Wow, color is back in vogue for this installment. I’m really happy with this one in that regard… for once.

Wanted to try some crazy experiments with the color on this one. Was kinda obsessed with the work of Ashley Wood, especially Zombies VS Robots. Awesome stuff, which I wanted to play around with here, but it’s obvious that I’d have to abandon the cleaner lineart style I’ve got going in order for any of his color style to work, so there went that. Kinda wanna keep that semi-Venture Bros. look going.

Instead, I went with the ever-awesome Endling’s work for inspiration. After sufficinet time spent drooling all over his gallery, I went and did everything for this comic in black and white first, and frankly was halfway tempted to publish it as such, but what can I say. Sky blue’s my favorite color. ^^

Won’t go into details, but real life has been rearing it’s ugly head again, hence the delay.  Good news is that I’m begining to feel more comfortable with the characters. Also, the drawings are coming out easier all the time.

Picked up a new neck pillow this week. Starting to feel almost human again. Would’ve had a perfect night’s sleep if i hadn’t just gotten billed for a medical procedure I had done a year ago…Wasn’t much, but still! How long does it take to process a stupid claim? *sigh*

Work has been nuts the past few weeks. We all had to juggle about three projects at the same time, all with tight deadlines. Will jump back onto comic again this weekend. Ought to be easy since I have to spend part of my weekend catching up at work, where we all use Cintiqs ^^. That always inspires me to draw more.

Just saw an advanced screening of Watchmen.

Good News: Rorschach, and the actor who played him, kicked major ass.

Bad News: Everyone else sucked, and sucked hard.

I guess I’m prejudiced because I read the book, but the performances were all flat, like they were just breezing through the script. Revelations that were supposed to be shocking ended up being anti-climactic, in part because they cut out so much of the side story. Basically, the book is just impossible to condense down to movie form, even at 3 hours. There’s too much you have to know in advance in order for the answers to the questions that drive the plot to have any weight. I think this lead to the acting coming off as phoned in, since the actors might not have read the book and only knew what they read in the script, thus they didn’t understand their characters like they were supposed to. The end result being that the actors didn’t sell it and I for one wasn’t able to buy it.

Long story short, they should’ve made it as a 12 part mini-series.

The worst offenders acting-wise were Laurie Juspeczyk (they just call her Laurie Jupiter in the movie), The Comedian and especially Adrian Veidt. His performance in particular during the climactic scenes at the end were just plain wooden. Again, they cut out most of his backstory, so he just came off as Mr. Creepy Guy.

Again, the guy who played Rorschach definitely got him right. He was obsessed with a black-and-white view of justice, damaged, ragged, uncompromising, quick on his feet and just plain psychotic; just the way I like him . His performance, especially during his final scenes, stood out like a sore thumb from the rest of the mediocre acting he was surrounded with.

Plus, the movie does LOOK good, and there’s plenty of geeky details for fans to pick out, but that sort of thing is par for the course anymore. Eye-popping effects and gratuitous sex/violence are a dime a dozen, even when they’re good. If they just gave a damn more about telling a halfway decent story with all that technology. After all, It’s a STORYTELLING medium, Mr. Snyder.

I also noticed that Alan Moore didn’t allow his name to be put into the credits, as he is well known for disavowing any filmed versions of his works. Between this and the film version of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I can understand why. The only film of his comics that was any good to me was V for Vendetta, which is strange considering how overhyped the Wachoski Brothers have turned out to be.

Just read that there’s going to be a Director’s Cut coming out in July, plus the DVD’s going to have the Tales Of The Black Freighter side plot as an extra. Will have to wait and see if this redeems the film in mine eyes, though I don’t see how it’ll fix the flat acting.

Rest assured that there’s an update coming and it should be up for next Tuesday. Lineart’s all done and I’m messing with shadows, which is one of my favorite phases because you can really see a scene achieve physical depth once you know where the light’s coming from.

More and more, I’ve diverging from the ’script’ up on the forums. You’d think this would be a bad thing, but I seem to operate best writing-wise when I can improvise off of a fixed set of circumstances. I don’t enjoy things so well with everything written in stone. I can do it, but I’d feel like a hired artist in my own comic. There’s all sorts of variations and oddness that come swimming through my oversized noggin’, and it’d drive me batty (er) to just ignore it, which would defeat one of the main purposes for doing it in the first place.

So thanks to all who’ve kept up with me so far as I figure out the best way to do this. I have every intention of sticking with it and I hope you’ll come along for the admittedly slow ride.

Going to be redoing the titlebar in the near future. It looks great, but it’s too tall, taking up precious screen space that should be set aside for the comic. It’ll probably look quite a bit different since the graphic elements don’t look nearly as good shrunken down to fit in a narrower space.

Battlestar’s back on and it’s a beautiful thing. I’m sad that it’s the last episodes, but I’m glad they seem to be heading for a very strong finish. Plus, there’s another TV movie and the series ‘Caprica’ coming up to keep my BSG fix satisfied for a while yet.

Wonder if future generations will even know of the original Battlestar series, or even of ‘Galactica ‘80′ (Ooh, on second thought, some things are best left gratefully forgotten). The first series still occupies a warm place in my cheesy heart. Lloyd Bridges is still the best Cain. The new one is a frakking psycho.

Feeling good about the story. I’m beginning to go off script a bit, but the overall idea should still be intact. Still have to re-invent a few things on the fly, which is tough because you want things to be consistent and to make sense, so you have to plan ahead a lot.