A nice cup of rabies

I just added a new comic to my lj friends page and thought I'd take a moment to promote what I'm reading.

First, we have T's The City Dreams of Tamino the Cat. Twice a week, he delivers a mysterious single panel. If you're a lazy bitch like me, you can read it via LJ at fitecomics.

Second, we have Ursula Husted's Looking Up. This daily page is a quiet (so far) story about a decaying romance interrupted by a giant hole in the ground. The whole thing is finished, so there's no worries about a sudden dose of chaos interrupting it. You can read it via LJ at lookingup_comic.

And finally, I just added Dumm Comics, a comics collective started by my animation school buddy Gabe Swarr. Five daily strips by five different people from the LA animation scene - three of 'em were trained at Spümcø. You can get it via LJ at dumm_comics.

Oooh, pretty. If a bit mind-twisty when you get the model really rotating through higher dimensions. I feel like I want to use some of these images as a component in something Escheresque, but I know I never will.

The metafilter post I found it in has some directions on how to get the Mac binary working - it's not packaged up as a clickable app.

"The Simpsons Movie" is coming out in two and a half months. Its writers still barely seem to know what happens in it. They've been working on the script since 'late 2003'. They're throwing entire animated scenes on the cutting room floor.

The poor bastards who actually have to draw this endlessly-revised shit are, of course, barely mentioned in this story. Except for a quote from Groening about the suppressed tension of the animators every time they make them try to twist in yet another direction.

From outside, this sounds like exactly the same kind of obsessive revisionism that I saw happening on "Ren And Stimpy Adult Party". There were episodes that turned into two-and-a-half show epics due to endless storyboard "improvements", eating up all the budget and time, leaving no room to actually animate it well. The bar for the Simpsons is lower, in animation and drawing quality, and the budget is higher, so they can just drag in more people to hack out half-assed scenes and slap some shadows on top of them to make it look 'cinematic' and probably get away with it.

But I bet there's more than a few people in the trenches of this show who're going to have the last spark of giving a damn for animation burnt out by this death march. There're going to be scenes someone put their heart and soul into, that set some new milestone for them, that get tossed because these fucking writers can't nail down a story in the boards and stick to it. Yeah, let's have a widescreen shot of every character who ever appeared in the show. Maybe we'll cut it later.

Fuck. In another world where I'd iterated on the test for the show a couple more times, I might be one of those people. I could see settling into a comfortable rut on that endless show and putting enough into the odd scene to get asked to work on the movie, and actually really love a few scenes of my own. Would I get to see my work up there on the big screen? It wouldn't be down to my well-honed skill; it'd be up to the whims of the writing committee. That's a horrible place to imagine being in.

Information Aesthetics blog. lj feed: infoaesthetics

cool.

Delicious Agony Prog Rock Internet Radio - all prog, all the time.

Roz? They have a show that's nothing but Genesis and solo stuff by Genesis members.

Wally Wood's '22 Panels That Always Work'. What's interesting is comparing the label put on it and the actual use - while it's been distributed as a way to keep things visually interested when you're handed an overly-talky script, a teaching tool, its original intent was for Wood himself to use as a cheat sheet, but his assistants wanted copies, and they spread it to people who ended up working under them at other places.

It's not surprising that this became an instructional tool and a valuable reference** - these little distillations of knowledge get passed around like this. More than a few of my handouts in animation school were third-generation Xeroxes of stuff that originally started as studio tools. I learned the rules of 'shag always comes in threes' from a set of notes that seemed to originate in Oliver and Company; the tricks to defeat unconscious, weird, slanty asymmetry in your drawings were demonstrated to me in a handout originally made during production of Tthe Little Mermaid.

Cartoonists are hungry for tools to make their life easier, for these little nuggets of truth that are glaringly obvious once someone's put it into a handful of sentences or drawings. And now, they end up on the net, sooner or later. We won't let the best stuff go out of print. I've heard more than one story of Figure Drawing for All It's Worth being the course materials for a figure drawing class, despite it being out of print for years - it's a succinct reference, it's not allowed to just vanish, not when Xerox machines can make it available.

**or so it seems; personally, I'd never seen this until earlier this year, but then again I hung out in animation circles, not comics circles