Scribes & Scoundrels

Blockhead

2010-03-12T19:44:00.001Z

Books. No cable, not a lot of movies, but there were always lots of books and periodicals in my house. And Xenu bless 'em, my parents worked their way through them, from cover to cover. It rubbed off on me. I took great pride in my ability to slog through any kind of printed material. If I started something, I was going to get through it, no matter how many times I drifted off to sleep.

This was easy enough to do while I was still in elementary school, and was reading mostly novels or popular history. In junior high school, I got it into my head that I should try to become a well rounded person, and would take the occasional stab at biology, mathematics, physics or philosophy. My patience and understanding quickly hit a wall, and with the exception of philosophy, I gave up trying to understand anything scientific or math related pretty quickly.

Still, that work ethic remained, and I'd doggedly try and get through Plato and Montesquieu, Dante and Pound, Joyce and Pynchon, succeeding more often than failing, but when I couldn't bear to continue on with the print equivalent of Ambien, blaming myself for my lack of discipline and stick-to-it-ness.

My first indication that there was a better way to read occurred while I was reading a magazine interview with the French cartoonist Moebius. I don't remember anything about the interview, except the fact that he mentioned one of his comic books was inspired by a book of poetry that he never finished reading. I was scandalized at the time, and thought less of him both as a human being and an artist.

So I continued mindlessly plodding through the world's great literature through my years as an undergraduate at the University of Manitoba. Sometimes it paid off, as in the case of Foucault's Pendulum, but more often than not, well, it pretty much went in one ear and out the other.

Perversely enough, a film studies course made me realize that reading books all the way through from cover to cover wasn’t always the best use of my time. During a class discussion, someone made a comment to the effect that they never walked out of movies. For a brief moment, we all sat around nodding and murmuring our assent, smug in our belief that we were all good, tolerant, and open-minded people.

Then our professor spoke up. “I do,” he said, “All the time. When you get to be my age, you realize life is too short to sit through something you don’t enjoy.” I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. At first I used this newfound bit of wisdom only in extreme circumstance, and only when watching movies.

But gradually that attitude began to seep over into reading. It started slowly at first: I finished the first part of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, and then quickly gave up on ever finishing the rest of it a couple of pages into the second part. Soon I was happily skimming and skipping my way through works of non-fiction, and happily giving up on novels after reading a hundred pages past the start or when I was only fifty pages away from the end.

My attitude toward finishing books became even more extreme, more insouciant. I used to devour novels by Christopher Buckley and Will Self, but after paging through their latest efforts I realized it was more bother than it was worth. In fact, my go to hell attitude has become so extreme, I realized the other day that I had finally come full circle: maybe I’d been too quick to delete Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. I enjoyed reading the first hundred pages or so, but as it was a little long, maybe it was a little bit like the television series Oz: something best enjoyed in small doses over an extended period of time.

Besides, if I get bored I don’t have to finish reading Quicksilver. I can stop reading it whenever I want...

Flatliners

2010-03-04T22:51:00.012Z

Flat, flat, flat. Flat, gloriously flat. Superflat. I’ve always wondered whether or not trade paperback collections cannibalized sales of monthly “floppy” comic books. Looking at the sales of The Walking Dead, it looks as if trade paperback collections don’t eat into the monthly sales of traditional comic books in their "pamphlet" format. But more on that later. Let’s take a moment to put flat, at least in the floppy context, into perspective.

Are flat, steady sales really all that interesting? Maybe. Since looking at a relatively straight line of sales figures for The Walking Dead is well, kind of…flat, I thought I’d compare it side by side with the sales figures for Superman:

While it is true that Superman outsells The Walking Dead, it is interesting to note that sales for the former title have been in free fall, and more importantly, Superman has a cultural resonance and a legacy that The Walking Dead doesn’t. With all the toys, merchandise, cartoons, television series, and movies out there, it’s surprising that circulation has been in a steady decline for the last fourteen months. If sales figures on Superman are anything to go by, the core audience for that title probably isn’t that significantly larger than the audience for The Walking Dead.

The trade paperback sales for The Walking Dead indicate that there is a larger audience for the title beyond that of the floppy readership. All trade paperback volumes and hardcover compilations combined account for roughly 33% of all sales of The Walking Dead comic book series. No trade paperback volume or hardcover compilation ever comes close to exceeding sales of the monthly title.

While the combined sales for all trade paperback volumes and hardcover compilations don’t exceed – with two exceptions - those of the ongoing monthly series, Image (the company that publishes The Walking Dead) does manage to sell an impressive number of copies. January and August saw the release of new trade paperback collections. Some combination of trade paperback followers and die-hard collectors of the series helped gave a boost to the sales of the new trade paperback collections released in January and August.

Given the length of the series (it has been around for over five years) I’ll assume that the number of people buying “Volume 1” of the trade paperback collections are probably all new readers. The total sales figures for each of the trade paperback volumes over the course of the year bear out this hypothesis. There is some evidence of attrition as there is a drop in sales for each volume, but chances are that if a reader likes the first volume, that reader will continue to buy more.

What about the future of The Walking Dead, once the series has reached its inevitable end? If sales of Watchmen or V for Vendetta are anything to go by, The Walking Dead should be generating a steady stream of revenue for Image long after the series has run its course.

Nota Bene Watchmen made its film debut in 2009, so V for Vendetta is probably closer to the norm in terms of sales. As with previous posts, all sales figures can be found here. Please keep in mind that all the sales figures pulled from this website represent estimates from independent comic book shops, and do not take into account sales figures from online retailers like Amazon, independent bookstores, news stands, or big box retailers like Borders.

Lesson Learned

2010-02-25T21:40:00.005Z

Well, I might have missed the boat on Marcel Dzama, but I like to think that I've since learned my lesson, and have bought some illustrations done by Rob Ullman, a local illustrator who does stuff for the City Paper, Richmond Magazine, and a ton of other places.

My sweetie bought me a nice pin-up from Ullman's website for my birthday, and when my bonus was deposited into my bank account, I decided to add another a piece that is DNSFW to my collection.

Like Pia Guerra,, Ullman has a nice, clean style that is reminiscent of earlier comic book artists like Dan DeCarlo or Carmine Infanito. Not a lot of artists emulate that sort of look, but when they do - as Ullman does - it stands out on the page like nothing else out there.

Sex Cells?

2010-02-18T21:36:00.020Z

Does sex sell comic books? It's hard to say. There are relatively few female superheroes that have their own solo titles, and the top seller in the female superhero category, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon has described Buffy as such in interviews) ties in with a television series. Despite the television tie-in, I think it is worth pointing out that Buffy is in the top twenty best-selling comic books and outsells all of her female counterparts and most of her male competitors without having to wear a skimpy costume.

As further proof that more flesh doesn't always lead to more sales, Power Girl, Spider-Woman, and Batgirl all started relatively late in 2009, and either went on to surpass, or closed the gap relatively quickly (in terms of sales) their more scantily clad counterparts, Red Sonja and Witchblade.

Spiderman, Batman, and Superman outsell their female analogues, however, the distance between Superman and Supergirl, in terms of sales, is not that great.

While the sales of Batgirl are eclipsed by that of Batman, it is interesting to note that the disparity between Batgirl, and another Batman spinoff, Red Robin is not that significant, if the sales figures for the first five issues are anything to go by.

Co-relation doesn't always equal causation, but if the sales of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Batgirl are anything to go by, the editors of Wonder Woman and Power Girl might want to think long and hard about serving up more cheesecake in 2010.

All sales figures can be found here.

Update: Slightly tangential, but an interesting post on marketing comic books to women can be found here.

2/18/07

2010-02-18T12:47:00.006Z

Two slash eighteen slash
two thousand and seven I
felt lucky, happy,
and loved when you said "I do".
two one eight zero seven

Coffee

2010-02-17T01:43:00.002Z

Writing is...okay, but it's DEFINITELY not even ⅛ as fun as making a film with a friend!

Red and Blue Make Green

2010-02-15T03:55:00.029Z

She-Hulk and Swamp Thing are two superheroes that I've been following on and off since I was twelve. I've been buying up the trade paperback collections of She-Hulk and Swamp Thing on Amazon and half.com like crazy lately, and while I was jonesing for my latest Swamp Thing fix, it occurred to me that color might help explain the sales of superhero comic books.

I've always liked offbeat superheros - She-Hulk, Swamp Thing, Booster Gold, and Animal Man to name a few - and the two common denominators that they all share is middling sales and costumes or pigmentation consisting of unusual colors.

Since I was curious to see what impact color might have on the sales of super hero comic book, I crunched the sales figures for a number of different superheroes over the course of 2009:

A couple of notes about my data. The sales figures were pulled from this website. The Amazing Spiderman is the only title that comes out three or four times a month, while the Hulk, Green Lantern, and Batman were all featured prominently in major storylines that without a doubt goosed the sales of their titles.

While I'm hesitant to draw any conclusions about green, I think red and blue, or some combination thereof, is the clear winner when it comes to comic book sales:

Having been raised on a diet of "grim 'n gritty" comics from the eighties through the ought oughts, I'm surprised black isn't a more popular color. While Ms. Marvel and the Punisher outsell their blue and yellow counterparts, Booster Gold and Nova, they only do so by about a 75,000 copies a year.

White is the clear loser in terms of sales. There aren't that many superheroes that incorporate white as a major part of their costumes, but when they do sales fade faster than a pair of Levis in the wash.

Red and blue puts Marvel and DC in the black, while white puts them in the red. However, for this comic book reader, green is the only color that "pops" on the cover of a comic book.

Update: I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings for the Occasional Superheroine, but as further proof of my thesis that a white costume kills sales, Emma Frost (a superheroine who likes to fight crime in white lingerie) had her own solo series that made its debut in July, 2003. The first sold a respectable 54,107 copies, however, when the series was canceled in December of 2004, only 24,519 copies of the title were sold.

The REAL Mad Man

2010-01-02T19:25:00.007Z

A vibrating Santa. Stuffed, plush, and cute in that really bland, obnoxious way that Hello Kitty is. And it vibrates. Worse yet, it laughs. When Dad showed it to me years ago, I winced. Maybe I was in my early twenties, still in university, and had a lot of vulgar, half-assed Marxism rattling around my noggin. Or it could have been my late twenties. By then the half-assed Marxism would have been pounded out of my skull by cold, hard reality. However, my fear of remaining forever on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder brought a pained expression to my face.

But not this year. When my sister brought it out, that tacky ball of plush fabric stuffed with cotton made me smile. My Dad sold a million of them. It was one of many good calls that he made during his career as a buyer for Saan Stores, a discount clothing retailer in Western Canada. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Teletubbies, Big Mouth Billy Bass, and countless other fads. The executives above him would hem and haw, but the old man had a gut instinct that was never wrong.

Even when he got kicked to the curb, forced out into early retirement, Dad had the last laugh. Almost to the month after his severance package ran out, the company went bankrupt. Anyone that had stayed on with the company, including the Doubting Thomases that second guessed my father's judgment for a good chunk of his career, got nothing.

When Matthew Weiner was still running around getting half-caf no foam soy cappuchinos for David Chase, my Dad was the original Don Draper. Dad earned a fraction of what Draper earned (adjusted for inflation), didn't smoke, was a moderate drinker, and was faithful to his wife, but inasmuch as I love watching Mad Men, I consider it an accurate reflection and vindication of my father's core values as a businessman: hard work, honesty, integrity, dedication, and loyalty.

Brooks Brothers Anarchist

2009-09-12T17:22:00.017Z

Pranks, hoaxes, fraud, and forgery. I've always loved pranks and hoaxes, and while I certainly don't condone fraud and forgery, I'd be lying if I said I didn't find those subjects fascinating. Mad Magazine and The Great Brain gave me a taste for that sort of thing as a child, but I didn't fully realize all the anarchic, comedic possibilities of a well done hoax until I was in junior high school.

After a long, boring (in the coma inducing sense of the word) day at school, I'd hang out with my friend Sigurd Jarlson in his parents rec room. Usually we would watch cartoons or read comic books, but one day Will discovered his father's old comedy albums. Cheech and Chong found their way on to the turntable, as did McLean & McLean, the Canadian knockoff of the aforementioned, mostly American duo.

As much as I enjoyed both acts, there was another, and as far as I know, unheard of gem in Mr. Jarlson's collection. It was a cassette tape, and on it, hastily scrawled with a black sharpie, someone had written: Id's Shit. I don't know who was responsible for it, but it was hysterically shocking, and even funnier was the back story that went with the recording. The person or persons responsible for the recording had mailed copies of it to disc jockeys all across the United States, and then sat back and laughed as as competing radio stations sued each other over who owned the rights to the recording.

That, in my eyes, then and now, was brilliant. Raising hell just for the sake of it. Sticking it to the man. For years I labored under the assumption that the man was older, white, wore a three piece suit, aviator frames, voted Republican, went to Church every Sunday, and held the kind of opinions associated with that kind of person. Liberals, well, liberals were, or should have been, a lot like my wife or Seth McFarlane: funny, smart, sophistacted, handsome and or beautiful, well-read, and for the most part moderate, but having an admirable sympathy for the underdog and or downtrodden.

P.J. O'Rourke, and later, Tommy Chong, of all people, challenged my assumptions about who the good guys and the bad guys are. "Ship of Fools", an essay about O'Rourke's trip down the Volga river with a ragtag bunch of aging American leftists, demolished my hitherto unassailable belief that all liberals were like my wife or Seth McFarlane: funny, smart, sophistacted, handsome and or beautiful, well-read, and for the most part moderate, but having an admirable sympathy for the underdog and or downtrodden.

But it was Chong's appearance on a local television chat show that was the real intellectual dynamite. Bearded, but wearing a slick Armani suit; a guy who made a fortune selling comedy albums to stoners, but who collected vintage modernist paintings. The talk-show host was appalled and enraged by both his success and his non-chalance about how he achieved it. It was funny. Chong's appearance and answers were definitely about hell-raising for the sake of hell-raising, but something was off-kilter about the interview, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

It took awhile for it to sink in, but then it hit me: the talk-show host held all the correct and liberal attitudes Canadians are supposed to have on a variety of issues. Nobody has any serious disagreement with the consensus on peacekeeping, multiculturalism, or single payer healthcare.

However, the woman's mindset was fundamentally conservative. If she agreed with any of the Canadian shibboleths mentioned above, it was because she didn't like change, rather then whether or not any of these things were actually good or useful. Being a liberal, a conservative, a skeptic, or a believer is a state of mind or an approach to looking at the world, not a set of opinions about any given topic.

If James O'Keefe doesn't consciously understand this principle, I think he grasps it on an intuitive level. The nice nihilist in me enjoyed O'Keefe's recent video sting. So welcome to the club, Mr. O'Keefe: it's pretty exclusive, as very few people are like my wife, Seth McFarlane, Tommy Chong, and P.J. O'Rourke: genuinely funny, smart, sophistacted, handsome and or beautiful, well-read, and for the most part moderate, but having an admirable sympathy for the underdog and or downtrodden.

However, if you want to keep your membership and avoid becoming just another right-wing Michael Moore clone, I hope you realize that an anarchist can be quite comfortable in a Brooks Brothers suit, and still piss off the establishment, regardless of which petty troll is pulling the levers of the machinery.

Just ask Tommy Chong if you don't believe me.

The Apple & The Turtle

2009-08-31T22:54:00.006Z

Computers were, initially, a crushing disappointment. When our sixth grade teacher announced that I was one of the special few that had been chosen for the computer class, I was excited. The machines certainly looked better than what I’d seen on Star Trek. A monitor and keyboard encased in beige plastic certainly looked more futuristic than the big boxes with blinking lights that dotted the pop culture landscape.

But using those Apple II computers turned out to be nothing like what I’d seen on The Jetsons. The first couple of times that I made the little green triangle move across the screen were fun, but pushing it across the screen got progressively less and less interesting the more our little class of brainiacs did it.

And when our teacher tried to get the little robot to move in tandem with the “Turtle” on the screen, the results were…underwhelming. Our teacher spent most of the class racing back and forth between his computer and the twitching, humming, slow moving robot on the floor. Real-life computers and robots weren’t half as glamorous, or smart, as the ones I’d see on Astroboy after school.

When I found out that my friend (who had been deemed less intelligent) had spent an agreeable morning drawing and painting in an extended art class, I asked if I could drop out. However, quitting was not an option, according to my teacher. I was intelligent, resources were limited, and I should be more grateful for the opportunities presented to me.

Suitably chastened, I resumed spending most of computer class watching the teacher try to make the robot work its magic on the floor. Since then, I’ve taught my share of classes and I realize that Steve Jobs wasn’t the person responsible for the dull class. The blame for that can be placed entirely on the shoulders of our teacher, who probably hadn’t done adequate lesson planning.

All was not lost. The public sector of The People’s Republic of Saskatoba might have dropped the ball when it came to preparing me for a fun-filled future full of flying cars, holo decks, and replicants, but the private sector, in the form of my Dad, helped revive my flagging interest a few months later when he purchased, or started buying, the components of a Commodore 64.

Our family was one of limited means, so the purchase was made piecemeal. The keyboard was the first piece that we had. I hooked it up to the black and white television, and to my delight, discovered that I could make pictures with the keyboard. I started building little forts, tanks, cannons, and aircraft, and set about demolishing them using the delete and cursor keys.

It was certainly a lot more fun than watching the turtle move ever so slowly across the screen. And once we got the disk drive…oh, the wonderful mayhem I could unleash on the screen. Mom might have flipped out when she saw the X-Men cover where Storm was getting ready to stab some hapless evil mutant with a dagger, but I could strike down as many foes as I wanted to with a digital katana and I wouldn’t hear so much as a single objection from my mom.

Was really I learning anything about computers, though? I suppose, at the very least, that Commodore 64 taught me that computers wouldn’t bite. At best, Dad grasped on an intuitive level (and I learned from his example) that a desktop or a laptop represents better all-around value for money than a gaming platform.

As for that friend of mine whose intelligence was deemed insufficient enough to handle the challenges of computer class?

He is currently teaching high school chemistry.

Huck Finn

2009-08-16T02:26:00.005Z

Canoes are awful. I have fond memories of driving to and from fishing trips, but the actual fishing trips themselves...not so much. Out on the water I remember periods of blissful calm that were punctuated by frenzied moments of pure terror whenever we had the grave misfortune to catch a fish.

Dad, all six feet, two inches, and 220 pounds of him, would leap quite literally into action running and jumping up and down the length of our canoe, to grab the net and get the fish into the boat. He did all this while yelling, "Don't move! Don't move! You'll tip the boat".

I was, of course, petrified with fright, and clutched the gunwales of our little craft in abject horror at the thought of of being the one responsible for sinking our little ship. In hindsight, the only person who was going to drown us was the maniac I referred affectionately to as "Dad".

Rafts, and not canoes, as far as I was concerned at the time, were the only way to travel on a lake or river. Grandma Guppy had given me a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a gift, and I loved the adventures that Huck and Jim had on the mighty Mississippi. Gliding up and down the river using a pole sounded like heaven.

I finally got a chance to find out for myself what riding a raft would have been like. My sweetie pie and I went white water rafting in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania this afternoon. Our raft was made of rigid rubber, and we used paddles, but sustantively, it couldn't have been all that different from what Huck and Jim experienced: fast,bumpy, occasionally scary, and fun.

Fun for me, but I'm typing this at a bed and breakfast after a nice hot meal. Not so fun for Huck and Jim, travelling on that raft for days. I'm surprised they didn't commit suicide early in the novel - life on the raft would have been bumpy, damp, and miserable.

So a raft wouldn't have been quite the pimped out ride my eight year old imagination thought it would be. I'm just glad I've never had to paddle a canoe in my life. My Dad might have been a man of limited means, but he was also one of the most clever men I have ever known (or will know). Our canoe was sixteen feet long, made out of aluminum, and manufactured by Grumann. Dad was able to mount an outboard motor on the back of our craft.

Huck and Jim would have eaten our wake if we ever zipped by them on the Mississippi.

After the Hal Sparks Show at the Arlington Cinema N Drafthouse

2009-08-09T04:04:00.006Z

Me: Cool! Hal Sparks is a non-drinker just like me.

Sweetie: That's right. Penn Jillette, Hal Sparks and you could have a party. A party with no drinking or smoking. A very boring party with just the three of you.

4 Colors

2009-08-08T05:50:00.006Z

Browsing through the shelves of comic books at Tramp's Records and Books was an eye opener. I was all of thirteen, and comic books were becoming works of art. Companies had just started printing some comic books on fancy paper. At first blush, it was a counter-intuitive gesture. Funny books were for kids. What was the point of printing them on expensive paper?

It was clearly a move to price impressionable adolescents like myself out of the market. I loved looking at all those comic books printed on glossy paper. Frequently, they had naked people in them, or the writer would drop the f-bomb.

However, there was no way I could buy a comic book like that and bring it home. Some friends of mine had unwittingly discovered a means to hide comic books from their parents: their collection was so huge, there was no way their parents would stumble upon the "adult" graphic novels buried underneath the pile of tamer fare.

Unfortunately, I didn't have their purchasing power, so I had to confine my appreciation to the store shelves or leafing through the stuff my friends had hidden within plain sight in their homes. There was another reason for the expensive paper. If I opened up a book like Blood: A Tale with artwork by Kent Williams, that slick paper made perfect sense. Watercolors wouldn't look so good on newsprint:

Over the years, comic book companies started to print everything on slick, glossy, and very expensive stock. My interest in comic books started to wane as they got more expensive. I'd initially chalked up my dislike of the pricier paper to a misplaced sense of latent artistic elitism.

But paging through the copy of Blood: A Tale that I bought for Lisa made me realize that my distaste for the more glossy offset or stiffly starched baxter paper had nothing to do with cultural conservatism. Ninety percent of the time, better paper doesn't do anything for the artwork.

Take any panel, or page from Sin City by Frank Miller, and it's going to look just as good on newsprint or fancy paper. It's all ink, and done in very simple and bold lines:

Nothing is lost if it gets printed on newsprint, and nothing of value is added to the artwork. But it doesn't have to be simple. Dave Sim and Gerhard brought an almost Baroque level of complexity to the artwork for Cerebus the Aardvark, but the art never suffered because it was printed on cheap paper:

Slick paper is here to stay, at least until Jeff Bezos can figure out a way to make comic books readable on the Kindle. As for myself, I'm just glad I have the purchasing power to buy whatever I want, and more importantly, have a wife who enjoys reading comic books as much as I do.

N.B.: If the Cerebus artwork doesn't look so good, believe me, it's a blog--not a newsprint--issue.

Fett's El Camino

2009-07-30T23:10:00.008Z

The Millenium Falcon is really a van. A van with a wizard airbrushed on the side. There are hot babes wearing chainmail bikinis clutching the wizard’s knees. And I don’t care what the song says. Fett’s ride would have been an El Camino. With flames painted on the side. And the car’s horn would play “La Chucharacha” every time he hit it. ‘Cause that’s how the Fett Man would have rolled, baby.

While Boba Fett’s earthbound ride would have been pretty pimpin', when I think about it, his actual choice of spaceship was kind of…retarded. I’ve been working on a model of the Slave I, and if the model and movies are correct, the ship takes off and lands horizontally, but flies vertically.

Think about it. The most deadly, dangerous, bounty hunter in the galaxy lies prone on his back staring up at the sky for a few minutes every time his ship lands or takes off. This would give any enemies a perfect window of opportunity to blow him to kingdom come while he struggles to get into or out of his seat.

I’m definitely not the first person to have noticed this flaw, as the good people at Lucasfilm have come up with a half-assed explanation of sorts. If the manufacturer was clever enough to build a spaceship, surely they would have been smart enough to recognize this design flaw in the first place?

Painting the Slave I and the Boba Fett figurine has been labor intensive, but fun. Since nobody is going to see much of the interior anyway, I’m trying to use as many different shades of gray as possible, even though the instructions want me to spray paint pretty much everything one shade of gray, with little touches of black thrown in.

Working with spray paint is a lot of fun. It’s a shame that law abiding, suburban youth--not unlike my considerably younger self--aren’t introduced to this wonderful medium. I spent countless hours in class, filling up loose leaf and defacing binders and textbooks with silly doodles when a much more worthwhile art project was literally parked right under my ass.

I had, in grade seven, a very cool ride: a chopper bicycle. Or rather, it would have been cool if it had been the late seventies. It was the late eighties, and everybody had a BMX. I, on the other hand, was pulling into the school bike rack perched on a banana seat, and getting teased mercilessly for it.

It was a shame I wasn’t a little more confident at the time. That bike had everything: mud guards, high-rise handlebars, and a sissy bar on the back. I’ve long since forgotten, and don’t really care about the taunts. The one thing I do regret is not pushing the envelope with that bike.

The paint had begun to fade, and repainting the bike might have taught me a useful skill. Even if I botched the job, spray painting the bike in a bright, day-glo color would have been fun, and the visual equivalent of a large, upraised middle finger to any classmate who thought my bike looked lame.

I’d like to think that’s what the Fett Man would have done, if he were in junior high school.

Update, Extreme Geeking Edition

For all you Sealab 2021 fans out there, Rocky sent me this message and a link: Hesh = M.C. Chris

Me Am So Smart

2009-07-25T05:39:00.008Z

Every single time I've used watercolor pencils with a fountain pen, I've smeared ink all over the place and wrecked the drawing I was working on. I couldn't figure out how Graham Roumieu, the author of In Me Own Words, Me Write Book, Bigfoot: I Not Dead did his water color renderings of Bigfoot without smearing the ink.

I was doing a sketch of one of his Bigfoot illustrations, and looking closely at the watercolors, it hit me: he did the watercolor first, AND THEN he drew over it in ink.

I tried it. And whaddya know. It does work!

Or, after seeing this video, maybe I need to go back to the drawing board...

Update: An anonymous commenter was kind enough to point me in the direction of ink that won't smear when used with watercolors.

Dungeons, Dragons, & Brokers

2009-07-24T21:10:00.004Z

The lead miniatures that were sold at the hobby store looked really cool. I didn’t have a clue as to how to paint one. They were so tiny. I left mine, a paladin, unfinished, and never gave a second thought to painting it. On the few occasions that I played Dungeons & Dragons, I’d put it on the table and stare at it, sliding it back and forth across the table.

The little metal sculptures were a source of endless fascination, done in a medium, lead, that I was unfamiliar with, and had a slightly greater range of subject matter and detail than I was used to. My experience with sculpture up to that point had been confined to toys like G.I. Joe figures (plastic), Royal Dalton Figurines (porcelain), Saints (plaster, and occasionally plastic), and Jesus (wood, plaster, brass, plastic or various combinations thereof).

Mom didn’t want me to play Dungeons & Dragons, but in the end, she shouldn’t have wasted any time worrying about it. Not unlike my classes in school, I found it hard to stay focused on the game. Role playing games went over my head, because at their heart, RPGs are a collective and co-operative enterprise.

While collecting comic books and playing RPGs frequently go hand in hand, I probably represented the extreme end of the comic book collector bell curve: equal parts bibliophile and pseudo-speculator. Collecting comic books, for me, at that particular point in time, was a highly individualistic and speculative endeavor.

Living in the People’s Republic of Saskatoba, I had no idea what a libertarian, let alone an anarcho-capitalist was, but I brought a Monopoly mindset to what should have been a communal endeavor. I was more focused on acquiring gold, weapons, and magic objects for my character than whatever the hell it was the Dungeon Master was trying to get us to do.

More importantly, it was hard to relate to the games on an aesthetic level. I know that there are many different kinds of RPGs but at the beginner level, it’s all about Dungeons & Dragons, which relies heavily on Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft for its mythology.

I’d read stuff like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy which mined the same fictional vein as Howard and Lovecraft before I tried Dungeons & Dragons, but Bilbo and Frodo never had a hold on my imagination in quite the same way that Superman, Han Solo, Captain Kirk, Indiana Jones, and Tom Sawyer did.

Apart from the aforementioned miniatures, the games didn’t have much in the way of visual appeal either. While the cover art for the game boxes, player manuals, and novelizations invariably “popped,” inspired, in part, by Boris Vallejo or Frank Frazetta, the black and white illustrations contained within were invariably…crude and stiff. The RPG manuals and character sheets had all the charm and warmth of a school textbook and worksheet.

On the other hand, comic books were a riot of color and frenzied activity. And the late eighties were a good time to be a comic book collector, especially if you were willing to go off the beaten path and sample what the horror, humor, war and crime genres had to offer.

But that’s a story for another day…

Pimp My Tie Fighter

2009-07-18T03:27:00.003Z

The Tie Fighter is the first Star Wars model I should have built. It's easy to paint. In fact, it is a little too easy. Everything is so monochrome, nothing but different shades of gray and black. I'm trying to liven up the cockpit a bit. I'm painting the seat tan, and the control column silver.

The model company should include more optional accessories and decals in these kits. I'd feel more free to pimp out these Star Wars models if the X-wing came with Bomber Girl fuselage art, or if there was some itty bitty fuzzy dice for the Tie Fighter.

Blue Sparks

2009-07-16T01:26:00.004Z

Sparks. Blue sparks. Maybe, the sparks were green. The sparks could have been blue and green. It has been years since I’ve read Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, but those sparks made smoking cigars seem like magic. Cigars that had been soaked in rum or brandy. The secret to not getting sick, at least according to the narrator Leonard Neeble (or was it the eponymous character himself who advanced the claim), was chewing bubble gum while smoking the cigar.

I never got to test the theory. Apart from an abortive attempt with ragweed when I was thirteen, I didn’t experiment with smoking until I was in university. I can’t remember my first cigarette, but I can remember my first cigar. Living north of the border at the time, I was able to purchase a Cuban – I believe it was a Romeo Y Julieta – for my inaugural experience with that noxious weed.

It was awful, but not in the way one would have expected. My Dad is the worst kind of non-smoker – an ex-smoker – so I didn’t want him to find out what I’d been up to. I tried to smoke it out on the patio, but that cold prairie wind made lighting the thing difficult, if not impossible. I don’t know if I ever got it properly lit. It was dry, and relatively flavorless, and after a few puffs I was bored and cold. So I stubbed it out, went back inside, and brushed my teeth very carefully. I might as well have rolled up the five dollar bill I used to purchase the cigar itself and smoked that instead, for all the good it did.

I’ve smoked cigarettes, but they’ve never held the same iconic fascination that cigars hold for me. Leonard Neeble, Allie Fox, Howard the Duck, P.J. O’Rourke, H.L. Mencken, Groucho Marx, George Burns, Bill Cosby, George Peppard, Dirk Benedict, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood, James Gandolfini, and Wendell Pierce – the cigar has a full nelson on my imagination that a cigarette will never have. A cigar is more than just a cultural statement though, and while I’ve smoked my share of cigarettes, they’ve never really become a habit for me.

A cigarette is kind of like a potato chip. You can’t have just one, and chips are a snack, not a meal. Any cravings that I have might have been placated, but they will return shortly, and with a vengeance. A cigar is like the steak that gets served at Mortons. I can order the baked potato with the steak if I want to, but there really isn’t any point. Once I’ve finished that steak, I’m done. And I feel fine.

It isn’t just the cigar itself that makes smoking so much fun. The accessories help enhance the experience. Humidors are probably the most important thing to own, next to the actual cigar itself. Nothing brings out the flavor of a cigar quite like a humidor. I’ve smoked my share of Cuban cigars in Canada and Japan, but they’ve never been quite as memorable or enjoyable (albeit very satisfactory, as most cigars are) as the every-country-except-Cuba cigars that I’ve stashed for a week or two or three in a humidor here.

The other missing part of the accessories equation is the means by which the cigar is lit. I know that some connoisseurs would frown on the practice, but for me, I like the retro charm of firing up a stogie with a Zippo. However, with someone who smokes as infrequently as I do, there is just one catch: the Zippo doesn’t hold a charge.

Nic and I were out on the balcony, and I had just broken out the cigars that I had been saving in the humidor for the last three weeks. But I couldn’t light the cigar because all the fuel in this masterpiece, this classic of American design and engineering had…evaporated. If I were a regular smoker, I don’t think this design flaw in the Zippo would ever have become apparent, but it was cruelly driven home to me that evening.

All was not lost. Nic had the foresight to bring a torch with him, and we puffed away on the Tabak Especial Balada Coffee infusion cigars he had purchased in Texas. After all, regardless of how the cigar is stored, or lit, or for that matter where it was grown, or how much it cost, as Freud once noted, a good cigar is a smoke.

Books That I Enjoyed Paging Through in Libraries and Bookstores, But Have Not Read From Cover To Cover Until Now

2009-07-06T22:18:00.009Z

The official picture posted online doesn’t do the building any justice. One of the first places my parents took us to in Winnipeg was the St. Vital Library. At the time, it looked the way I thought a library should look. It was all brick on the outside, and had winding staircases and rooms crammed with shelves of books on the inside. For some reason, I’ve always remembered it as a whimsical, gingerbread-gothic hybrid, all cupolas and gables, designed by some lovable, eccentric, and unknown local architect.

The building clearly isn’t a miniature Smithsonian, but rather something a little bit more modern. The quirkiness of the design itself can be chalked up to unusual shape of the property that the library was built on, and not just the whimsy of some lovable eccentric. And that anonymous architect has a name: George A. Stewart. So the building is a little bit more prosaic (though still something of an underrated local landmark) than I remembered it, but that isn’t terribly important.

What really matters is the world of education, enlightened ideas, and imagination that the City of Winnipeg opened up for a young boy who had blown his allowance on comic books, slurpees, and video games, and had nothing better to do with his time. Dickens, Zola, Descartes, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Ginsberg, Shakespeare, Proust, Locke, Marx, Tolstoy and Hegel: a feast for the mind, and all free of charge.

Hegel was, well, I’d seen his name referenced in a back issue of Howard the Duck, and it took me all of one sentence to realize that Hegel wasn’t my cup of tea. Stephen King showed much more promise than any of those dead boring guys. The book that got me interested in his work was Cycle of the Werewolf. On my frequent visits to the library, I’d take it off the shelf, flip through the book, admire the beautiful illustrations by Berni Wrightson, and occasionally read a line or two from the text itself.

The only part of the story I read in its entirety was the chapter where the fat chick gets chewed up by the werewolf. Was Mr. King such a master of terror that I couldn’t bear to read the book? With all due respect to Mr. King, that wasn’t the issue. I certainly didn’t have any problems reading Christine, The Tommyknockers, or The Running Man. However, for whatever reason, I enjoyed paging through the novel, but never read it.

Cycle of the Werewolf wasn’t the only book that I’d leaf through and enjoy, but never actually read. This is a pattern that has repeated itself with all the books written by my favorite authors. I thumbed through The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test at the library and owned a used paperback of The Right Stuff, both written by Tom Wolfe, for years before reading either title, despite the fact that I enjoyed reading Bonfire of the Vanities. Before I even knew who P.J. O’Rourke was, I’d paged through National Lampoon’s 1964 High School Yearbook parody on many different occasions in the humor section of the bookstore, but it didn’t occur to me to actually read the thing until Rugged Land reissued it in 2003.

Of course, once I got around to actually reading these titles, I wished I had read them sooner. I thought I’d worked my way through that list until I had a conversation with my sweetie, and I mentioned that Cycle of the Werewolf was one King novel I hadn’t read, even though I’d enjoyed looking at those Berni Wrightson illustrations for years. About a week later, a first edition of the trade paperback arrived in the mail – it had even been signed by Berni Wrightson. The colors popped, and Wrightson’s line work seemed even more detailed and ornate than I remembered it.

Of course, the book sat on my shelf for a few weeks. I’d pick it up, flip through it, and admire Wrightson’s illustrations. I even read the part where the fat chick gets eaten by the werewolf. But I didn’t start reading it from start until finish. Until last night. I couldn’t get to sleep, and I started reading it, beginning with January. I made it all the way to May, and I’m going to finish it when I get home from work tonight.

It’s so good, in fact, that I wish I had read it sooner.

My Andy Warhol: An American Valentine

2009-07-04T22:47:00.013Z

Dad was a performance artist. I hadn't even heard of the word when I was seven, let alone known what it meant, but if Dad wasn't a bona fide, dues-paying member of that body fluid spraying tribe, then I don't know the meaning of the term. I can remember Dad settling a bet with a next door neighbor, and he cut him a check.

But not just any check. Dad got a big piece of poster sized bristol board, a sharpie marker, and a ruler, and got down to business. Mr. Deutscher even cashed that bristol board check, although I don't think the bank was too happy about having to honor it, but honor it they did.

Which is a long, very roundabout way of saying that if I have even the smallest spark of creativity in me, it probably comes from my father. Unfortunately enough for Canada, that sort of creativity didn't attract a lot of media attention on the Canadian prairies during the eighties. Nor did it pay the bills. Dad had to work full time at a discount clothing retailer to do that. Art was just something he did, unconsciously, on the side.

On the other hand, if you happened to be Andy Warhol, and you lived in New York, art was something you could do very consciously, full time as a matter of fact, and not only pay the bills, but make even more money than what a Canadian discount retailer could ever dream of making. Not only that, but your death would attract considerable media attention.

I don't think I really knew or understood what the difference between Canada and the USA was until I watched that CBC documentary on Andy Warhol. I'd never given any thought to where I would live when I was older, let alone where I wanted to live. But after watching that tribute to Andy Warhol, I knew that Saskatchewan wouldn't cut it. The images and, ironically, the music ("Andy Warhol" by David Bowie was playing in a continuous loop during the documentary) and the lifestyle, well, it was as far away from Claude Langevin landscapes, potato salad, paper mills, and guys wearing Iron Maiden t-shirts as geek could get in those days.

At this point, I should say that all this occurred during the eighties. There were no two-hour waits to see a GP at a Canadian hospital and, despite the slightly higher unemployment rate, I suspect that those who gainfully employed could have counted on a level of job security that an American probably couldn't be certain of. Pinkie (especially the Canadian variety) brains routinely got their panties in a bunch about Ronald Reagan wanting to destroy the world. New York was an ungovernable hellhole, and American manufacturing had seen much better days. Living in Saskatchewan or Manitoba wouldn't, and in fact shouldn't, have been such an unattractive option.

But unattractive it had become. Being a Mad magazine reader, I was well aware of all of America's negatives, but there was something so much more magnetic about our neighbors to the south. I might have gotten Andy Warhol's paintings confused with Ray Lichtenstein's canvasses, but the point is they both popped in a way that a Group of Seven poster never could. Even during what everybody thought was a decline in American influence, the culture still had more energy and vitality than everybody else. And I wanted to be a part of it.

And I would become a part of it, quite literally, as I currently live quite happily in Alexandria, Virginia with my beautiful California girl. However, I think being an American is as much of a state of mind as it is about living in an actual physical location, and I hadn't quite reached that stage yet. Andy Warhol was going to help me get there.

It was easy enough to look at picture of Frank Zappa, and say, "Cool man:"

And then see a picture of Gordon Lightfoot and snicker, "How lame:"

But it's a little harder, at least when you're worried about slipping a rung or two further down the socio-economic ladder, to embrace Kid Rock, at least in all his bizarre, hedonistic, let your freak-flag fly high glory:

Ella Fitzgerald and alt-rock were what I believed to be the more socially acceptable musical options, but I did have my go to hell moments. For my money, I prefer the lesser-known work of Vaughn Bode, to the more high-brow stuff produced by Robert Crumb. I've always had an affection for the works of P.J. O'Rourke and Tom Wolfe, but there was a time when I'd have explained my interest in Stephen King as nothing more than junk reading.

I don't want to come off as some reverse-snob, pissing on somebody's high-brow tastes just to justify some of my low-brow tastes. As a matter of fact, I don't really see it as high- or low-brow anymore, it's all just part of one big, beautiful... no-brow. The highs and lows can't exist without each other, and the best way to appreciate either extreme is to embrace the other side with equal vigor.

And that's what I love about living down here. I love that go to hell ethic, like the colors in a silk screen by Andy Warhol. It took me awhile to appreciate it. I had my own hang-ups about slipping further down the socio-economic ladder, but I managed to get glimpses of that freedom, of just liking something for the hell of it, and not giving a fuck what anybody really thought.

The first time I saw Takashi Murakami's artwork was in 1997, in South Korea. I couldn't read hangul, so I didn't know who he was. I couldn't play the status game, one-upping my imagined betters. I just liked those paintings, statues, and big balloon installations because... the colors "popped," like Warhol, and Murakami was riffing off the Japanese anime I'd grown up with as a boy and young adult. It was brilliant. I didn't know why, or even how, but I knew it was... beautiful.

It took awhile, but that was where it all began. I couldn't articulate it at the time, but it was the first time that I realized that there was nothing wrong with what I liked. I already knew it was okay to like William Faulkner and Ella Fitzgerald, but it was also okay to embrace The Cramps and Stephen King. Andy Warhol was great, but so were Playboy and the illustrations in Stephen King novels. I was raised just as much on the latter, even if my parents didn't know it, and it was artistically every bit as valid as what Warhol was doing. In fact, I'm sure that it is what Andy had been trying to tell me along. Once I learned how to say, "Fuck it. I don't care what anybody thinks," I knew I would be happiest living in the USA.

So thank you, Andy, for the inspiration. Despite the best efforts of the Canadian media, pinkie-brains north and south of the Canadian/US border, brain dead politicians (with D's or R's behind their names), and the Wagon Queen Family Truckster, I've found a place to live - and thrive - that I love like no other.

Me & Malvina

2009-06-27T19:18:00.015Z

Weeds stopped using "Little Boxes" as its introductory theme song and opted for a cold intro last season. I think it was a sound decision. I prefer the pithy visual puns, and "Little Boxes" has to be one of the most smug, self-righteous, sanctimonious songs ever written.

I didn't always feel this way about Malvina Reynolds's, ugh, classic. Dad loves the Pete Seeger cover version, and I'm certain the first time I heard it was on the drive back home from a fishing trip with my father. Later, in university, I thought the bit about how "the system" forces us to conform and become "lawyers and doctors and business executives" quite clever and perceptive.

However, working summers in a warehouse convinced me that being a lawyer, an accountant, a doctor, or a business executive wasn't such a bad thing. If someone has the moxie and discipline to put themselves through school and become an architect or engineer, only an asshat would mock them for it. Despite my mercifully short stint in the blue collar trenches, I still retained some residual affection for the song. After all, nobody really likes a McMansion, no matter how hard the owner worked for it, right?

Maybe. Although I still had pleasant memories of fishing trips and sympathized with the class warfare angle (those lawyers might be rich, but they have no taste, ha-ha) I didn't fully appreciate what a douchebag Malvina Reynolds was until I saw this photo:

Malvina Reynolds is a soulless, bloodless, ~~"political activist"~~ freak. The houses are by no means "ticky tacky". They were built out of red wood, which is apparently one of the most durable woods that can be used in construction. As for the "boxes" charge, these are the kind of suburban homes latte sipping, Prius driving, urban hipsters would throw their own Grandmas under a Hummer to own.

In other words, these are creative, attractive homes to live in. It's not just the fact that there are X number of floor plans that can be combined in any number of Y different ways. Look at all the angles and cantilevers on the homes. It's straight out of Frank Lloyd Wright. The design is done in a fundamentally modern, American idiom. Why any self-styled "creative" person would want to mock it is puzzling to me. Malvina Reynolds is nothing more than a philistine for heaping scorn on the architects and the developer that built this development.

Look at the shriveled old bat:

It's not that hard to imagine someone like Malvina being taken on a tour of some Xenuawful concrete monstrosity of a Cuban or Soviet apartment complex and clapping her hands with childish glee upon seeing the communal kitchen or hearing that the happy workers only have to walk or bike two miles to the nearest bus stop.

But middle class people in America looking for a nice, affordable home? They can go fuck themselves as far as Marvina Reynolds is concerned. The architect who drafted the plans for these houses doesn't get any credit for his creativity from Malvina either, although some commie hack probably got a blow job of a "folk song" for his concrete abomination, if Malvina Reynolds ever visited the USSR or Cuba. And brainiacs like Malvina Reynolds profess astonishment when Ayn Rand's novels are embraced as classics by the masses in America???

So, Malvina Reynolds, you, like your hero, Karl Marx, can go suck it. As for me, I'm putting Little Boxes: The Architecture of a Classic Mid-century Suburb by Rob Keil on my reading list.

Geek Bling

2009-06-26T01:25:00.007Z

Rocky had the coolest watches. Nice, retro digital watches: one was a Fossil, and the other one was ordered directly from the maker online. Very bling, very geek chic. At the time, I was still under the thrall of the WASP credo that a watch should be understated.

Which was kind of retarded, now that I think about it. It's easy to be "modest" and wear a plain Timex when the cuff links you're wearing were inherited from your grandfather. But for those of us without the benefit of a trust fund - a category to which I most definitely belong - next to our wedding bands, watches are probably the nicest, and only really acceptable pieces of jewelery most men get to wear.

Thanks to Rocky's inspirational example, I've been wearing big, chunky metal time pieces strapped to my wrist for the last five years. However, until last week, I didn't have the courage to follow his more fashion forward example. That changed, when I saw the Projects Iridium Watch.

Since I check my Blackberry constantly, watches have become more jewelry than timepieces for me. Accuracy is not an issue with this watch. It's a simple design, but I like how the blank white face "pops" because there are no hands visible on the face, just the red and blue dots moving beneath the face of the watch.

While I do love this watch, I don't like the fact that the wristband is attached with screws to the case. Pins would have been appreciated. This is the kind of watch that would look great with a grosgrain strap, but that is no longer an option due to the difficulty of removing those tiny screws.

Which is a shame, because when I saw this online, I knew I had to have it. Next time I see another clever timepiece from Projects, I'll think twice about the purchase because of that odd design quirk.

Red Squadron

2009-06-19T23:50:00.003Z

Putting glue on the little plastic pieces of a model and sticking them together is the easy part. Actually painting all those itty bitty parts is the big challenge. Masking tape and tweezers help. And that black paint that got mixed in with the red paint? It adds realism to the X-Wing fighter. Now it looks like it has seen battle against a whole squadron of Tie-Fighters.

Bikini Girls With Machine Guns

2009-06-19T01:59:00.017Z

James Ellroy once said (and I'm quoting from memory), "Don't write about what you know. Write about what you like to read." It's good advice, and if I'd followed it when I was younger, this blog post could have been a comic strip.

When I was in junior high school, I loved comic books, and I liked drawing. The classroom was my studio, my binders and the lined paper within a canvas, a Bic ball point pen was my brush, and the various denizens of the Marvel and DC Universe were my inspiration.

For some bizarre reason, I also enjoyed drawing punk rockers with large mohawks. I'd seen a review of the bio-pic "Sid & Nancy" on television, and although I was surrounded by legions of hair metal headbangers, my heart beat in solidarity with the punks. Workingclass London toughs and New York City hoodlums trump Canuckistani Beavis and Butthead everytime.

I was probably more Jean-Michel Basquiat than Leonardo Da Vinci, but what else was a young boy living in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan supposed to do? Certainly not pay attention to the teacher droning on in front of the class.

My parents, who either wanted to encourage their budding Keith Haring, or at the very least get their little brat to stop destroying his school supplies, bought me a sketchbook and some charcoals for Christmas. This had the unintended effect of killing off any desire to be an artist on my part, although I did stop defacing my binders.

Of course, my parents weren't to blame for strangling any artistic sensibilities in the cradle. Their gift opened my eyes: until then I had no idea what a difference the right tools could make. A Bic on a maroon vinyl binder cover just couldn't give me the same results as charcoal on heavy bleached white paper stock. Ironically, it was the very comic books that inspired me to do sketches on any flat surface that put a stake in the heart of any desire I had to draw.

I'd read the letter columns of my favorite comic books (I was a weird kid, and there ain't a lot to do if you're raised to be a devout Catholic in Manitoba) and the advice from editors, writers, and the artists themselves was the same: anyone who wanted to be a pro shouldn't use comic books as their only artistic model

It was good advice...of a sort. I'd agree that if an artist isn't careful, he can end up drawing a lot like Rob Liefield, who has obviously spent a lot of time drawing boobs, boobs, and more boobs:

And not much else. Adam Hughes draws beautiful tits:

But one of the reasons why the tits are so spectacular is that the hands look pretty good too. And hands are a lot harder to draw than a pair of breasts.

Combine it with a general appreciation of the human chest in all its permutations (see the Justice League cover at the top of this post), and it's no wonder that Hughes can make an easy living as a cover artist while Robert Liefield, well, I don't think that Obama would want to hang this in the Oval Office:

Still, as a neophyte just starting out, ray-guns, dinosaurs, and bikini babes with machine guns would have been better practice than using coffee cups and the tree in my backyard. The latter are boring, and even when done fairly well, are never quite as satisfactory to draw, initially anyway, as an alien blob getting ready to chow down on some little green men.

And if the boring sketch of dull everyday objects doesn't pan out, the process quickly becomes one great big cycle of negative reinforcement. By the time I got to university, I'd given up drawing everything, except for the occasional spiral in the margins of my notebook. There were a few coughs and splutters of artistic activity, but by my late twenties any interest I had in putting pencil to paper in a non-verbal capacity had died out.

But the story doesn't quite end there. My muse and I were buying some games for our nephew at a Toys 'r Us, and she suggested that we purchase a copy of The Boy's Guide to Drawing for myself. After one very happy month of drawing aliens from the book almost every day, I've hit a wall on one robot I've been trying to sketch. I can't nail the right perspective on a pair of tank treads that I'm trying to draw.

I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet. My brother-in-law has some "How to Draw in Perspective" manual that is gathering dust on his bookshelf. I flipped through it a year ago, and thought it looked pretty dry, but it is starting to look a lot more interesting now. How else am I going to learn how to draw the best bikini girls with machine guns this side of Adam Hughes?

And Step On It!

2009-06-17T11:02:00.007Z

Crystal meth vending machines: I'm okay with the idea. Back in the day, when I grew my hair down to my shoulders and struggled to get through The Communist Manifesto (all forty miserable, tedious, soul-crushing pages of it) I would have snorted and dismissed the idea. Now, even though I wouldn't use them myself, I don't think they would be such a bad idea.

Part of the credit (or blame) for this change of heart can be laid directly at the feet of P.J. O'Rourke. During my senior year of high school, I thought that he was funny, but there was no way his ideas could work in the real world. I still think he is funny, ten years later, and now I think he might be on to something with that whole unfettered capitalism thing. If it's one thing a Commie or a Christian hates, it is the idea that someone out there might be enjoying themselves.

All of which is a roundabout and extremely tangential way of saying that I'm really enjoying O'Rourke's latest book, Driving Like Crazy. Reading the introduction to his latest collection of articles, I remembered the reason why I was originally drawn to his work in the first place: he can argue, effectively, for ideas that I thought I would never seriously entertain. In this instance, that American automobiles are, or were, the best designed and engineered cars on the planet.

I don't know enough about cars to judge whether or not P.J. O'Rourke's arguments are correct. But that is really besides the point. It's nice to read authors with whom I agree. However, it takes a lot of talent to hold someone's interest when the author is writing about a subject the reader is unfamiliar with, and goes against what he thought was the commonly accepted wisdom on the subject.

Thanks to recent advances in medical treatment, I'm sure I'll be enjoying O'Rourke's cheerful brand of iconoclasm for years to come. And despite his answer to my question about his plans to write a memoir about his days at The National Lampoon, I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope he changes his mind about that firm "No" he gave me.

As for Karl Marx: you, sir, can go suck it.