I haven't written a blog post this year, have I? Let's fix that. A quick recap of how I’ve spent 2016 so far:
At 3am on December 31st we got up and started driving to Florida. I had the best tacos in my whole life at a little place in St. Augustine later that day before meeting up with a group of friends, several of whom I hadn‘t seen in a long time. January 1st was spent in a swimming pool. The next day I got to see a really great friend of mine marry an awesome girl. After that we parted ways and went on to stay with one of my girlfriend’s aunts in DeLand. We went to Blue Spring State Park and saw a bunch of manatees, then spent two days in Disney World, visiting the Magic Kingdom and Epcot.
The trip feels like it changed something deep down inside of me, like I’ve been permanently altered in some small way that I can’t quite place.
I’m now viewing the world through a weird Disney filter, which may very well last all year. I’m more aware of the man and his studio’s influence over the rest of the world. I watched Robot Carnival, which I had gotten for Christmas, and was dumbfounded to realize that one of the movie’s segments, Starlight Angel, is set in a theme park based on the Magic Kingdom, including Cinderella’s castle, the Electric Light Parade, and Space Mountain. The final segment, Chicken Man and Red Neck, was a tribute to Fantasia’s Night on Bald Mountain. I also started playing the Witness on the PS4 (up until I got fed up with the disc drive constantly ejecting and decided to send it off to be serviced), and I have this idea that the island the game is set on is actually an abandoned, unfinished theme park of some sort. I’m even more fascinated with animatronics than I was before. If you’re into animatronics, Disney is really the place to be.
We got back from Florida in time for an absurdly sharp drop in temperature followed not long after by a big snowstorm. Depression set in, and exhaustion from the trip slipped into an overall lack of energy that I blame on the weather and isolation, among other things.
I discovered that having a 2-year-old nephew makes me oversensitive to anything involving child endangerment, even if it’s something like an episode of Ultraman. I don’t know, maybe those two days at Disney pushed that a little bit, too. I screwed myself up pretty badly by one day reading a Wikipedia article about a toddler who was kidnapped from a mall and murdered by two ten year old boys in England, and the details of it stuck with me and made sleep difficult for a handful of nights. A two year old went missing on a hike with his grandparents in Tennessee just as that big snowstorm hit, the local news was all over it. When I read that they found his body five days later I dropped everything and sobbed for a while, and had to stay off of Facebook because people kept posting about it. Even watching Shogun Assassin again more recently bugged me at how frequently Daigoro’s life was in jeopardy. It’s ridiculous and I don’t know what to do about it.
I’ve been working on my first comic since last summer, a small four-pager about my relationship with kaiju movies throughout life. It’s taking far longer than it should, but I’m trying not to let that get to me. Slowly easing my way back into making sequential art. Other stuff is in the works too.
Spurred by a Zyuranger marathon that Shout Factory TV hosted one Saturday, I’ve been watching random episodes from various Ultraman shows available on their service and on Crunchy Roll. Nine shows total, ten if you want to count the precursor, Ultra Q. So far? Ultraman Max is my favorite, especially with the involvement of Shusuke Kaneko and getting Takashi Miike to direct a couple episodes. Ultraman Nexus is the biggest disappointment, all the color and charm sucked out of it to try and gear it towards an older crowd, with laborious pacing, empty characters, and overly relying on crappy CG. It’s like a bad anime.
To keep myself occupied during those periods where I have no energy, I’ve been doing fan art of various Ultra Kaiju. Here’s the most recent one:
The rest are in this year’s portfolio if you want to see them.
On top of sending in my PS4 for service, I’ve returned two pairs of shoes and three shirts. Maybe four, I forget. Trying to update your wardrobe without any real sense of where to go with it, while also realizing that you’ve gained a noticeable amount of weight for what feels like the first time since high school…it can be a bit difficult.
I waited too long to apply for a table at ETSUcon, so this is the first year I’m missing it, but I‘m not really all that bothered by it. I may still go one day, my friend Hunter is doing a panel on Disney stuff and he’s a hilarious guy. I WILL be setting up for a local art thing called the Bristol Bizarre, though, so it’s not a total loss. Aside from Rob-Con this summer and maybe ACE, I don’t really plan on tabling at any other conventions. We’re just going to go to HeroesCon as fans, and I’ll hopefully have a minicomic cranked out in time to take with me and hand out down there. What that minicomic may be, I’m not sure, but I've got some ideas.
There’s more. There always is, but this post has gone on long enough. Hopefully the rest of the year won’t be quite so lethargic and unproductive and I'll start kicking ass again once it warms up. Take care of yourselves!
