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ross campbell's LiveJournal:
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| Friday, May 9th, 2008 | | 2:06 pm |
night falls. i rise. though i've never been much of a Spider-Man fan (i guess i could be if they kept him on Earth in his own universe and didn't have him undergoing reality shifts, har har), i've found somewhat of a new appreciation for the Spider-Man movies after i borrowed the trilogy from my mom this week and rewatched it. i still don't love them; there are parts i really like, but the detracting points often overwhelm the good stuff, namely how much of a drag Mary Jane is throughout the entire series. i can buy into the damsel-in-distress to a degree, but even by the second movie after MJ is kidnapped again, it's like "jesus christ, this again?" and then again in the third movie, i find it really grating. and not even the villains kidnapping her, MJ also gets into trouble from unrelated nameless muggers and collapsing architecture, and then compounding that with Gwen Stacy in the third movie, too. can't they come up with something else to get Spider-Man into action? i don't know. i know Spider-Man's very traditional "boy-rescues-girl" kind of thing (except Black Cat, i guess) but it gets really old and i can't help but groan through the whole movie, heh. i think the series' other most grievous error was to relegate Venom to the last 20 minutes of SP3 (which is also unfortunate because those final 20 minutes are the worst in the movie and border on being total garbage). i'm not really familiar with Eddie Brock or Venom from the comics but i love Topher Grace, and it was just a damn shame that he had such a small part even though his character had so much going on and the rivalry between he and Peter was so good and then the black suit thrown in there, that could've (should've) been its own 2 hour movie. and i like Thomas Hayden Church a lot but the Sandman kinda blew, him having the powers didn't really have anything to do with anything. i really liked how in the first two, Goblin and Doc Ock's powers had something to do with the plot and their abilities affected them, their powers were a point of contention, but with the Sandman he had these sand powers randomly (which is fine) but he never contemplated that he was made of sand; which is also fine i guess, but it came off more like they just didn't have time in the narrative to give him a scene like that. the movie's still fun but it ends up being such an unceremoniously cramped, ill-plotted mess. i still can't get over how Brock somehow knew about Sandman's dying daughter. HOW?!?! and that stupid fucking butler at the end revealing that crucial information, haha. he says to Harry "your father's wound was made by his own glider" and Harry's like "oh i guess Spider-Man didn't kill him after all!" couldn't Spider-Man have easily picked up the glider and stabbed the Goblin WITH it? i wonder if Harry fired the butler immediately after that; "WHAT?!?! i got my face burned off, ruined my friendship with my best friend, and basically screwed up my whole life and everyone else's for NOTHING?!!?" heh, worst writing. anyway, i found myself comparing Spider-Man to the Iron Man movie, where even though the female character Pepper Potts is still a supporting player and she mostly just assists Tony Stark (while still being integral, of course) she's never in peril. they never had Jeff Bridges kidnap her and tie her up to lure Iron Man out or whatever, and Pepper seemed to be running around doing espionage and shit and setting off reactors the whole time. i really dug that. and that one scene where she stuck her hand inside Tony's ribcage. haha. ( i have to try. ) | | Thursday, May 8th, 2008 | | 9:25 pm |
house of mystery. DC/Vertigo's House of Mystery #1 came out on Wednesday, in which i drew a four page story (written by bill willingham) involving giant flies and gore. check it out!! i don't know where you can get issues online off the top of my head, so you might have to make a trip to the comic store.    the last page in the story is the best one, but posting anything from it will give it away! so you'll have to go read the comic. ;) | | Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 | | 11:33 pm |
Iron Man.
pretty awesome. i've sort of talked about this before, but i really love the ability of live-action versions of these characters being able to capture the wonder and excitement in even the most "mundane" of super powers/abilities, something that's generally lacking in most superhero comics, and Iron Man was full of it. great stuff. like how the movie depicted Iron Man simply flying as this incredibly amazing thing, which it is, but in the comics it's like "pft, so what? my brother flies." the movie really played to the character's strengths, and had him doing things and involved in situations specific to Iron Man, rather than a storyline that's basically two guys in suits fighting where you could drop in any hero, but Iron Man has all the industrial corporation technology stuff going on that really couldn't fit with any other character. i was never big on Iron Man in the comics, i mostly only know him from crossovers and shit and little things here and there, but i really dug the movie. if Marvel was doing a standalone Iron Man book, i'd definitely read it, same goes for most of their characters, too. although i think in the comics, doesn't Tony Stark have some bullshit going on where the Iron Man armor is like under his skin so he can suit up at any time, anywhere? blah. that's no fun.
my only real complaint about the movie is the thing after the credits, and i'm going to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen the movie or didn't stick around: afterward, Robert Downey returns home and finds Sam Jackson as Nick Fury in his apartment. Fury goes "you think you're the only superhero around? i'm here to talk to you about the Avengers initiative" or something like that. me: "NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO."
looks like Marvel is planning on destroying my last bastion for standalone, non-shared-universe superheroes. at least they got the X-Men movies out of the way beforehand. then we'd see something like Hugh Jackman on the Avengers. ugh. | | 1:40 am |
my heart is on fire and if I don't feed it fast it'll just burn up and fade. man, this year has been a disaster for my schedule. i can't believe it's been 7 months since i finished Wet Moon 3 (back in October!), and all i've done since is write a few books, two big pitches, a couple White Wolf things, Mountain Girl #3, and other little assorted things. it sounds substantial but is it really when spread out over seven months? i don't know. i know i could've been done with Wet Moon 4 by now. my original plan was to have my new DC book (shh) done like way back in March, but things have been so slow with that, i haven't even started drawing it, and now everything's all backwards and i'll probably see if i can finish WM4 first. ugh. if not, i don't know what i'm going to do. things have great potential to be horrendous. time terrifyingly gets away from me these days, and it moves so fast, a year seems like nothing. i still feel like October was last week. Wet Moon 4's all set to be drawn now, the stack of paper waiting. that's the worst part of any book for me, getting over that initial I'M-DRAWING-THIS-BOOK hump. getting the courage to overlook how long it is and how long it'll take, start at the beginning and dive in. although it's the shortest Wet Moon volume so far, so length-wise it's a walk in the park compared to the behemoth page count of volume 3. probably going to greytone volume 4 in Painter; on Mountain Girl 3 it was pretty time-consuming but i'm hoping to speed it up, and the ideas of saving so much extra paper and being able to better control the tones of the darker skinned characters are appealing. argh, who should be on the cover?! ( you're dead. ) Current Music: the protomen: beards going nowhere | | Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 | | 6:45 pm |
| | Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 | | 11:22 am |
| | Monday, April 28th, 2008 | | 1:02 am |
i'm gonna try not to come back.
finished thumbnailing Wet Moon 4. the book is shaping up pretty good so far, i guess. i like the ending. i really like doing endings, i should do a book of just those. an anthology of endings without beginnings or middles.
i got the proof of Mountain Girl #3 and it looks good, just a couple typos to fix, and then i'll have copies of that in a few weeks or less.
relating to last entry about DC's ongoing Power Girl series that i wish i was doing, i also found out they're doing an all-ages standalone Supergirl thing. i also wanted to do that. i suggested a Minx Supergirl in the past but nothing happened with it, but probably for the best, i'd probably want to make her like, Puerto Rican or Kenyan (or whatever the Kryptonian equivalents would be, heh) or something and there'd be a huge debacle about it.
i think about doing an all-ages book sometimes, and the idea is really appealing because i want younger kids to read comics; gotta procure the next generation of readers and all that, but i don't know if i have it in me. a book being all-ages is so much more than just not having profanity or nudity, i think, but i'm not exactly sure what the "much more" entails. i have this superhero thing i really want to do and sometimes i think about how it could be all-ages, but then there's killing and stuff in it and i don't know if that would fly with whatever publisher i manage to sucker into putting it out. i mean, me personally, i don't have a problem with kids reading stuff like that, they'd probably be playing video games and watching movies that are much more violent than what my comic would be, but i think a lot of what "all-ages" also is, is marketing. it's really being marketed to the parents of the kids, they're the ones that have to be satisfied. i think kids will pretty much read/watch anything and they'll be fine with it, probably barring shit like Cannibal Holocaust, Irreversible, Frank Miller books, and The Fly 2. and obviously every kid is different and their tolerance/reaction depends on their personality and their upbringing and all that, but look at me, i saw Night of the Living Dead and all sorts of stuff when i was like 7 and i turned out okay! ;) so since most parents are so sensitive and scared of violence and sex, the levels of that stuff in a given work has to be much lower to please the publisher. and that's what i don't know if i have in me, i don't know if i could write a story about human characters without somebody talking about tampons or boners or a female character having breasts that are too intense or something. and i think kids should learn about sex stuff early on, even the raunchy stuff, because there's really nothing wrong with it and it's nowhere near as "bad" as the violence that's everywhere. by "bad" i mean not bad at all, it's still weird that sex is a bigger deal than violence. blah blah blah that's another post. anyway, i think i could write a story about animals that could be all-ages, though. they never swear or dress scandalously.
that felt jumbled. | | Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 | | 1:26 am |
stay behind the night, ahead of the sun.
today was a very summery day, it's like we totally skipped spring here. cold, then hot. we didn't even get the usual steady rain of April. the thought of having four more months of summer is almost unbearable to think about. all this sun and heat, i'm miserable over here! sigh. the summer weather and all the extra sun always grinds me to a halt, too, and i really felt it today like a clear marker of the season change. i got hardly anything done and even fell asleep on the floor for a little while, too heavy-hearted and bleary to do anything. it's nice at night, though, FOR NOW. i actually don't really have anything to say, i better get to bed. anyone who went to NYCC over the weekend have anything good to report? i heard DC's doing a Power Girl series now, i'm half pleased and half ticked because i wanted to do that. | | Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 | | 2:20 pm |
| | Monday, April 14th, 2008 | | 7:35 pm |
DIE.
i like how kids usually operate on a completely different system of social logic (or lack thereof). i was thinking about one event from my childhood today that exemplifies these different sort of parameters life had back then; i was 7 or 8 or around there, and i was really into Aliens and Predator at that age, i was just getting into the monster and sci-fi stuff and i was really excited about it. anyway, a best friend of mine at the time, brian, had seen Predator and i wanted to show him Aliens and how awesome it was, but he replied "no. i only like movies where they're in the jungle." and at the time, though i was disappointed, this seemed completely reasonable.
another friend of mine had a scooter, one of those old style big scooters that were around before those new tiny ones kids have now; on the narrow platform where you stand, his had a gorilla face printed on it with the words "don't stand on my face" below it. anyway, my friend believed that the message was a real warning, and that if you stood on the gorilla while riding the scooter that you'd spin out of control and crash. we both followed this religiously and made sure to never stand on the gorilla's face while riding the scooter lest we be thrown off and die. i think once or twice i put the toe of my shoe on the gorilla just to test it, but never went further than that. makes sense.
Current Music: bella morte: grey skies black | | Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 | | 1:27 pm |
april o'neil.
i've really fallen off the april fool's boat, but not on purpose, though. i've missed it two years in a row now, it creeps up on me and before i know it i don't have any time to plan anything. plus, the best venue for my past april fool's pranks, deviantart, always does their own website-wide joke now, which everyone notices so everyone's on guard, they know it's april fool's, they're quick to disbelieve anything else. the best jokes happen when people forget what day it is. so now i'm moving april fool's to another day from now on, and i can't say when. it'll be a secret until it happens.
some guy emailed me the other day about turning The Abandoned and/or Wet Moon into movies, and he even included an excerpt of the adaptation he's working on for The Abandoned, heh. i checked out his resume on IMDB and he's been a production assistant on a bunch of movies i've never heard of, but his recent positions include stuff like Indiana Jones 4 and a bunch of Law & Order episodes. i've always been reluctant about a Wet Moon movie or TV show or whatever, but i've been more open to the idea as of late, i guess partly because i doubt it'll ever happen. how would you even take Wet Moon and put it into a 2 hour movie? what would you include and cut out? unlike the comic it would probably have to have some kind of plot, too, i guess, since if you're only doing one story with it rather than a meandering ongoing series it should be something more structured. at least that's how i'd probably want to do it. although if it was a small budget thing maybe that wouldn't matter as much. i don't know, who cares. | | Sunday, March 30th, 2008 | | 3:20 pm |
escape from poop. i think Escape from LA might be a better movie than Escape from NY. it's not quite as "hard" as NY, in terms of violence and blood, but i like how much more satirical it is and how Snake seems so tired and weary through everything. i think the main thing holding it back is the music score, they really should've stuck with the synth sound. All-Star Superman #10 was pretty amazing. i thought the series was going for 12 issues but it looks like the next one's the last one, d'oh. now i wish they'd let Morrison and Quitely do their own All-Star Batman (NO ROBIN). i would have liked to get into Frank Miller's absurd Batman & Robin, but i can't get past Robin and that other characters like Green Lantern are in it. i just want plain ol' Batman by himself stories. ( MG. ) | | Thursday, March 20th, 2008 | | 1:12 am |
we should take that helicopter before somebody else does. another cool Steven Grant essay at Permanent Damage: here( and. ) | | Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 | | 9:20 pm |
Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments.
all right, Harvey ballot done and sent off. thanks for the suggestions! | | Saturday, March 15th, 2008 | | 8:21 pm |
| | 6:16 pm |
pretending to be alive.
we went out to see Neil Marhshall's new effort Doomsday last night, and were surprised to see Romero's Diary of the Dead listed as playing. i'd stopped checking theaters after a while, since it didn't look like Rochester was getting it given the movie's limited release. anyway we saw Diary instead, and... well i don't know. i wasn't really sure what to expect, i'd only read a couple mixed reviews, but that stuff never dissuades me, and actually what most people seemed to be saying, that Diary was too heavy-handed, i sort of disagreed with. i didn't think it was that ham-fisted at all, at least considering Romero's other work. it was no more on-the-nose than Land of the Dead or Bruiser or even Dawn, i don't think. i think the writing/storyline in Diary is up to Romero's usual standards, and though some the dialogue is awkward, it's not too cliche (though Romero himself created the cliches, perhaps, heh), creative and often atypically structured, so i was into that, despite a few eyeroll and "what the?" moments. i think the only part of the writing that sucked was that the characters kept fighting about the main guy who was videotaping, since it's obviously absurd that somebody would keep shooting through all this chaos and Romero obviously knows it, too, so he felt compelled to address the absurdity on-film to let you know he knows and it doesn't really work. just leave it alone, man, go with it. at various points in the movie other characters start picking up cameras, too, and toward the end the main guy even refrains from taking out a zombie and helping someone in order to keep shooting, and i liked this sort of vague video-camera-related insanity that started to pervade everyone and i wish more was done with that. i also wasn't crazy about the narrated interludes, but those were a small part.
anyway i was turned off initially by the idea, i'm just plain old not that into cinema verite stuff, and besides me getting really motion sick from the camera work i only want to watch an "actual" movie or whatever. Blair Witch, Cloverfield, even Cannibal Holocaust (heh) to some extent, i just don't like the person-with-a-camera stuff; but since that's Diary's whole thing, and i can mostly get behind Romero's messages and what he's saying, i can't fault the movie for it. it's just not my cup of tea. and it sucks that even if i had been blown away by Diary, even if i felt it was the best Dead movie thus far, i'd probably never watch it again because i'd get sick from the jerky footage. anyway, the movie was all right, i think although its commentary is relevant it's the weakest Dead film. i liked about the first half of it, then around the halfway or 2/3 mark it lost me and felt like it dragged on and the ending was sort of deflated or something and unsatisfying... most of the acting was pretty mediocre and even bad at points, but it could be argued that it was intentional, or if it wasn't it still works for the movie; part of Diary's thing is people stylizing and altering video footage to present a different "truth" or whatever, and then after they do that it becomes false and subjective and that there's no such thing as an objective documentary blah blah blah, so i think that the characters seem flat and the acting often wooden or forced kinda works for the film in a strange way. like this meta thing, where you're supposed to be watching this footage shot with "real" people who are obviously just actors in reality, but who are acting falsely in a falsely real situation... the addition of music was cool, too, more skewing-reality stuff, though the worst part in the movie comes from a part where the actions of a girl who happens to be from Texas gets scored with this banjo hillbilly tune or something. kinda off-putting.
on the gore side, Diary had some pretty good stuff, including an acid-to-the-head zombie death and a zombie that gets defibrillator paddles to the head and various bloody bites and all that good stuff. i read an interview that Romero said a lot of digital blood was used and i was afraid it was going to look like a lot of the obviously-CG stuff in Land, but it all looked really good.
after Diary we got free passes to any movie, because the film was a little shaky and they never turned out the lights in the theater for some reason. so we complained, got the passes, then returned later that night and saw Doomsday, hoping to end the night on a better note. i knew Doomsday would be good and it was, it was awesome. it's pretty much Escape From New York meets Mad Max plus a part with castles and knights and cannibals. some great gore, a guy being burned alive, exploding and severed heads, a cybernetic eyeball, and a sweet car chase at the end and lots of yelling. not crazy about Marshall's rapid cutting and shaky-cam during action sequences, but this one was a lot less confusing than his last movie the Descent, which at times was almost incoherent. i think Doomsday's up there with or maybe even better than Rambo 4 so far for this year. maybe the new Indiana Jones will top 'em, though. and the new Hulk movie looks pretty cool, too. | | Monday, March 10th, 2008 | | 4:54 pm |
rise from thy hoary tomb. saw Bella Morte last night, it was great as usual. they changed up the set since last time i saw them, which was great; they dropped Earth Angel, finally played Haunted and even The Devil's Eyes which i haven't seen them play since i lived in Savannah like five years ago. they also played a new song, In The Dirt, from the new yet-to-be-released album, it was awesome. heeding my forlorn pleas to stave off spring ever further, over the weekend the Ice Gods bestowed upon Rochester a mammoth two-day blizzard and snowed the shit out of the place. i took a few amazing walks outside, one in near whiteout conditions, i love that stuff. sometimes i wish it was winter all year long. ( endless permafrost. ) Current Music: bella morte: the alone | | Monday, February 18th, 2008 | | 9:08 pm |
nothing really. here's a cool essay about thought balloons in comics by Steven Grant. pretty good read. i put thought balloons in Water Baby, but now i think i should get back into them, i really like the idea of having images in a thought balloon. | | Thursday, February 14th, 2008 | | 12:21 am |
i'm for killin' that goddamn thing right now. ( artwork. ) | | Saturday, February 9th, 2008 | | 4:46 pm |
ghost town.
the more i think about it the more i think i should've started with The Abandoned 2 instead of what i did with the original/existing book; as in i should've had the first Abandoned book be set after the initial apocalypse, with all the lord of the flies kids and this post-apocalyptic new society run by Mad Max tribal teens where everyone dies when they hit adulthood, which is what volume 2 was/is going to be. obviously i couldn't have foreseen all the difficulties with Tokyopop and not getting further volumes in the series, but i feel like all i've done with The Abandoned was put out another zombie invasion story that's basically the same as every other one: the first day(s) of the epidemic, following a group of survivors that hole up somewhere, etc.. originally i felt like i needed to set up the phenomenon in the first book in order to better represent it in the second and third and to show the world's transformation, but looking back on it i don't think that was the right choice. i should've launched directly into it and put out something really different. hardly any zombie tales take place mid- or post-apocalypse, almost every one outside Romero's Day and Land of the Dead is structured basically the same.
i'm working on a new secret zombie book unrelated to The Abandoned that i'm not supposed to reveal yet, but it's also at the beginning of the zombie phenomenon. the zombie "gimmick" in this new one is more complicated than The Abandoned's and i think it needs more initial set up, but i'm starting to wonder whether i'm making the same mistake again. since who knows if i'll get a sequel to this new one, and i can't decide if the story is "different" enough from the standard beginning-of-the-invasion formula for the genre. i don't know.
in other less vague news, i drew the first page of Mountain Girl 3 today. wheee. it's always a hurdle for me to get back into drawing a comic again after a long stint of doing mostly writing and random sketches. i haven't drawn heavily in months but even after drawing just one page i can still feel my arm starting to flame up again, heh.
Wet Moon 4's writing is coming along pretty good, i'm past page 100. i think it's the toughest thing i've had to write thus far, i'm trying to keep the page count around volume 2's length, and volume 4 has a lot of situations and locales i've never worked with before and it jumps around a lot too, so that kind of throws me off trying to keep the pacing and deciding what to put in and what to throw out or what to save for volume 5. i hope this one's better than volume 3 but i'm not sure yet.
over the past week or two i was thinking seriously about training to become a vigilante or a cop, or starting a band that plays songs about vigilantes. being a vigilante is tougher than it would seem, so i'm pretty sure i'm not gonna do that, but now i'm thinking about looking into being a facial composite artist for the police or the FBI. i was doing some research about it and a lot of people use computer programs for that stuff, but usually only because artists aren't readily available. and the FBI apparently still stands by the hand-drawn method because viewers have more of a connection to it than a weird, pseudo-realistic, kind of creepy photo composite. sort of a similar thing with how it's said that the more cartoonier the character design, the more viewer identification that takes place. so that's where i could come in and seriously bust some evildoers. i guess that might be a better path for me than a cop, since i'm not very authoritative and i'd probably get stuck just giving out speeding tickets, but if i was a composite artist i could cut right to the chase. we'll see how that goes.
Current Music: dark tranquillity: terminus (where death is most alive) |
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