The result of goofing around tonight:

Yes, that IS a topless girl with pink hair shouting "HOLLA!" I don't know either, leave me alone.

Also created a Photography gallery and uploaded some stuff to it, including this self-portrait that is a complete homage to Videodrome. Long live the new flesh!

That's it. Stay classy, folks!

[Brett]

Scattered thoughts, fired off like a sawed-off shotgun into the face of a mutant crocodile.

-Working on a new comic idea. Using Scott, the main character from that crappy Dream Dive comic that I really should take down from this site. It takes place AFTER Dream Dive, and it too involves dreams, only not so directly. Big chunks of the narrative are ripped straight from my own dreams. Like the other projects, who knows if I'll ever even get into drawing this...

-After recharging my batteries from the summer session, I started today on a painting and two large charcoal drawings. Also got a request from mom for ANOTHER painted barn. So there's that too.

-Rob-Con is this Saturday. I'm going to hit it up after work at the storage buildings and before work at G2K. I find something good there every year, it seems, though nothing tops the year before last, when I walked away with two volumes of Kabuki and three volumes of Transmetropolitan...

-Of course, I don't have much spending cash to work with. I ordered the final volume of Scott Pilgrim the other night off Amazon, along with Frankenstein's Womb and Do Anything by Warren Ellis. And a paperback copy of Crooked Little Vein, so that the order would get free shipping. So I'll have two copies of my favorite novel!

-Casanova and King City are my current favorite reads. Just saying. I keep rereading the issues I have.

-This weekend, we went to a housewarming party and had a lot of fun. The best part of the night was a story about a guy having recurring nightmares about his parents being murdered. A lucid dreaming therapist told the guy to take a gun out of the glove compartment of his car to stop the murderer. When the guy finally got the courage to do this in the dream one night, a monster unfolded out of the glove comparment and screaming "STOP FUCKING WITH THINGS YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND." The guy apparently still isn't cured yet.

-Also, this happened. I get tickled a lot. -_-

-Also, DOGGY. SO CUTE.

-Both pictures were taken by Simon, whose house the housewarming party was at. His girlfriend, Amanda, was the one who told the excellent story above.

-I keep watching this:

The Goon is a comic I picked up religiously for a while, but then stopped. The creator is local, from Lebanon, Tennessee. Old-school mobsters beating the crap out of zombies! This reminds me to pick up more volumes.

-I get to see Inception on Thursday. I cannot wait.

-And um, that's about it for now. AWAYYYYYYYY.

[Brett]

I’m going to go ahead and confess, this review may be a little biased.

Sin & Punishment: Star Successor is the sequel to Sin & Punishment, a somewhat obscure title released during the Nintendo 64’s dying breath in Japan, then re-released worldwide on the Wii’s Virtual Console, where it saw a restored popularity. Both games are developed by Treasure, the development team responsible for some of my favorite action games like Ikaruga, Gunstar Heroes, and more. They’re also both rail-shooters, a dying game genre that remains one of my favorites. Ever play Rez, the Panzer Dragoon titles, or Star Fox 64? Ever play Ikaruga or any other Treasure title? Then you may have a pretty good idea of what this is about, in which case, stop reading and go buy this game, you fool!

I can sum up the game pretty quickly and easily: you run and fly around blowing up monsters and ships and stuff while dodging barrage after barrage of bullets, projectiles, and other obstacles. It’s a white-knuckle adrenaline rush that doesn’t let up until you’ve beaten the game or given up because holy crap, there’s a lot going on at any given moment and dodging and shooting simultaneously can get rough.

Thankfully, the controls are simple and make gameplay supremely easy to pick up and dive into. You have two characters to pick from, a guy with poor fashion taste named Isa, or a girl named Kachi. The only differences between them are their aiming and their special attacks. You control their movement around the screen with the joystick on the nunchuk, aim your Wii remote at the screen, hold B to shoot, tap it to use a melee attack (trust me, you’ll need it), A button uses your special attack, and Z button dodges (you’ll need that too). Being on rails, your character will always be moving along a linear path, but you can and will be throwing them all over the screen in an effort to avoid wave after wave of enemy attacks. Back to the differences between the two, Isa cannot lock onto enemies unless you tap A to target one, so you need a steady hand for accurate shots. His special attack is a tremendous charged blast that deals a lot of damage in a large area, and you will come to rely on it a lot. Kachi, on the other hand, will lock on automatically to anything you start shooting at. If it’s an enemy that doesn’t go down within a few shots, she’ll stay locked onto it until you let go of B and point your targeting reticule at something else. This can be a little frustrating when you’re confronted with over a dozen smaller, more annoying creatures but you’re stuck locked on to some large structure or tank that’s not even really doing much of anything. Her special attack is to lock onto up to eight targets at once by holding A, or you can target one enemy up to eight times, so it’s a lot like Panzer Dragoon Orta or Rez. The only issue is, if you’re targeting one enemy, it takes longer to target them eight times than it does for Isa to charge one massive explosive blast. Who you pick is up to you, though, maybe you’d handle Kachi better than I could. Their melee attacks pack the same punch, and you’ll be using it a lot to rack up massive points and for deflecting missiles and other projectiles back at other enemies, which is both awesome and completely necessary if you want to see this game through to the end.

Everything else comes secondary to the gameplay. The graphics, when things slow down and during cut scenes, are really not so great. Both Isa and Kachi, despite being separate genders, look like the same character model and their faces are practically identical, and the same goes for most of the human-looking villains in the game either. But that’s kind of understandable, Treasure is not a huge team and with the sheer amount of things thrown on the screen at any given time, they had to sacrifice graphical power in order to make sure the game runs smoothly with no frame-rate hiccups whatsoever. The story is absolute crap, with bad voice acting and very little explanation as to what’s going on. Now the first Sin & Punishment didn’t have a good story or voice-acting either, but it’s somehow superior to whatever they scribbled together here. Do yourself a favor, skip the cut scenes and get straight into the action. Music is typical electronic synthesized craziness one would come to expect from arcade-style action games, with some screaming and wailing guitars for good measure. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but your mileage may vary.

It really is all about shooting things up. The game throws wave after wave of enemies at you as you fly through underwater tunnels, race down a desert highway on a sweet hover bike, and run through a secluded forest in the middle of the night. There are numerous bosses, and they will try their best to kill you. It becomes a bullet-hell game, trying to navigate through a tiny opening between waves of projectiles while also trying to stay locked on. It is an intense, old-school experience through and through.

It’s only eight levels and the game is over between four and eight hours, depending on which difficulty you select and how good you are. However, even four hours is quite a lot for a rail-shooter, especially considering that the first Sin & Punishment was over in around an hour. I could only play it in small bursts anyways, and even then if I shut my eyes I’d start seeing dozens of bullets flying at me at once. Every minute of this game is heart-pounding insanity, and you’ll be spending the majority of that time screaming expletives at the TV, usually out of sheer, dumbfounded awe over what’s happening in the game.

Despite its flawed graphics and poor story, the game is still a joy to play. If you’re into rail-shooters or any of Treasure’s previous games, there is no question about it; you must get this game. If you’re skeptical however, at least give it a rental or play it at a friend’s house. Then maybe you’ll understand.

[Brett]

So. Cyberpunk Blues is finally completed and can be found HERE! A poignant tale about the lengths some crazy folks will go to for publicity. With jetpacks and partial nudity.

It only took 3 or 4 tries to figure out how to color the thing, and I'm still not 100% satisfied, but it's done. And I totally ripped it from Casanova, the best comic that no one has ever read. Here's a segment from the second volume, illustrated by the awesome Fabio Moon:

Sadly, I can understand why no one read it. It was put out by Image, a 16-page indie comics, one of Matt Fraction's first published works. But now it's being rereleased through Marvel's Icon imprint, and the first issue came out this week, in glorious full color, as well as HAND-LETTERED.

I picked up my copy today. I love it. Casanova is everything good about comics, lovingly crafted, psychadelic, and explosive. It is beautiful. Definitely in my top 5.

Back to Cyberpunk Blues, I'm glad it's over. I wish I had some more pages to work with, but everyone else was going over their page count, so I'm glad I could reel myself in. I think it's successful as it is.

I can pinpoint my influences easily. A lot of the perspectives were ripped straight from the pencil of Jack Kirby himself, courtesy of How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, which also taught me a great way to figure out shading, one of my biggest weaknesses. Casanova, as I mentioned, influenced the color, and the use of blacks in the backgrounds too. The original inked pages don't have quite as much black as the actual comic itself. And Scott Pilgrim, too. Gail's design is clearly inspired from Lady Gaga's strange fashion choices, but how I'd like to think Jack Kirby would design her. Vincent is totally one of my Second Life avatars. Tetsuo Coil combines the awesomeness of tesla coils with my favorite Japanese body horror film, Tetsuo the Iron Man.

Music played a big part too, especially since the two characters are in the music business. I had two specific playlists, titled PUNK and GLITCH, that I listened to a lot. Here's a glimpse at some of the tracks that propelled me through this project:
Rancid - Maxwell Murder
The Pixies - Debaser
The Prodigy - Invaders Must Die
KMFDM - Feed Our Fame
Death From Above 1979 - Pull Out
Masafumi Takada - Rave On (from the Killer 7 soundtrack)
Daft Punk - Human After All
And more!

This also put me on a large Pixies and Rancid kick, which was why I listed them first. Ever watch Eraserhead? If not, you may be better off, as David Lynch's first film is a mind-bending, nightmare-inducing beast of a movie, but there's a song in it, sung by a lady in a radiator, about how everything is fine in heaven. And the Pixies did a smashing cover of it, which was introduced to me by my co-worker at G2K, the great Jeremy Massie, creator of the Deadbeat, which you should buy and read. Anyways, the song:


So the summer session is over, and until the Fall semester begins I'll be working my butt off at G2K Games in Kingsport as well as my regular job at the storage buildings. Rest assured, I'm slow-boiling some new comic ideas too.

There's more. A lot more, probably, but no time. I'm getting exhausted. READ MY COMIC FOOLS.

[Brett]

Hey folks!

I've been busy as crap lately. Started training for G2K Games, and the Kingsport store is supposed to open later this week, provided all goes well. I think it's going to be great, I love the people I work with, and time flies when things get rather busy.

Work on the comic is solid. The entire thing is drawn, inked, scanned, and lettered. Now I'm into the coloring process, which makes me want to kill myself because it's awful. I can't color worth crap. If things get desperate, I'll just keep it black-and-white, with some grey tones. Here's my favorite panel, which I'll probably have to censor...

And a mock album cover that I did for the comic:

There's a LOT of sleeziness in this comic, it only makes me a little uncomfortable.

In Digital Photography, I recently wrapped up a 5-image compositing assignment, in which my head is replaced with a toaster. I put them up in their own gallery, but I think this one is my favorite:

This is the best worst thing I have ever done, yes.

The final project will be using 5 screenshots from Black Hole Ghost to make prints of, but I dunno which five to pick, considering there's 1600+ shots in total. I've narrowed it down to 18 or 19, heh, which may go in their own gallery or something, but here's a few I picked:

I'm shocked at how great a lot of these shots look by themselves, but yet it's nigh impossible for me to watch Black Hole Ghost anymore. All I see are its flaws. My friends and just about everyone else who has seen it seems to love it though. Heck, one kid on Youtube commented that the writing is better than anything Hollywood's put out in the past 20 years! I don't think he's seen anything GOOD lately, but still, it's flattering to know people enjoyed my insane stop-motion project.

I still owe Sierra dinner for being in this thing.

[Brett]

Hello. It's been a while.

I've been fast at work with my summer classes, heading to the end of the second week. It moves fast, and so do I.

I am ahead of everyone else in the comicbook class, because, well, I'm so enthusiastic about it. We watched a documentary called Comicbook Confidential, which was really good, especially the bit with R. Crumb and the parts with Will Eisner. Also watched How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, which is exactly like my book, only more entertaining because it's Stan Lee himself in front of the camera! Also watched a DVD about the business itself, and breaking in. But no, as far as work goes, everyone else still seems to be doing sketches and working out their ideas. I wrote a short story in about 5 minutes, did page after page of sketches, then decided I hated it and pulled out my second Cyberpunk Blues idea and started it.

I'm nearly finished inking the cover, got the panels and some penciling done on all 4 story pages, and finished pencils for the first page! Here's a peak:

The bottom left corner panel is my tribute to Scott Pilgrim. There are probably other Scott Pilgrim tributes, too, but that one's my favorite.

So I may be way ahead, but I think the inking and coloring process will slow me down quite a bit, especially coloring, seeing as I have no real clue what to do there...

And here's a charcoal drawing I finished shortly before moving back to Johnson City:

Digital photography, on the other hand, I rather hate. It drags and drags.

Other things!

-E3 happened! The best thing? The 3DS, obviously, Nintendo's new handheld juggernaut. While Sony and Microsoft finally revealed their answers to the Wii's motion controls, Nintendo is thinking ahead of the pack. Nice.
-Speaking of Scott Pilgrim, the new trailers are WONDERFUL, especially the International trailer released today.
-I watched Splice two weekends ago with some friends and it was insane. It's like a very modern revision of Frankenstein, just crossing many more lines and making you intensely uncomfortable.
-Been listening to a bit of some new genre of music referred to as Witch House. Bands with symbols for names, making them impossible to do a Google search on, and their song titles are about the same. Slow, dragging, stompy synths and distorted vocals. Weird stuff.

I have also fallen in love with Brett Domino. I am proud to share my first name with him:

I had decided a couple months back that I REALLY want a theremin. Now I also want a stylophone.

Last but not least, I got a part-time job at G2K Games. My best friend works at the Johnson City store and I know one of the managers, and I'll be working at the store in Kingsport once it's opened. I am so very excited.

That's it. Going to bed early tonight, haven't been getting too much sleep lately, and I need it, I do.

[Brett]

This is currently one of my favorite songs, by a Thai metal band called Chthonic, called 49 Theurngy Chains:

I rarely listen to death metal. I am quite the metalhead, but it's usually more in the vein of stuff like Megadeth and Mastodon. But this...this is wonderful. I'm not sure I can explain WHY, but I'm going to give it a shot...

For one, having two different singers/screamers makes for an interesting dynamic. One higher-pitched and more manic, the other lower, more monstrous. Following on that note, the, is that a cello? Or a singing voice that's been manipulated? I'm pretty sure it's a cello, but it, coupled with the epic keyboard work, provide a great melodic foil for the absolutely BRUTAL guitars and drums, which sound like machineguns. It's a perfectly paced song, not too long, not too short. The lack of any solos from the guitars is a bit disappointing, as I for one believe that metal and guitar solos are inseperable, but the song by no means suffers from this.

I'm actually trying to put a list together of my all-time favorite songs. I doubt this will go on it, but still. It's only got 6 tracks there right now. I'll post it if it ever gets to a satisfying point.

Classes start next week. Torn between wanting to do a pulp sci fi tribute or hardcore one-on-one fight for the comic class, but I guess I'll decide when I get in there. Finished a painting and started on a charcoal drawing at work today. And I built this last week:

Behold PHMEH, the Reader Eater! Cut from the pages of the 10th anniversary issue of Heavy Metal, 1987, my first and hopefully last attempt at papercraft! The instructions were vague and my large man-hands are not suited for such intricate work, so he looks pretty crappy, but I love him nevertheless.

That's all I've got tonight.

[Brett]

How do you feel about Lady Gaga?

My girlfriend loves her. Me, I love her outfits, her outlandish style, and I think she's pretty hot, but her music? Oh lord it's awful. However, I have learned how to make her sound tolerable, and that is through the magic of HEAVY METAL:

I'm not going to lie, I have lost count of how many times I've watched/listened to this. Solid guitarwork. Not to mention I love that ridiculous tutu made out of scrap metal. See, the more Lady Gaga resembles an extra off the set of Barbarella or some other similarly ridiculous sci fi b-movie, the more I love her. And with legs like that, she can go pantsless whenever and wherever she wants.

So! If you've noticed, I FINISHED my painting of the sloth with the naked woman. It is entitled "My Favorite Deadly Sins," because it's funny AND pretentious! Sort of.

I love that extreme, distorted perspective. And the pink skin, complementary to the dark green, helps push the figure forward, does it not? First time I've painted in forever, and I think I didn't do half bad. I've got two more paintings to start on tomorrow, completely different subject matter...

I am also working simultaneously on three comic scripts. One for the new chick with prosthetic legs WHO NOW HAS A FREAKING NAME. I've got a few pages of her script done. I think it'll be quite the long comic, the story I want to tell is rather large. The other two scripts are older, unfinished things I look at from time to time. One being sort of my love letter to old-fashioned run-and-gun shooters like Contra, the other being more of the kind of thing you'd see in an issue of Heavy Metal.

Speaking of which, I submitted a picture of myself reading a 1986 issue of Heavy Metal to the website Hot Nerds Reading Comics. Who knows if they'll use it or not, as I'm not sure I'm all that hot, but you know, I felt I needed to represent! Or something.

OTHER RANDOM THINGS I HAVE BEEN INTERESTED IN LATELY:
*The creators of such wonderful films as the Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police (a personal fave) have released the trailers for their new film, Gothic and Lolita Psycho. Check it out, it looks bloody fun. I wonder when their last one, Vampire Girl Vs Frankenstein Girl comes out?
*Finished Snow Crash. Need my own copy. Now reading Flicker, which is all about film, and I love it. Already halfway through it. I normally don't read anything this fast.
*Maybe I've been watching too much of season 1 of Fringe. I'm having Walter and Peter Bishop randomly showing up in some of my dreams. The most entertaining one was Walter trying to instruct me in buying toothpaste that can be used to concoct some power hallucinogenic drug. Um...

Eh, that's it. Back to work.

[Brett]

I'm having issues.

Okay, my last post here was about designing a new character. Since then, I have made a little headway in creating her, but I'm still getting frustrated. I did countless drawings before her true self was revealed to me, and her outfit is 90% there. She has a history, roughly. Father was a scientist, mother was a drunk, portals, kidnapping, horrible accident, blah blah blah. She has a motivation, which is to say, there's a reason for her existing and for wanting to make her the protagonist for a story. Hell, I even found a way to tie it into Black Hole Ghost and possibly ANOTHER story of mine under this folder entitled "Cyberpunk Blues." Inspiration comes from various sources. Some primary influences on this character and her story are my favorite anime, Outlaw Star, A Drowning, which is the first single from Trent Reznor's new band How to Destroy Angels, Fringe of course, David Mack's excellent comic masterpiece Kabuki, and some other stuff I can't think of. Also this photo:

It's still just a painfully slow process. She still doesn't have a name, and while I usually pull female character names from songs, I'm having no luck there. Her personality is having a hard time showing itself as well. I know that when I get to the comic, it will be her telling her story about her past to another character, but that's ALL I know. I don't know how to get the story kicking into gear. Is she being chased? No. Hurm. I REALLY want to throw her into outer space. I just...don't have a terribly great reason. Not yet, anyways.

So when I'm not screaming at my sketchbook to figure these things out, I keep busy with other stuff. Today, I started a large painting of a baby sloth coiled around the outstretched arm of a nude woman. Part of me wants to pretentiously name it "Deadly Sins" when it's finished, tongue placed firmly in cheek, but no. Also wanting to do a large drawing, charcoal maybe, of a sloth. I TOLD YOU I WANTED TO DO SLOTHS.

The sloth baby painting is on an old canvas that already had two other paintings done. So there's two thick layers of gesso under this thing. I also gesso'd over another couple old paintings I had done in the past few years and disliked greatly. One of those canvases will be an attempted painting of our unnamed chick with prosthetic legs in some acrobatic pose. The other one...um, I dunno. I'll think of something. If I don't think of something, I'll fall back to my usual standby: A robot or a naked chick. Or a robot WITH a naked chick.

I'm also pulling out a script I did last year for a 22-page comic that fit under the "Cyberpunk Blues" folder. It's the kind of story I'd love to submit to Heavy Metal. I had ditched the script and started a rewrite, but never finished it, so I'm looking over it again, thinking about those characters.

Also, just gorging myself on reading material. Snow Crash is approaching its conclusion, and after that I'll open up Flicker, some novel that my odd friend Ruta got me for my birthday. Finished reading From Hell, finally. Read a Kabuki volume I found at the local used book store, read Warren Ellis' first Astonishing X-Men run, Ghost Box, as well as his excellent-but-all-too-short Ignition City, now finishing up the first volume of Planetary. Also rereading Elektra Assassin (I saw similarities between her and my nameless chick), and I set up a few subscriptions at G2K Games for myself and my girlfriend. She wanted American Vampire and iZombie, I'm getting King City, Electric Ant (based on the Philip K. Dick story, adapted by David Mack), and Joe the Barbarian. This is the first time I've picked up regular comics in FOREVER. And starting in June, I look forward to the updated Casanova, also known as one of the best comics no one ever read.

Erm. That's all for now. Got some stuff to finish here. DOWN DOWN DOWN

[Brett]

The Spring semester ended last week. It was my biggest workload, with 4 studio art classes to deal with, but it was also my strongest since coming to ETSU, with the A's finally outnumbering the B's, 3 to 2. SUCCESS.

Summer is in gear and I am starting to grind away with the Creative Process. My time at work is spent reading through comics voraciously and drawing. I swear I think I've learned more about drawing the human anatomy from a few issues of Heavy Metal than I ever did when I took figure drawing. Or maybe I'm just paying more attention. I don't know. Regardless, my figures are getting a little better. I just need to eventually move on from sketches to doing actual pieces. I want to do more than a couple paintings...

I also want to do another comic. Like, BEFORE I take the comic book class in June.

Of course, I'm dry when it comes to ideas currently. When I first did the Ezra Neuro comic, I had envisioned doing two or three more stories with the Radioglyphs. Now, though, I'm hesitant. Ezra is boring to draw, the other characters are laughable and unnecessary, and plus that comic was an experiment. Conceived, drawn, and finished in a week as just a massive creative burst, an exploding bomb with little or no forthought involved at all. I didn't want to get bogged down explaining who these characters were, where they were, what it was they did, or anything. And to do more stories would mean having to actually expand things from the cartoony madness. It would require actually fleshing out these characters that were meant to be nothing more than people that jumped around and fought a giant monster. If I just did another stand-alone thing like the first one, I feel like it'd diminish the inherent charm. No matter what I may try to do with Ezra, I still have to actually THINK and PLAN, and that goes against the philosophy I had with that comic, with that character.

But I found a muse:

Say hello to Aimee Mullins (which is coincidently the name of a girl I have classes with). She is an athlete, actress, and fashion model. With prosthetic legs. I know next to nothing about her outside of what I just told you, but I find her absolutely awesome, and quite attractive too.

So it hit me: you don't see very many main characters in comics (or most other media, I suppose) that are amputees or anything of that sort. I mean, Daredevil, my favorite superhero, is about the only one because he's blind. And sure, there are characters like Cyborg from the Teen Titans and Forge from X-Men, who have robotic prostheses with weapons and other high-tech crap, but that's not quite the same.

Thus, I have decided to design a female character with dual prosthetic legs, much like Aimee up above, who would star in her own comic. This is a somewhat delicate situation, of course. Calling attention to her lack of flesh-and-bone legs too much would be bad. You don't want to get all preachy and trite. I just want a kickass chick who happens to have prosthetic legs. But I can get totally creative, too: I want her to have a mad scientist-type partner, a guy who builds and invents stuff all the time, who is constantly building new legs for her. Like, crazy, weird designs that are borderline impractical, to the point where it makes her nervous when she's about to strap on a pair of jet boosters that are supposed to make her fly like Iron Man.

Of course, the idea still works. Sure, he's a mad inventor, but what would she do? I was thinking she'd be a space pilot, but no. Not quite. My girlfriend suggested that she repairs robots at the same time I considered making her a satellite repair technician. I'm still undecided. Unlike Ezra Neuro, I want to flesh her out. Also, she needs a name. Hurm.

Also of influence is Olivia Dunham, played by Anna Torv in Fringe, which is my current favorite TV show. My girlfriend got the first season on DVD for me, and I watch an episode or two almost every night. I love her to death because she's a very badass FBI agent, going out of her way to get things done. One of my favorite moments is in the pilot episode, where she's chasing a guy across rooftops. He jumps off a roof, hits the wall of the adjacent building and lands on the fire escape and runs down the steps. Without thought, she makes the same leap, hits the wall, lands, then leaps off the fire escape and onto a dumpster. She also is not afraid to draw her gun and start firing, if she needs to. Absolutely awesome.

So there we have it. The beginnings of a comic are coming together.

And yes, I still plan on drawing and painting a sloth or two. Yes yes yes.

Anyways, it's time to start creating. I need to find a proper soundtrack to work to...

[Brett]