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Jess Jodloman Sunken Pearls of Cap'n Hatch

Joe Kubert Tor 2008 The first issue of Kubert's revived primitive hero

High Cost of Four Color Fun Reaction to Tom Spurgeon's essay on the state of comic books

Madame Sans-Gene Illustration and review of the 1894 play starring actress Gabirlle Rejane

Spirit #15 Art by Paul Smith. DC Comics

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ARCHIVE PAGE 55

Wednesday, June 10, 2008

Photos of Weather Conditions

[Below] Rainfall along 288 in Chesterfield County, near Midlothian, Virginia.

[Below] Boulevard Avenue through Richmond City, Virginia June

SEE THIS PICTURE OF BOULEVARD ENLARGED

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Jack Kirby!

A review of the Mark Evanier "Kirby King O' Comics" book (Abrams; $40.00) over at the New York Times, written by John Hodgeman, where he discusses Kirby's DC 'New Gods' concept and stories:

It was a cosmic “epic for our times,” with one foot in ancient myth and the other in the wildest science fiction. And unusually for a comic book story, it was designed to be told slowly, over many years, and to come to an end.

But it was also a personal epic. Kirby, as you ought to know, was the King. He got the nickname while working at Marvel comics, where, with Joe Simon, he created Captain America. Later, with Stan Lee, he helped fashion a completely new, psychologically rich aesthetic in comics, reviving a flagging industry and unveiling a pantheon of pop-culture deities — the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the Silver Surfer — that still walk the earth today.

But Kirby’s share of the riches they generated was modest. Like nearly all comics artists of the day, he worked for hire. Born in 1917, Kirby (né Jacob Kurtzberg) was a pugnacious child of the Depression-era Lower East Side and thus far more likely to favor a sure paycheck over a smartly negotiated contract. (Often, there were no contracts at all.) By the end of the ’60s, fights with Marvel over money and growing resentment over Stan Lee’s celebrity led Kirby to an unthinkable defection to the competition.

DC, by contrast, offered him vast creative latitude and an almost overdetermined amount of credit. “KIRBY’S HERE!” shouted bold sunbursts on the cover of early Kirby issues. The Fourth World was to be his liberation — the place where he would at last get to do his own thing.

The results were startling. Kirby fans already knew that his art was muscular and kinetic, and in this collection, he’s at the height of his powers. His characters are always in motion, leaping and punching at impossible angles, straining at the panels that try to contain them. Kirby’s writing was the same way. His stories were linear — even primitive. But there is something powerful and melancholy and personal that weeps in Orion’s epic, city-smashing rages.

At other times, though, the pages cannot seem to keep up with Kirby’s astonishing imagination. Concepts, characters, subplots and themes are wildly thrown into the mix like drunken punches and then abandoned, never to be seen again: A whole city “hewn from the giant trees of a great forest”! Space giants lashed to asteroids! Werewolves and vampires living on a miniature planet in a scientist’s basement (a planet with horns on it)!

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Click to view Bathead enlarged immensely

Monday, June 9, 2008

Photograph: Richmond City from the Sky

The James River sure looks muddy in this Astronaut Photo. It is the largest river in Virginia, flowing down from Highland County on through to Chesapeake Bay, a distance of 340 miles.

The Photo: The large green island in the river is Belle Island, it is under the Robert E. Lee Bridge spanning across it's top. The river is highly navigable at this point in the city, and historically speaking, prior to easy access to railroads (and later cars) people vastly preferred to travel by boat to points north (for example Washington DC or to Baltimore) or points south (Charleston). A coach ride over such a distance was unpleasant and often an endurance test due to rough roads and the primitive nature of horse-drawn vehicles.

Click to see this sky photo of Richmond significantly larger

If you look close you'll see I'm the guy standing with the Batman comic book next to the dog eyeing a cat with its hair hiked up.

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Click to view Hillary Clinton enlarged considerably

Sunday, June 8, 2008

Ink Drawing: People Coming from the Late Night Showing of the Indiana Jones IV Movie

Click to see largely

Friday, June 6, 2008

Drowned Valleys of the Megalopolis
I Found Out Today that I Live in the Greek Word for "Big City"

Above: From the Astronaut Photography web site.

Suddenly I need to catch my air:

Baltimore Area, Maryland, USA: Baltimore, Maryland can be identified in this northwest-looking view of the western shore of Chesapeake Bay. Numerous drowned river valleys provide excellent natural harbors along the periphery of the bay. Baltimore’s harbor has been developed along one of these drowned valleys, the Patapsco River. With a population of over 2.5 million people, the greater Baltimore urban area is part of the northeastern U.S. Megalopolis that extends from the Boston (MA) area to Richmond (VA). Specific features that can be seen in the image include a short segment of Interstate Highway 95 that connects southwest Baltimore with northeast Washington, D.C.; the intersecting runways of Baltimore-Washington International Airport south of downtown Baltimore; Francis Scott Key Bridge that skirts around the southeast side of Baltimore; the Chesapeake Bay Bridge that spans the bay and connects the Baltimore area with the eastern shore of Maryland; and the central business district of Baltimore where the two arms of the inner harbor terminate. The darker-looking vegetation cover is mixed hardwood forests (notice that many wooded areas are located along streambeds and floodplains of small river valleys), while lighter-looking land parcels in the rural countryside is used for crops or pasturelands.

This reminds me of my Grandpa who lived nearly all his life farming. When I rode with him into a nearby town, which to him was a city, he looked at the proximity of the houses one-to-another and said, "No one could stand being this packed in close unless they were born to it." Long pause. "But when they'd turn eight, they'd start gasping."

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Photograph: Carillon Bell Tower, Richmond Virginia

Click to Enlarge:

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Portrait: Writer Charlaine Harris

Click to Enlarge:

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Apple Macintosh Mayhem!

I saw this at Technorati:

...OS X 10.6 may go gold master by December 2008 in an effort to start shipping it in January '09 at Macworld Expo. Mac OS X 10.6 will be a milestone release for Apple, as it will leave the PowerPC behind: a fully 64-bit clean, Intel-only Mac OS X.

Though probably a much better system, OSX 10.6 will leave a lot of Macs orphaned in its wake, more or less as what happened years ago to poor old OS9 machines (I still have three!).

The real problem I see for Apple is what will follow after they use up all the OS Ten numbers and they have to jump to "OS 11"? Just doesn't sound as good as that big "Malcolm X" style letter floating on top of all their marketing, does it? And for that matter, just consider what will happen if they a forced to go to "OS 13"?

Maybe they will stay at OS Ten forever, and just keep using longer and longer fractions to denote changes, along with pet names for the versioning (for example, OSX.4 is called 'Tiger' and OSX.3 was 'Panther' and so on).

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