c. billadeau

This is beautiful.

“It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news. …

“… For this edition of the paper, nearly all the rules taught in journalism school were thrown out the window. Writers used the first person and showed up in nearly every photograph alongside their interview subjects, including the likes of Defense Minister Ehud Barak and President Shimon Peres.

“Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: ‘Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place… Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points…. The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again….’ The TV review by Eshkol Nevo opened with these words: ‘I didn’t watch TV yesterday.’ And the weather report was a poem by Roni Somek, titled ‘Summer Sonnet.’ (’Summer is the pencil/that is least sharp/in the seasons’ pencil case.’) News junkies might call this a postmodern farce, but considering that the stock market won’t be soaring anytime soon, and that ‘hot’ is really the only weather forecast there is during Israeli summers, who’s to say these articles aren’t factual?

“Alongside these cute reports were gripping journalistic accounts. David Grossman, one of Israel’s most famed novelists, spent a night at a children’s drug rehabilitation center in Jerusalem and wrote a cover page story about the tender exchanges between the patients, ending the article in the style of a celebrated author who’s treated like a prophet: ‘I lay in bed and thought wondrously how, amid the alienation and indifference of the harsh Israeli reality, such islands — stubborn little bubbles of care, tenderness and humanity — still exist.’ Grossman’s pen transformed a run-of-the-mill feature into something epic.

“So, too, did 79-year-old author Yoram Kaniuk, whose novel ‘Adam Resurrected’ was recently adapted for a movie starring Jeff Goldblum and Ayelet Zurer. He went into the field to write about couples in the hospital cancer ward. The thing is, he’s a cancer patient, too. ‘A woman walking with a cane brings her partner a cup of coffee with a trembling hand. The looks they exchange are sexier than any performance by Madonna and cost a good deal less,’ Kaniuk wrote. ‘I think about what would happen if I were to get better…how I would live without the human delicacy to which I am witness?’”

I wonder if any American newspaper could ever pull something like this off. I know I, for one, would gladly welcome it.

Updated the cover to “The Great and The Terrible”; the old version is seen back here. Mainly a vanity update, though the illegibilty of the text on the back of the cover was bothering me.

“The Great and The Terrible” is still living up to its convoluted name, by the way. I may or may not be currently trying to scramble together enough money in the next month to make it out to Oregon to hear the writer speak at ARGFest. Really, I wanted to go in the first place, but the main allure now is that chance to shake hands with the guy and/or vent my frustrations by kicking him squarely in the shins.

So if you folks have any suggestions for traveling on the dime, I AM ALL FOR THEM. Because I do not have the approx. $500 it would cost to fly out there right now.

Also, have a page from an adapation I started of Jack London’s A Thousand Deaths! There are more pages to this, but they a) need a lot of editing (damn dark bluelines) and b) are not actually all that great, so I might not even post them anyway.

I thoroughly blame Tessa Stone for getting me into the comic scene.

About six years ago, I think it was, I was just a wee teenager with absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Well, ok, I had a special sort of delirium that made me think I knew where I was going. I still wanted to be an astronomer at that point. I had wanted to be an astronomer ever since I was five years old and knew how to actually pronounce the word. I mean, what can I say? Being the first born in the family meant that craving for success had been buried into me at a young age (plus, my parents were pressuring me into looking at colleges by the eighth grade).

In any case, I was a struggling, lost, and confused teenager with the whole internet at my fingertips. However, instead of finding a grown-up job with an important-sounding title to start persuing, I found a few pages of Stone’s “Kill The City” in some corner of the web–more specifically, I found my gateway drug.

Thus began the downward spiral into the alternative comic art world and, eventually, what amounts to where I am right now.

Since I found those pages of Kill The City floating around the ‘tubes, I haven’t let Stone disappear off the radar. That project died a sad death, to be later replaced by newer runs and other projects (most notably a collaboration with her equally-talented sister, Under Lock & Key). Despite the fact that none of these projects have never seen completion, I waited. No matter how frustrating it was to think, “Oh man, she’s really going to go through with this one this time,” when I knew the comic wouldn’t, I waited. Like the patient stalker fan I am, I always waited.

Needless to say, when I heard she was working on a new project after a several-month hiatus, I broke out into a cold sweat. ‘No way,’ I shivered, ‘I thought she’d never come back.’

Stone described “Hanna Is Not A Boy’s Name” as a sort of side project to some other things she’s working on; a ‘comic exercise’ that is updated daily.

Updated. Daily. Oh, shit. This is the equivalent of rolling a bottle of vodka into an AA meeting to me, guys.

Hanna Is Not A Boy’s Name has some familiar supernatural overtones in it, but is anything but traditional. I’ve always admired Stone’s brilliant character designs, and this one is no exception to that. She breaks out of the predictable archetypes by introducing offbeat characters like an amnesiac undead and a passive-aggressive vampire into it. Rather than forcing humor down our throats, she really has a way with dark, natural humor created out of the sheer insanity of the situations she throws her characters into. As she describes it:

“It’s essentially about a crazy boy named Hanna who tries to be a super awesome paranormal investigator but really is scraping by the seat of his pants, told by a dead guy who really is sort of lukewarm about everything.”

There’s a neat concept and storyline behind the comic, but also a sense of freedom that I haven’t seen in her other work. I hate using this phrase, but: it’s fresh. I can’t think of a more exact use of that overabused phrase, really. It’s a break away from her normal stuff–but a really good breakaway. Like, ‘oh god please please please keep doing this if you don’t I will cry’ sort of breakaway. Simply by giving the panels a color treatment, there’s a fiery, tangy, citrusy flavor to every strip, not to mention the openness to the panels and the interplay between text, image, and panel. Text has always played a part in her work, but as of late, there seems to be a particular amount of attention being paid to the visual role of the word in her images. Which, of course, I adore.

I can only hope these will be collected and printed at some point in the near future. I still get sniffly whenever I remember that I missed the boat to grab a copy of some limited Under Lock & Key book prints, arghhh.

In any matter, what are you still doing here, reading this post? Get over to the blog and start reading, damnit. And then you can join me in staking out ’til the next update. Company in misery, folks.

If I can’t cure myself of this addiction, the least I can do is impose it upon the rest of you suckers.

(PS: I promised myself years ago that I was going to get a tattoo dedicated to Kill The City on my neck. It has yet to happen, but damned if I’m gonna break that promise.)

link: Hanna Is Not A Boy’s Name, Tessa Stone @ dA

I just put in an order with a printing press for my very first business cards and promo mailer. And you can’t see it, but I’m glowing like a proud new parent over here. May have to bronze-bootie these babies for the scrapbook.

Summer break! I’m slowly working on assembling some separate portfolios, which requires me to finish a couple of projects and document others. In the meantime, here’s a couple of pages from an inking class I took last semeser–pages from Bruce Jones’ take on War That Time Forgot. Only the inks are mine; Al Barrionuevo did the pencils.

And here’s a screenshot of a promotional mailer I’m (slowly) putting together. Exciting!

New image for a portfolio illustration final; got to basically do whatever I wanted, and I’ve been wanting to do a mockup of a book cover spread for a while. “The Great and The Terrible” is actually a supplement to a game I’ve been involved in for the past month, and it’s much more complicated than the synopsis makes it seem, heh.

Updated version of the website is live.

Most notable inclusion this time around is the image preview now works. I was having a bitch of a time getting a lightbox-style script to work with the side scroll, until I found floatbox. Simple, customizeable, and actually works with the layout. You have no idea how happy a simple scroll lock makes me.

Up next: gotta get together the material for the comic art and concept art pages. They will be in a similar sidescrolling style as the main portfolio, but I will be grouping images by project or story, instead.

Also: for fun, here is a brief essay I wrote on Warren Ellis and the posthuman.

‘Bout time I got one of these things on my website.

I’ve been using livejournal for years now to blog, but anything not art-related tends to get closed up behind f-locks. And sometimes I just have a burning itch to share all my ridiculous internet finds with the world, you know?

So I hope to mesh this blog with my portfolio updates, as well as anything post-worthy. I will still be updating my livejournal and will keep the personal and incoherent junk I write about 90% of the time behind that thar f-lock, so if you already watch me there, you probably don’t need to hang around here too much!

For everyone else: o hai!