the danger Wolverine may be in, he's going to survive. OK, so obviously nothing is ever going to happen him anyway; he's the main character. But there's a tiny part of your brain that's never quite sure about that. That's why we watch movies and read stories. But when you know going in that nothing can happen to your hero, there's no real point in watching. It's about one step up from the old "It was all a dream" trope.

Since the movie can't offer any plot points of consequence, it offers up a plateload of answers to questions no one asked: How old is Wolverine? What was his family life like? How'd he get his claws (OK, that one might have been worth asking). Did he ever date? Why's his memory faulty? And most importantly of all, where did he get that cool leather jacket (I wish I was kidding about that last one, but sadly I'm not). Like all prequels I've seen, one can almost imagine the director marking items off of a checklist. "Claws? Check! Love life? Check! Reason for memory loss? Check! Acquistion of stylish jacket? BIG check!"

Like the first three X-Men movies, this one tries to see how many other mutant characters it can trowel onto the script; most come and go in seconds, and precious few are ever identified by name. It would be a challenge for even the most hard core comic geek to recognize and identify the majority of them.

Most puzzling is the decision to take the popular character "Deadpool," who has a very cool costume and distinctive wise guy personality, and change him into a bland, shirtless hamburger-faced killer whose mouth is inexplicably sewn shut. He's set up here for a return; hopefully if that comes to pass, he'll look and act more like his comic book inspiration.

An aside: There's supposedly some controversy among geekdom (what else is new?) about when exactly this movie takes place. Some have apparently done the math and say it takes place some 30 years prior to the first X-Men film, which would put it in the 1970s. But, they cry, the production design and costumes don't reflect the 70s, and in fact look quite contemporary. Honestly none of that entered my mind for a second while watching it. It takes place sometime before the previous movies, and that's all I need to know. If you want to get really nitpicky about it, the first X-Men movie starts out with a caption that says, "In the not too distant future," so technically they haven't happened yet, and Wolverine could indeed be a contemporary piece. Confused? I don't blame you. Don't worry about it and skip to the next paragraph.

Not a horrible movie, and definitely not a great one, it resides squarely in the vast plain of "Meh."

I give it an apathetic and half-hearted C.

Star Trek
The best movie I've seen all summer, which in a summer littered with this much mediocrity seems like damning with faint praise.

Writer/director J.J. Abrams took the wheezing and ailing Trek franchise off of life support and rejuvenated it by starting over from the beginning. Forget everything you know, this is a brand new Star Trek, set in an fresh and alternate time line.

Personally I think jettisoning all that history and baggage was a great idea. The franchise was collapsing under the weight of 40+ years worth of continuity. To date there've been FIVE different series set in the Trek universe (six if you count the animated series) giving us well over 700 episodes. And you can bet your captain's log that every fan demanded that any new material jibe with what's gone before in all those episodes. Mistakes will not be tolerated. It made coming up with new material and moving forward nearly impossible. Starting over was the only answer, and the perfect solution, giving the franchise a fresh start.

I wasn't sure how I would feel seeing new actors playing the old familiar characters, but after a few minutes I didn't even think about it-- I totally accepted them in the roles. I guess that shouldn't have come as a surprise; look at how many different actors have played classic characters like Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes throughout the years. I thought the new cast all did a great job-- the new Dr. McCoy was excellent!

Some hard core fans may say the new movie's long on action and short on traditional Star Trek substance, but that's fine with me-- I'm a little weary of getting hit over the head by thinly veiled messages. I already know racism is bad, I don't need a "white on one side, black on the other side alien" to tell me so.

There will no doubt be sequels, and I hope the producers don't blow their opportunity. They've got a brand new universe to play in, and they need to take advantage of it. Give us new stories, no remakes please. We don't need Antonio Banderas as Khan.

Full of action and a lot of fun. When was the last time you could say that about a Star Trek movie? Too bad we'll have to wait two or three years for the next installment, instead of tuning in next week.

Highly recommended, I give it a solid A.

Terminator: Salvation
Again with the prequels! Only in Hollywood could we get a movie that takes place in the future, but is actually set in the past of the Terminator universe!

Ever since the first Terminator movie came out in 1984, we've been hearing bits and pieces about the Future War, the battle between Skynet and humanity. For over 20 years fans have been dreaming, "Boy I sure wish I could see what the Future War was/is like! If only they'd make a movie set in that time." Well, be careful what you wish for. Now we've got our Future War movie, and it ain't all that great.

Once again we have a movie that has all the symptoms of the rapidly spreading plague of sequelitis. The screen writers valiantly try to whip up some danger for our heroes, but since we've already seen their futures, we know nothing of consequence can possibly happen to them.

Terminator:Salvation features John Connor, leader of the human rebels, risking life and limb to save ordinary grunt Kyle Reese from the clutches of the evil Skynet. If you've seen even one of the previous movies, you'll know that through the magic of time travel, even though Kyle is younger than John, he's actually his dad. So they can place Kyle in as much danger as they want, but we know he's not going to die. If he was to be killed in this movie, then the first three wouldn't be able to happen. All that makes watching this movie an exercise in pointlessness.

The film also suffers greatly from the absence of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The fact that the movie picks up considerably after a fully computer animated version of the T-800 appears is testament to this. Maybe if Arnold wasn't busy running California into the ground, he could have appeared in Salvation and elevated it a bit.

Also, based on the amount of ordnance and deadly robots that Skynet has at its disposal, it strains credulity that the poorly-organized and outfitted humans would survive for long, much less be able to defeat it. Skynet has riderless motorcycles with robotic brains and reflexes, unstoppable killer cyborgs and even giant, 100 foot tall Gundam-like robots. The humans have standard issue helicopters and machine guns. There's no doubt in my mind who would really win this conflict.

It's full of cool robots and lots of noisy explosions, but since it's yet another prequel and we know nothing can happen, it's ultimately pointless.

I give it a C.

Drag Me to Hell
Sam Raimi wrote and directed this back-to-basics horror movie that turned out to be one of the best things in the theater this summer. Too bad nobody saw it. Drag Me was unfortunately crushed by a poor release date and the "Transformers" juggernaut.

A simple story about young woman, and old lady and a gypsy curse, Drag Me to Hell is smart, violent, gory, funny, and believe it or not, genuinely scary. What more could you ask for in a horror film?

I was worried when I found out that it's rated PG-13, and expected yet another watered-down horror flick in the mold of "The Ring" and countless other toothless, scare-less movies that have littered the cineplex in the past decade. But Raimi manages to squeeze the rating until it cries "uncle," resulting in one of the best horror films I've seen in years.

Do yourself a favor: Skip Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and go see Drag Me To Hell.

I give it a solid A.

The Hangover
A buddy comedy about four guys who travel to Vegas for one last fling before one of their number is married. The Hangover is probably the best comedy I've seen so far this year, but honestly that's not saying a lot. It was nice to see a movie about actual adults for a change, instead of yet another movie about horny teens looking for sex.

It has some laughs, but IMO they were surprisingly sparse and the middle of the film slows down considerably. Zack Gallifinackas steals the show, and will no doubt get a lot more film work soon (and deservedly so).

Ed Helms plays virtually the same "spineless guy marrying a bitter harpy" character as he does on The Office; in fact it's hard not to think of his Andy character while watching this movie. If Helms wants a career in films, he's eventually going to have to start playing a different character (are you listening, Michael Cera?).

Warner Brothers is proudly trumpeting that this is the highest grossing R-rated comedy of all time. I hate these kinds of statistics. Of course it's the highest grossing ever, ticket prices are no doubt higher than they were last year, or at any time in history. Next year there'll be a movie that sells fewer tickets but will still make more money. Studios need to stop counting cash and start counting actual tickets sold. Then we'll see who's really the highest grossing whatever. Butts in the seats, that's what counts.

An OK comedy that just didn't grab me the way it apparently did the other 99% of the population.

I give it a B.

Land of the Lost
Universal and Will Farrell take a beloved and surprisingly grown up kid's show and turn it into an unfunny fart comedy.

Not the worst movie I've ever seen, but far from the best. I was (and still am) a big fan of the 1970s TV show, so I figured I would be incensed by the treatment it received at the hands of the new movie. Actually I found myself oddly indifferent to the new film. It's so far removed from the TV show that it scarcely affects it at all.

I'm wondering exactly who this movie is for. The fans who fondly recall the original will be unimpressed at best. Moviegoers who've never heard of the original will most likely shrug and say, "So what?"

The main problem with the movie is that it's just not funny. They'd have got more laughs if they'd made it a straight up action movie with a few comic relief moments. Will Farrell seems particularly lackluster and unenthused, as if even he's tiring of his own antics.

The movie has an odd, almost cartoony look. I've heard speculation that this was intentional, as an homage or sorts to the primitive effects of the original show. I'm not buying that. That would be a bit too subtle for a movie like this.

What's genuinely puzzling about the whole thing is that it was produced by Sid and Marty Krofft, so the whole thing must be sanctioned by them. I guess everyone needs to eat, and make their yacht payments.

I give it a hearty and resounding D.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Transformers: Revenge is dumb. Big, noisy, stupid and dumb. The first movie was somewhat watchable, but this one is just a big giant mess. The plot, if you can call it that, makes absolutely no sense. It's almost as if director Michael Bay watched a child playing with some Transformers toys, stole his ideas and incorporated them into a script. In fact we would probably have gotten a better movie if that were the case.

According to internet rumor, which we all know is always 100% accurate, last year's writer's strike disrupted production and they started filming without a completed script. I see nothing in the movie that would disprove that rumor.

The movie sets up a world with ill-conceived and illogical rules, and then blissfully ignores said rules when it's convenient to the plot, or when it will get a so-called laugh. Defenders of the movie will tell you to chill, it's a film about giant robots that turn into cars. They'll tell you it's just a big dumb summer movie that's supposed to be fun, not make sense. I would remind those people that one of the best summer movies of last year concerned a man who dressed as a bat and fought a green-haired clown. Summer movies can be smart as well as fun.

Megabytes of server space have already been written about the movie's many flaws, so there's no need for me to cover the same well-worn ground. I will, however, offer a few items that especially bothered me about the film.

• Lack of "The Sound." You know what I'm talking about. On the cartoon series, whenever a TF would change from a car to a robot and back again, there'd be this unmistakable grinding metallic sound cue. Every kid who ever owned a TF toy made a reasonable facsimile of this noise with his mouth while playing with them. They used a distorted version of the noise a couple of times in the first movie, but it was totally absent this time.

Why? Why would you make a TF movie and leave out that sound? It's like making a Six Million Dollar Man movie and not using the "nanananana" noise when he does something bionic.

Not using it is downright criminal, and it's too bad there's no law on the books against it.

• Whenever two or more Transformers are fighting, it looks like someone shook a box of scrap metal and filmed it. I honestly can't tell what I'm looking at. It's all a blur of hyper-detailed cgi models.

The "design" of all the Transformers is just plain too complicated. I already believe that they're robots who can turn into cars, you don't have to show me where every single part of the vehicle goes when they're in robot mode.

The TF designs in the cartoon were fairly simple in order to facilitate animation, but that worked to their advantage. Look at the images above. Which robot looks like it's made from the parts of a semi truck, and which one looks like a loose collection of jagged red and blue parts, hot-glued together into the rough outline of a bipedal shape? There's no reason that the cartoon designs couldn't have been used in the movie. Just add a bit of texture and they would have been fine.

When I was a kid and I saw a movie that particularly excited me, I couldn't wait to get home so I could start drawing the characters. I'd fill page after page full of Disney characters and Star Wars ships. If I was a kid today and had just seen Transformers, there's no way I would even attempt to draw one of those scrap metal monstrosities. I couldn't! If I'd seen this movie as a kid I probably would have given up drawing for good and never have become an artist.

• Why did the old Decepticon who decided to switch sides have what sounded like a Scottish accent? And if he was supposed to be so old that he was falling apart, why was he disguised as a Blackbird? That's a relatively recent invention. Wouldn't it have made more sense if he was a biplane or some such older model?

• For me, the stupidest and most irritating moment comes during Sam's first day of college, Sam is attacked by a Decepticon that is disguised as a super hot co-ed. Once her cover is blown, she turns into a robotic puma or something, attacks Sam and then promptly disappears from the movie (or maybe she was blown up, I honestly can't remember). This opens up an ENORMOUS can of worms, roughly the size of the Queen Mary. Is this some new ability the Decepticons have developed? It had better be, because if they've had the ability to disguise themselves as perfect replicas of people all along, then why the frak have they been bothering to look like cars and trucks all this time? This little incident causes a hee-yuge problem in the TF universe, and it's brought up for no apparent reason other than "because it looks kewl." And once it's brought up, it's promptly forgotten and never mentioned again.

• When Sam and company need to go to Egypt, instead of the Scottish Transformer flying them all there, he decides to teleport them. Can all Transformers do this? If so, then this opens yet another can of worms. If they can teleport, then why do they waste time disguising themselves as vehicles and driving or flying?

• Mikeila (Megan Fox) must have earned all sorts of badges in first aid when she was a girl scout. After the cast teleports into the desert, Sam's hand is burnt and smoking, apparently injured from the violent teleportation process. Not only does Mikeila whip out a roll of gauze, she wraps Sam's hand up so expertly that it appears he even has splints and a cast under the bangages.

The reason for this of course, was Shia LeBouf's real life hand injury, sustained in a drunk-driving accident. Much was made in the media about how this injury shut down production for a week or two, and how the injury would be written into the script. Apparently "writing it into the script" is Michael Bay code for "saying nothing about it and having Shia wave his injured hand about as much as possible."

There's no excuse for this; if they can animate a cgi robot with 40,000 moving parts, then they can add an uninjured cgi hand to the end of Shia LeBouf's wrist.

• After Optimus Prime is killed, Sam is told that the only way he can be brought back to life is to use sort sort of ancient key. After much searching and hundreds of explosions, Sam finds the key and sticks it in Prime's chest. He is immediately recharged and comes back to life. About 30 seconds later, one of the Decepticons flies down and yanks the doohickey from Prime's chest and flies off with it. Optimus Prime seems none the worse for wear. So he did he need the key or didn't he? In essence Sam stuck a new heart into Prime's chest, and then it was ripped back out.

I could go on, but I'll spare you. It doesn't matter what I think anyway-- at the time of this post, the movie has somehow grossed over 800 MILLION DOLLARS worldwide, and it would not be a surprise if it passed the BILLION dollar mark before it's over with.

The world just isn't fair. Michael Bay makes a movie without a script and as a result no doubt lives in solid gold house with hot and cold running champagne. Meanwhile the rest of us sit in our dingy kitchens eating store brand macaroni and cheese. There's a lesson in there somewhere, kids, and I don't think I like the sound of it.

If you've not yet seen it, please, by all means skip it and go see something worthwhile.

I give it big dumb D.

M.S.S.E.S.D. (Make Something Shark Every Shark Day)

Over on Flickr, Jublin (aka Justin White, a Flickerite of fame and reknown) challenged everyone to draw a shark a day for his ongoing "Make Something Shark Every Shark Day" group. I'm not going to be able to draw one every day, but I thought I'd try a couple.
This is Mel Sharkelton. As you can see, Mel is a ticking time bomb of hate and anger, and is easily agitated.

Mel was drawn in about an hour, in Photoshop on the graphic tablet.
Here's the sketch I did for Mel. Most of my sketches and doodles are done on paper, but this was a rare electronic sketch done in Photoshop. I like the way the sketch came out, and for a minute considered just using it as is, without cleaning up the lines.
Mel is based on a drawing I did way back in 1994. It's odd that I know where to find a specific piece of paper I scribbled on 15 years ago, but I have to search the house for my car keys every morning.

The drawing's stiff and lacks energy and there's absolutely no variation in the thickness of the line. I was also deeply entrenched in my cross-hatching phase back them. Still, there's something in it that appeals to me and made me want to take another shot at it. I'm hopeful that I've improved a bit as an artist in the past 15 years.

He was drawn with an ordinary ball point pen, which would make my art professors' hair shoot off their heads like cartoon porcupine quills if they ever found out. I know there are better drawing implements out there, but I could never get the hang of inking with a brush or a nib pen, so I've pretty much always used ball points. I say use the tools you're comfortable with. And end as many sentences as you can with prepositions.
This is Abe Finnstein. Now that Abe's retired, he's migrating south to Floridian waters with his wife Muriel, where they'll swim 15 miles an hour in the fast lane and enjoy the Early Surf Special.

As usual, Abe was drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet.
Here's the sketch for Abe. Again, this was a Photoshop sketch, instead of the usual pen and paper kind.

Futureboy Backgrounds

A while back I posted an entry about Futureboy, a character I created about ten years ago while working at a small animation company. You can read all about him here.

I made a couple of very short (2 minutes or so) Futureboy animations in Flash. They turned out OK, so with those projects under my belt, I decided to hatch an even bigger plan: I was going to create a series of Warner Brothers-esque short cartoons that would play in movie theaters before the main feature, just like in the old days.

The fact that you've never sat down in a theater and watched a Futureboy cartoon should tell you what happened. It was a cool idea, but one that was far too ambitious for both me and the company. It would have taken months, maybe even years to single handedly write, animate, voice and direct an entire 7 minute cartoon totally by myself. Futureboy's big screen debut died before it ever got off the drawing board.

I did get far enough into the project to create some Photoshop backgrounds for an animation test.

OK, this one's techically not a background, but I included it anyway. This is an alien ship that lands in the spaceport. Drawn in Photoshop on a ton of layers. All these backgrounds were drawn with the mouse too-- I didn't have a graphic tablet back then, so I should get extra points for difficulty.

In my story outline, a brand new alien species comes to the Spaceport where Futureboy worked. His nervous boss, Mr. Feeny, foolishly put Futureboy in charge of greeting this previously unseen race, and escorting the alien ambassador to the auditorium where it was to give a speech.

As the ship lands, a small green blob slithers out of the ship. Futureboy assumes this is the Ambassador and grabs it and attempts to usher it to the auditorium, running into all sorts of complications along the way. Eventually he delivers the blob to the podium, only to discover it's not an alien at all, but a glob of sewage that plopped out of the ship's waste chute.

Charming, eh? Looking back, maybe it's just as well it never got made after all.

Here's an interior shot of the spaceport, looking out at the alien ship landing on the platform. Note the Jetsons-like flying cars. Somebody's really been waxing that floor!

Just for the heck of it, here's the same view of the spaceport interior sans alien ship.

Here's the exterior view of the council chamber where Futureboy was to deliver the alien ambassador. That's one futuristic looking door!

The most impressive thing about these backgrounds (if I do say so myself) is that they were drawn sans graphic tablet. Every pixel was drawn with the mouse. Don't ask me how.

Who knows, maybe somewhere in a parallel universe people are sitting in a theater watching the finished version of this cartoon before the movie starts. I'm also rich, powerful, 14 feet tall and coated with gold in that universe as well.

Barnyard Art

I was looking through some old backup CDs and found this barnyard scene that I drew circa 1999. It was a test image for an animation project that never quite got off the ground. Funny how often that happens. Well, not funny, but certainly very common.

It was drawn in Photoshop, on about 100 layers. I was trying to recreate the painted look of old Warner Brothers cartoons backgrounds. I didn't know much about simulating paint strokes in Photoshop back then, so it's not as painterly as it could be. I didn't use any of the paint effect brushes, it was all done with just the standard default PShop brush set and various filter effects. Fortunately since then I've learned what the various brushes can do and can simulate paint a lot better.

I didn't have a graphic tablet back then, so it was all done with the mouse. Don't ask me how. Nowadays I wouldn't even attempt such a thing with just the mouse.



Here's a shot of just the barn without the distracting dog in the foreground.

Ten Years After

I just realized something-- May 19, 2009 was the TENTH anniversary of the premiere of "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace."

It's hard to believe it's been TEN years since George Lucas foisted this horse-faced, lop-eared frog onto an unsuspecting public. It just doesn't seem possible that we've been living in this Post-Jar Jar World for an entire decade. How quickly the years roll by.

My theory is that it hasn't really been ten years since the movie came out. What's actually happening is that the world wants to distance itself from the movie so badly that it's begun to spin faster in order to send it into the past quicker.

As you may have gathered, ten years hasn't mellowed my opinion of "The Phantom Menace." As far as I'm concerned, it still stinks.

The Butler Did It!

I suppose somewhere in the mists of time there once was a really popular murder mystery in which the butler actually DID commit the crime. Then, as happens in all forms of media, everyone jumped on the bandwagon and started copying the idea until it became the cliche it is today. Now no self-respecting author would get within ten feet of such a plot.

This drawing started out as a simple sketchbook doodle of a snooty butler. Then while I was drawing him, the title phrase popped into my head. I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out how to draw him with a gun or some sort of weapon behind his back (but still be visible). I wasn't having much luck, and then I got one of those "Aha!" moments and added the sinister shadow.

At first I was going to use all the weapons in the "Clue" board game (gun, noose, lead pipe, knife, candlestick and monkey wrench), but there just wasn't room. If I tried to add two more items to the shadow I'd have had to make the whole thing taller and then the butler would have ended up too small. Plus the shadow of a lead pipe isn't very interesting, so I changed it to a crowbar.

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet.

Here's the original sketch. Much less elaborate than the final drawing. His guilt is a bit more obvious here as well! The figure didn't change a lot from the sketch, other than his outfit (I googled "butler" to see what kind of suits they really wear). I'm glad I ditched the text for the shadow.

Like Father, Like Son

Just a monster taking his son out for ice cream.

I drew the dad first, then tried to figure out what a cute little version of him would look like for the son. Note to budding artists: big eyes & pupils are essential ingredients in cuteness.

The fish head & worms in the cone were a last second addition, believe it or not. Originally the monster boy was holding a plain old every day vanilla cone. I was staring at the drawing, thinking there was something missing, but couldn't figure out what. It finally dawned on me that plain ice cream wasn't very monstery, so I added some gross stuff to it to make it seem more appropriate for a monster boy.

I've always been terrible at picking colors, so I've been concentrating on improving that as much as I can. I've used Kuler a lot lately to come up with good color combos, but this time I just eyeballed it. I knew I wanted the monsters to be green, so for the background I just played around with the hue slider until I found a color combo that looked good to me (the background was originally red, but that was a little too eye-searing, so I changed it to a cooler blue).

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet.



Here's the original sketch. It was really tiny, so I had to clean up the lumpy lines a lot for the final drawing. The dad didn't change a lot, but the kid got quite an overhaul. He didn't look all that appealing in the sketch, so I needed to "cuten" him up a lot.

Hillbilly Headlight

I saw this car in a parking lot a few weeks ago. If you look closely (sorry it's not clearer, it was a hastily snapped cell phone photo), you'll see that the owner ingeniously fixed his damaged headlight by duct-taping two flashlights to the bumper of his car. There, now it's all better!

I'll give him points for resourcefulness and sheer chutzpah, but unfortunately its not quite street legal.

I know what you're thinking. "But Bob, you're being too harsh! Give this poor guy a break! These are tough economic times and the owner of this car no doubt can't afford a costly auto repair!" Retract those claws, kitten! I spotted this car parked in front of the local comic shop. That tells me that the owner's got the money; he just decided to channel the funds into more high priority items like comic books, action figures or gaming miniatures. Who needs to see where they're going at night when there are Warhammer minatures to buy?

Jasper The Surly Ghost

Jasper started out his life (or would that be death?) as another doodle in my sketchbook.

I was trying to make him transparent and look like he's glowing as well. Note that you can kind of see through his folded arms.

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet.
Here's the original sketch of Jasper. Yep, I drew him on lined paper. Nothing much changed, the final is pretty much line for line the same as the sketch, which doesn't happen often.

It Came From The Cineplex: Orphan

Well, we're in the home stretch of Summer Movie Season 2009, and so far it's been pretty much a bust. There've been a few standouts like "Star Trek" and "Drag Me To Hell," but for the most part we're still seeing the unfortunate fallout from the last year's writer's strike, as the multiplexes are littered with big budget, yet poorly written dreck.

That's why it's such a refreshing surprise when a decent movie comes along.

I heard absolutely no pre-release buzz for this movie, and in fact had never even heard of it until I saw the trailer a couple of weeks ago. It seems to have slipped into the theaters almost undetected. I had extremely low expectations for it, figuring it to be yet another dismal and lackluster entry into the "Innocent Family Takes In Sinister Orphan" genre. But I was very pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be pretty darn good.

The story concerns the Coleman family: parents John and Kate (heyyyy... was that intentional or just a coincidence?), their son Daniel and deaf daughter Max. The story opens just after Kate, who is a recovering alcoholic, has just had a miscarriage. Depressed over the loss of her unborn child, she and John decide to adopt a child to help fill the void.

They visit the local orphanage and meet Esther, a Russian-born 9 year old who is polite, articulate and artistically talented seemingly beyond her years. Taken with the little girl, they decide to adopt her.

They bring Esther home and things go smoothly for a few days, but soon Esther is the target of schoolyard bullies who make fun of her out-of-style clothing and Old-World manner. Back home, Kate begins to notice some peculiarities about Esther as well. She keeps the bathroom door locked at all times, refuses to visit the dentist, won't wear more modern clothing, and can play Tchiachovsky like a concert pianist. Most puzzling of all, she never removes the decorative ribbons from around her neck or wrists.

Things go from weird to worse as those who dare to cross Esther end up injured or even dead. Esther pushes a stuck-up class mate off a playground slide, breaking her ankle. She sets a treehouse on fire with her new brother Daniel trapped inside. And she shockingly and brutally kills Sister Abagail (the head of her old orphanage) after she begins deducing that Esther may not be what she appears.

Gradually Kate begins to distrust Esther and begins investigating her past. She finds out that the previous family she lived with all died in a horrible house fire. Sister Abagail's orphanage claimed that Esther came from a Russian institution, but after contacting them Kate finds out they have no record of her.

Kate makes her suspicions known to her husband and psychiatrist, but of course no one will believe her outrageous claims against poor sweet little Esther.

Eventually, events transpire that finally convince the rest of the family that Esther is just no damn good, but by then it's far too late for them, as Esther goes on another bloody rampage.

I won't spoil the ending here, but I will say it was a twist on the usual "evil orphan" trope that I've never seen before. Best of all, all of Esther's little quirks, like the constant wearing of neck and wrist ribbons, her refusal to visit the dentist, and her artistic and musical talents all add up at the end; there's a satisfying and logical reason for all of them.

I was glad to finally see an R-rated horror movie in the theater again, after far too-many watered down PG-13 outings. There are a couple of glitches, like the grandmother who smiles blissfully while letting her 5 year old deaf granddaughter wander away unsupervised in a busy hospital, or the fact that Kate was able to so easily waltz out of the hospital after being admitted, but I'm willing to cut the movie a little bit of slack.

Bloody, violent and brutal, "Orphan" far exceeded my expectations and ended up being one of the better films I've seen all summer (of course, in a summer filled with "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" and "Land of the Lost," how hard could that be?). It's smartly written and directed, and doesn't offend the audience's intelligence. The little girl who plays Esther is perfectly cast and quite creepy, even when she's just standing there.

Final Verdict: B. Much better than I expected, and definitely worth a look. Go see it instead of giving more money to "Transformers."

In Search Of: A Signature

I've been struggling for a lonnnng time to come up with a suitable cool looking signature logo that I could use on my illustrations and design work.

It seems like it's always easier to come up with a logo for other people than to design one for yourself.

For a long time I had it in my head to make a logo that looked like one of those square red symbols on Chinese prints, called a "chop." Chinese artists carve small wooden stamps of their name and stamp the bottom corners of their paintings. Don't ask me why I went in that direction. I suppose because I've always been interested in Asian culture and thought it would look kewl (note: the image above is not the one I tried to make for myself, but just a generic example of a chop).

I went through probably a hundred sketches over a period of months in an attempt to make my name resemble Chinese characters and yet still look like English letters. Needless to say, this was easier said than done. I was going absolutely nowhere with this concept, and then one day it dawned on me-- I'm not Chinese. So why was it I trying to make an Asian looking signature?

So I scrapped that plan and started over. After more sketching and dead ends I finally decided to go with my interest in all things retro. I looked at logos of various toy & game companies from the 1960s and designed a logo based on them.

I finally have a signature logo I can live with, but this it's by no means set in stone. For one thing the text under the main logo is almost unreadable when the logo is printed small. I need to figure out a solution for that. I'll probably keep tweaking it from time to time until I think it's perfect (which, if things go the way they usually do, will be a couple decades from now).

Designed in Illustrator.

Computer Art From The Bronze Age

I was looking through some old CDRMs recently, and came across this image of a robot floating down a smoky high-tech corridor. It was created in a 3D program called Swivel 3D, circa 1995.

I worked at a CD manufacturing plant back then, and for some reason they had a copy of Swivel 3D lying around. I started messing around with it and eventually learned it. It was pretty easy to use, and you could get some decent results, although nothing that would keep Pixar up at night.

The CD company had an in-house TV network that would display news and goings on from around the plant on monitors in the lunch room. My goal was to create some short 3D animated "bumpers" to play between news items.

I learned how to model figures and sets, how to use texture and bump maps, how to light a scene and to generate atmospheric effects to give a scene some depth. Swivel 3D also had some basic animation functions that were fairly easy to use.

Unfortunately, 3D animation is very memory intensive, and the computers we had back then just couldn't handle the kinds of animations I had in mind. I could generate small 3" square Quicktime animations, but they were far too low res to display on a large screen. We just didn't have the memory or disk capacity to create full screen high resolution movie clips. Oh well. It was a good idea even if it didn't work out, and I learned the basics of 3D modeling and animation.

I don't think they even make Swivel 3D anymore. The company that made it probably got bought out or swallowed up in a merger sometime in the past 15 years.

The image above is just a static frame. If I remember right I did make a crude low-res animation of this scene, but it's lost in the mists of time. The plan was for this to be like a countdown to a news item. Three robots would glide into frame one at a time and float past the camera. Each robot would have the number 3, then 2, then 1 on its chest to count down to the news story. Here's a tip for any would-be animators out there-- if you make your a floating anti-gravity robot, then you don't have to model or animate legs!

In case you missed it the first time, you can see some even more ancient computer art from me here.

Coconut Monkey

I've got plans for more Coconut Monkey if I ever get the time.

He turned out OK, but boy did he fight me. He was another one of those character designs that works great as a rough sketch, but is tough to draw for real. I had a lot of trouble drawing his face and figuring out how to show a raised edge around it without it becoming too complicated.

I'm not sure about the blue color of his straw. I tried making it red, but then it looked like his brains were getting sucked out. Maybe the blue will grow on me. Or white! Most straws are white, right?

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet.

Off Target

I'm usually a big fan of Target's in-store branding and marketing. All the signage and decorations in their store are very well designed as well as fun and appealing. I especially like their gift card designs.

But, you can't hit one out of the park every time at bat.

Take a look at this bottle of Target brand mouthwash I bought recently. It features their new "On-Target" rounded arrow motif. Frankly I'm not a fan of the arrow; I thought the old circular "target" logo was fine. Maybe in time this new logo will grow on me.

But what really caught my eye one morning as I stood over the sink trying to focus on the bottle of mouthwash was this:I even did a double take the first time I glanced at it. Call me crazy, but that refreshing splash of amber-colored mouthwash looks disturbingly like a dead cockroach lying on its back.

Now every time I look at it that's all I see; I can't not see a dead cockroach. Not really the image you want in your mind's eye when you're using mouthwash.

It's OK, Target. I still love you. You're one hundred times better than Walmart. But lose the roach, huh?

A Brief Look Into The State Of Newspaper Comic Strips Today: Beetle Bailey

There was a time when readers considered comic strips one of the most important parts of the newspaper. People would actually choose one paper over another based on the comics they published.

Those days are gone forever.

This is possibly the most disturbing, uncomfortable and off-putting comic strip I've ever seen.

I really don't need to see General Halftrack's dessicated, nude body lying prone on a cold, metallic examination table. And I really don't need to see his burly doctor warning him before he performs an unpleasant and invasive procedure on what I must assume will be his rectum.

The second panel is even worse. The General's surprised yelp and the Doctor's hidden right arm point to only one painful, probing and shocking conclusion. But on closer inspection we can see a tiny glimpse of the Doctor's hand, lovingly rubbing skin cream on the General's withered buttock. I honestly don't know which scenario is worse.

How I miss Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side.

Sketchbook Pages Part II: The Sketchening

Here are some more pages from my sketchbook. Some of these will eventually become full color illustrations. Others will go into the garbage where they belong. I'll let you decide which is which.

Note that some of my sketches are actively critiquing my work. That's normal, right? Not a sign of schizophrenia or anything?

Hey Kids, It's Bimbo!

I saw this truck going down the highway this evening and risked life and limb to catch up to it so I could get a photo.

I'd never in my life heard of Bimbo or their products, and couldn't imagine why anyone would ever give their company such a name. Were Floozy & Hooker already taken? Why give the cute little bear an unfortunate name like that?

I checked out their website when I got home, and it all became clear-- Bimbo's a Mexican bakery, similar to Hostess or Dolly Madison here in the States. I'm assuming Bimbo probably means something different south of the border (if it means anything at all-- it may just be a cutesy nonsensical name there).

I also learned through their website that it's pronounced "Beem-bow," so again, it's not as unfortunate as it looks to our eyes. Still, it's pretty funny to see a Bimbo truck rolling down the highway.

An aside: I'm continually fascinated with the way website URLs tend to combine words and spell out things the owners never intended. For instance, the URL for "Bimbo USA" comes out as "bimbousa," which looks like it should be pronounced "Bim Bow Sa." Sounds like a new tropical drink. "Yes, dahling, I'll have a Scotch on the rocks and the lady will have a Bimbousa."

Herkimer McSlouchalot

Another wimpy little guy I drew. He was pretty straightforward, I drew the figure, then colored him and finally added an old paper texture on the top layer to give it an aged look.

I need to quit drawing these meek little mousy guys. I'm running out of weak and feeble sounding names.

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet.



Here's the original sketch. Nothing really changed in the final drawing; it's pretty much identical.

Tonight On Siffy!

On July 7, the SciFi Channel officially changed its name to "Syfy."

Much has already been written about the change. It was first announced back in April of this year, and many people thought (and hoped) it was an April Fool's joke. Sadly, it was all too real.

The reason behind the change is allegedly a matter of trademarking. The SciFi Channel naturally wanted to trademark their name (um... shouldn't they have done that maybe... fifteen years or so ago, when they first started broadcasting?), but was informed by the courts that because "sci-fi" is a word in the English language, it can't be trademarked. So they decided to get around the ruling by changing the spelling of their name so that it would be uniquely their own.

I have no idea how many variations and versions the network brass went through, but however many it was, it wasn't enough. Somehow, someone of high rank at the network settled on the new spelling "Syfy."

I defy any English speaking person to look at their new logo and NOT pronounce it as "Siffy."

I was going to say that surely there were better spelling variations than this one, but after thinking about it for a minute or two I can't think of any. "SyeFye" doesn't leave any doubt as to the pronunciation, but it doesn't look any better than what they came up with.

I think if they were dead set on changing the spelling to something they could trademark, they should have gone with a new name altogether. Something like, "Imagine!" or "Brainstorm." OK, those aren't much better, but I didn't have 75 meetings with my staff to discuss it.

They might just as well change their name. The network hasn't had much to do with science fiction for years now. Personally I've had no use for them since 1999, when they canceled Mystery Science Theater 3000. It was the best show they had, and one that could have gone on forever.

That was just the beginning of their long, slow decline. Not long after that they started airing wrestling (!). OK, I get the "fiction" part where wrestling is concerned, but I'm not seeing the science. Then they started producing a series of reality TV shows, one in which unsuspecting people are deliberately scared poopless, and another where two grown men pretend to see ghosts. Again, I see the fiction, but not so much the science.

Also, what's up with the tagline there in the new logo? "Imagine Greater?" What the hell does that mean? It's not even a sentence. Apparently there was a huge miscommunication between the network and the ad agency, causing them to drop a few words from the slogan.

Mom and Thumper always told me if I can't say something nice, then don't say anything at all. Honestly if I adhered to that rule I'd never say anything. But I like to give credit where credit is due: despite the ridiculousness of the new spelling and the bizarre sentence fragment of a slogan, it is a nice layout. Stark, clean and elegant. The letterforms are masterfully combined as well. Makes me wish I'd designed it.

But it still spells "Siffy."