We got this:

We got this:

Okay, today marks the end of the story of Stanislav Blue in Secret Government Robots. It has been great having Marq on the art duties for this one. He took a story I wrote off the cuff and made improvements that I couldn’t have done on my own, and it is great to see my words become images without actually having to be the one making those images. Thanks Marq!

Next week will start with a single strip that I made up at a boring night at work a few months back that I need to use before it becomes irrelevant, but then I can jump into my next full-length story. So that’s something.

In the meantime, I have not been living a completely artless life. I already mentioned my first watercolor painting, which I have titled “It’s Like A Metaphor For Life Or Something” and now I present my second:

I call it “Nude Ascending A Staircase (Inside A Rocketship)”:

And I’ve still got one more frame I want to use up. When the inspiration hits, look out art world.

I’m going to take a moment to talk about some superhero movies. The Avengers movie will be coming out soon, so this is a topical discussion, but the thing I am speaking about today probably isn’t going to be a factor in that movie. (But while I bring up the Avengers, there is an Avengers Handbook coming out sometime this month, I believe, that I did some work on, but I couldn’t find the solicitation on Marvel’s website, so I didn’t do my usual announcement post)

What I’m talking about is superheroes meeting their friends. There are a lot of superhero movies I haven’t seen, but something I’ve noticed in the Iron Man, Captain America, and Spider-Man films is that they all include a close bond between the hero and another character that I thought interesting in how it differed from the same relationship in the comics:

In Iron Man we are given the friendship between Tony Stark, Iron Man, and Jim Rhodes, his friend in the military who goes on to become War Machine. When the movie begins these two guys are already friends even before the whole Iron Man thing happens. Not so in the comics where Tony didn’t meet Rhodey until after his origin in a war zone and he needed to find a way home. The two became friends then. We never see how they meet.

In Captain America, Steve Rogers and James “Bucky” Barnes have been friends since childhood, then Steve goes on to become Captain America and Bucky becomes his ally in the art of punchin’ Nazis. Again, this differs from the comics, wherein, Captain America didn’t meet the orphan Bucky until after he became a super soldier. Like Tony/Rhodey, we’ve got a pair of friends established before we even get there.

And the one that bugs me the most even though I care the least, Spider-Man. In the movie we meet Peter Parker and the girl he has loved for all his life, Mary Jane Watson. As before this is different from the books. In the original stories it went like this: Peter (already Spider-Man by this point) had a ton of complications, one of which was his Aunt’s constant attempts to fix him up with her friend Anna Watson’s niece. Peter, who had never met Anna Watson’s niece, assumed the worst of her and was blown away when he met her. And even then the two didn’t become a couple right away. But in the movie, they went with the much more trite Girl He Always Loved idea, even though the comic version is much more interesting and new. (I understand the Spider-Man movies are being rebooted soon, so I don’t know how things’ll go there)

I can see a bit of why this is. In a movie you’ve only got so much time where you can story in there. To an extent, especially the first two examples, you’re just giving your character friends from way back who we’ll understand as being friends from way back and be able to relate. But there’s something the comics can do, as an ongoing medium, that the movies can’t. They can show us the start of a friendship, and its growth, and get us more invested into it. Obviously the comics also manage to mess this up plenty of ways (not least of which being contrived plot twists), but it is still a thing we can get from the books that we can’t in the movies. And when it comes to a romantic interest, I think this is especially important.

So, I guess, the way to meet a superhero, in the movies at least, is just to already know a superhero. I guess I’ve run out of rant on this topic now. Good night.

Okay, so this is my second attempt at doing a post today, the first having been met with some sort of error that prevented it from working. What the chunks was that about, Internet?

Take note: with yesterday’s post we come to the rushed conclusion of the most recent SecGov story. That one kinda drifted away from where I had planned to take it and then, when it came time to wrap it up, I didn’t have much room left. My next story shall hopefully be better structured. That’s what this is after all, an attempt to learn how to do this crap.

But before I get to that next story, we’ve got something altogether different for SecGov next week. More on that, next week.

Haiku!

Why go to the moon?
I like it better right here.
I don’t want to go.

Man, what does that haiku have against the moon? I mean, sure, maybe it is a lot of effort to get there, there’s not much to see when you get there, and there’s a lot of risk of something going wrong, but… well, no, I guess I agree with the haiku now. Still, if we got our act together and did more space work, we’d have most of those problems fixed

So we definitely had some warm weather the last couple days. My apartment had the kind of sweltering hard-to-sleep daytimes that I associate with Summer. It’s cooler today, so my sleep was more efficient, you will all be glad to know.

Anyway, there was probably more to have said, but I’m not going to bother, instead opting to end here and find out if it post this time.

It is not often that I bother to draw Adventure Dennis by hand, so this sketch I did on Marq’s whiteboard a few months back is clearly of historical significance. I’m told it is gone now, but here is a picture Marq was nice enough to take first for posterity.

Haiku!

All the drunken cows
are making it hard on me
because they hate me.

I have supposedly been trying to bang out a quick crappy novel that I can publish on the Internet over the last couple weeks. I’ve only got a little bit done, but suddenly I’ve been doing all sorts of other things. Funny how procrastination on one thing can actually make me more active on other things.