Christopher Panzer at Arts Editor writes of comics/graphic novels, “The Ninth Art” in this article from January I meant to post and lost in my blog box. Sorry.
Prepared by mainstream acceptance of Pop, Psychedelia, post-Situationist Punk, and Graffiti (just to name a few), thirty years of imported Japanese manga, and the recent spate of feature film adaptations of Marvel superheroes and graphic novelists, this uniquely 20th Century medium has acquired a sophistication that legitimizes its claim to fine art status. It is also a crossroads in these synthetic times, combining the language of film, literature, art, poetry, and music. And at the same time, it reprograms our neurons to accept illustration, design, and typography as “real” art as publishing gets redefined by electronic media and print media blurs our definition of multimedia.
Enjoy Jeff Smith’s big night over here at Boneville! For obvious reasons, I could not make the show, but lots of cool folks did, and the event was a huge success! Congratulations, Jeff!
This should be posted in all schools and work places…
Love him or hate him, he sure hits the nail on the head with this! Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.
Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!
Rule 2 : The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
Irena Sendler, awarded the title of Righteous Gentile for helping to save 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, has died of pnuemonia at the age of 98 in a Polish hospital.
Sendler and a group of friends in the Warsaw municipality’s social welfare department started producing false documents to provide Jews in the ghetto with monetary assistance that the Germans had cut off.
After 1940 the ghetto was closed off to non-Jews, and Sendler and her friends could not get in to distribute the funds.
She soon learned that one sanitation company was still allowed into the ghetto. Sendler got the Polish director of the service to employ her and 10 friends so they could continue helping Jews.
For the next two years, dressed as nurses, Sendler and her friends carried food, money, and medicine hidden in their dresses to ghetto residents. As conditions deteriorated, and the liquidation of ghetto began, Sendler came to the realization that the only chance for the children to survive was to escape.
In 1942, she joined the Polish underground movement, “Zegota,” and, with the help of a dozen friends, initiated a large-scale clandestine campaign to save Jewish children. “You know the people, we have the money,” the president of the organization told her, she recalled.
This is what a real superheroine looks like:
This is a cartoon:
“I get mad when someone calls me a hero,” she (Sendler) said at the end of an emotional interview, her face suddenly glowing. “I did a normal thing.”
A man who dressed up as Darth Vader, wearing a garbage bag for a cape, and assaulted the founders of a group calling itself the Jedi church was given a suspended sentence Tuesday.
Arwel Wynne Hughes, 27, attacked Jedi church founder Barney Jones — aka Master Jonba Hehol — with a metal crutch, hitting him on the head, prosecutors told Holyhead Magistrates’ Court.
He also whacked Jones’ 18-year-old cousin, Michael Jones — known as Master Mormi Hehol — bruising his thigh in the March 25 incident, prosecutors said.
Fortsooth, and of a surety, Darth Vader is evil personified.
I’m getting some complaints that users cannot post comments.
My Spam filter is voracious. Please contact me directly if it is eating your posts. We get hundreds every day, and I try to screen, but can’t catch everything.
If you post with a link, the filter may put your post on a hold until I can approve it.
If you are a first time poster, your post will be held until I can approve it.
Passwords and user names are case sensitive. Try retyping your info.
If you still can’t post, contact me. I can change your password.
I do not screen posts after you have been approved as a living breathing human being and not a bot. I do not delete posts because people disagree with me, but I do ask for civility here and since everyone is almost always civil, we never have any problems. I don’t think I’ve ever deleted a post actually.
Former Donning/Epic Comics editor Laurie Sutton has dropped a note to let everyone know that she has a goodly number of rare, early Tim Sale books that she can sell you at rock bottom prices.
Here’s what I’ve got in the way of Thieves’ World material for sale:
The single issues are square-bound, 61 pages, B&W, penciled and inked by Tim
Sale, published by Donning/Starblaze 1985-1987. These are in mint
condition; $10 each.
3 copies of the softcover compilation of issues 1-3
The softcover compilations are also square-bound, 183 pages, penciled and
inked by Tim Sale, colored by Chris Perry, painted cover by David Cherry.
Published in 1986. These are in mint condition; $20 each.
ONE boxed hardcover compilation of issues 1-3 (color), signed by Lynn Abbey,
Robert Asprin, and Tim Sale (#28 of a limited edition of 500). Also in mint
condition; $75.
All these copies are my editor’s/contributor’s copies and have been stored
since I got them. Untouched by human hands. Boxed and stuck in a closet
for over 20 years. Let them breathe free at last!
Interested parties may contact me at thievesgirl@bellsouth.net.
Thanks again,
~ Laurie
I do believe these are Tim Sale’s first published works, and they are long out of print.
This may be one of the more unusual images of Sir Galahad I’ve found.
This is by an artist named Herbert Gustave Schmaltz and it is circa 1881.
Apparently, Galahad found Thor’s hammer before Don Blake did.
And am I the only one who thinks the placement of the hands and face of the girl who is girding Sir Galahad’s loins is rather unfortunate? Or fortunate, depending on your point of view.
Moving right along, to everyone out there, thanks for all the get well notes.
I saw the doctor yesterday, and I have settled into a nice, comfy case of bronchitis which is kind of annoying and uncomfortable, but not a big deal. Minor fever, tired a good deal, but I am able to work and get about OK.
We have rescheduled my trip to Portugal to the end of the month, and the doc says I should be fine to travel by then.
I am working comfortable half days, trying not to slip behind on the job. So far so good. There are some commissions to finish off though, and some packages to ship this week, so I need to stay on top of those.
The only big problem has been uploading images to clients and the board (light posting, I’m sure you’ve noticed). The weather keeps knocking out the satellite. We’ve had almost a half foot of rain these past days. No complaints there, we really need it, but the storms this past week are the worst in six years.
Several families nearby (and I mean down the street), lost their roofs and were lifted off their foundations. Cars went flying. There was no report of a tornado, though.
Here at our farm, the winds took out an enormous tree in the front yard, the one covered with wisteria vines 20 feet high. It went down mere feet in front of me ma as she was walking down the street to get the mail. Quite a shock. She was amazed at how fast it fell. Trees don’t creak and worry themselves over, they just plop in about a second. The wisteria vines, as thick as my leg, snapped like wire.
So now we have this big pile of stuff in the driveway. Lots more chopping, hauling and sawing to do, as if we don’t already have enough of that on a tree farm! Of course, we are very sad to lose a fine, mature tree and that wisteria!
Before the worst of the storms hit, we gathered as many of our flowers out of the garden as we could. The ones that remained got gobsmacked. The tulips were shredded.
All in all though, we were pretty lucky, as there was some flooding, and, of course, tornadoes and mayhem elsewhere.
I’m not able to do much gardening and yard work, and that is a big disappointment. But the bad weather has been a lucky break for all that. This was the coldest April in 114 years, and May is also very cool. It has been in the 30’s at night. This is great for prolonging the spring flowers and we have enjoyed tulips and daffodils for nearly three solid months, but summer planting is very late.
If I had planted when I wanted, doubtless we’d have lost all the seeds to cold and rot. But since I will end up planting very late, it’s all worked out for the best.
I will try to post some pics of our flowers the next day or two.
So, I am selling off a bunch of art to pay for it.
This was a drawing intended as a preliminary sketch for a series of The Hobbit illustrations. I was trying to get some ideas on paper for the town of Dale, hence the dragon banners and whatnot. For more of my Lord of the Rings art and sketches, click the Lord of the Rings tab below.
To bid on this or others drawings and paintings now on ebay (with more going up over the next few days) click this link (it may be a few hours before this art shows up in the queue).
There’s art from The Sandman, Lucifer, The Lord of the Rings, A Distant Soil, Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman, and others going up.
I just now paid off the scanner I bought this fall. Geez. I really wanted to put off buying a new system for at least another year, but the new gigs are eating up huge graphics file space, and it’s time to upgrade. The size of my next project will consume mega-gigabytes.
