Weekend Video: Comic Book Heaven

I promise you this is not a sad documentary.


Comic Book Heaven from E.J. McLeavey-Fisher on Vimeo.

Seriously. Not sad.

I had a filling installed this week. I went to my new dentist a week ago or so, and he said, "we should take care of that. It's small now, and should be pretty easy. Come in next week."

So I came in next week, and I got it taken care of. He was not the first, or even the second, dentist to tell me to come in and get that taken care of. I do not have dentist anxiety. Have I mentioned that, in my household, "a trip to the dentist," is an idiom for an idea that sounds like a good idea, but really is more like a pain to get through?

Anyway.

The family of numbing agents related to Novocain don't work so well for me, and I have unusually hard enamel. That's what they tell me about my enamel. I don't need to be told the numbing agent isn't working. I can figure that out for myself. And I'm sitting there in the chair, and it's tilted way back, and I have my hands stuck in my pockets to keep my wallet from falling out, and the dentist gives me a little topical, and then gives me a shot of something, and then comes back four minutes later.

I don't know how long I'm there, but only about three songs play on the radio overhead, and we're done.

And that experience at the dentist is a sadder story than this documentary about Comic Book Heaven.

Weekend Video: "Five Second Story: Autumn"

The end of summer is right around the corner. I can feel it in the wind, and smell it in the forests around here. Because the world is tilted. So enjoy a very short short video called "Five Second Story: Autumn."


Five Second Story: Autumn from Vincent Lammers on Vimeo.

Tilted makes the world go. Around here, anyway. Other places? Maybe not so much. 

Autumn will be here before you know it. Watch out for critters bonking around.

Ba-da-dahm-dahm!

I've been watching The Rockford Files lately during nap time. It's a good way to keep the laundry going, and I can bring it up on the tablet when doing dishes.

It's a good show for being made aware of how much things have changed. For instance, holy cow there are a lot of pay phones. They're everywhere! And a lot of kinds of booths, and mounts. A lot of design work went into phone kiosks, back when everyone used pay phones.

I've also been interested by just how many things we take for granted were already in the air in the mid-1970's. Season 4 is a big one for almost-weekly "A Very Special..." theme episodes where things revolve around Making A Point about racism, sexism, ageism (!), and so on. 

Season 5 toned down the "everything this time is about the Theme" aspects of it, but layered in cultural references. There have been a couple of episodes so far where the central character is a successful business woman. In one, we were lead to expect her to be the villain, but she was just hard-driving. In the other, she was the victim but self-absorbed. But it's the small things, details that could be one way, but were another, or could even be left unaddressed. 

The one I keep coming back to is a second-tier character in a murder about... oh, it's The Rockford Files, so it doesn't really matter, the story is convoluted. But this second-tier character is nicknamed Captain Crunch, and when Rockford asks someone about him, he's asked if he's planning to make some long distance phone calls. It's 1978, and what could be an easy-to-digest cops-n-robbers show is making casual references to underground system hacking. It was big news as far back as 1971, when John Draper (the real-world phreaker called Captain Crunch) was quoted in an Esquire article. 

But it's still, even in a world with only three TV networks and an active magazine culture, it's a fairly obscure thing to just toss into the story for no good plot reason. So anyway. In addition be being full of high-speed car chases, laconic pacing, and folksy charms, it's a show papered over in a strange sort of timeless contemporaneousness. 

200 Words on Modern Dentistry

I have a dentist appointment later today. It's my first trip to this person. I wasn't really very happy with where I was going to before. It's a practice, with a flashy name, and no pattern for which of the staff dentists I was going to see. The last time I was there they took my blood pressure. The cuff hurt, and when I mentioned this, the whoever-but-not-a-dentist said that it does that. So that's when I decided to find a new dentist. Ideally, a dentist whose name is on the door.

We'll see how it goes. The previous practice seems to be an exemplar of a family idiom we have, "a trip to the dentist." As in, "Hey, that sounds like a trip to the dentist!" Which means an idea that sounds good a good idea, but really isn't a good idea at all. I mean, it's not a bad idea, just more unpleasant than fun. Like the Unpleasant:Fun ratio exceeds 1.

On the other hand, when I leave the dentist, I like the way my teeth feel, except for the residual polish grit. That's when I get a drive through cheeseburger.

Also: I have very hard teeth. 

Weekend Video: hadopelagic

I like the loopy, bulbous, somewhat wormy look in action here. I like it a lot. I'm also a fan of the color palate. On the whole, I think it looks great.


hadopelagic from kanahebi on Vimeo.

And just because they're coming for you doesn't mean they're not so cute about it!

Have a great weekend. I'll mostly be celebrating our son's birthday.

More Charlie? A Newly published chapter from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!?!

Here's some news from The Guardian. 

Or, sort of, not really news? 

It's the 50th anniversary of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and a new edition of the book is out, and a chapter from an early draft, but not included in the final book, is available.

It's always great to have more Roald Dahl available, so yay for us! 

Also: it's just a draft; it's short, and--crucially--it wasn't included in the final book. So what do we take from it. I think if we take anything more from it than the simple pleasure of a few more paragraphs of that wild, cruel, fantastical world, then we're committing some sort of literary overdraft. It's just a bit of fluff, it doesn't tell us anything new about the book we have, or give us anything reason to reconsider what we have already decided about the book. It's not apocrypha. It's noodling around with some ideas that either didn't make the cut, or got adapted and integrated into the book we have in some other way.

Of course, there is so much in that little chapter to enjoy, and wonder at, that I'm now ready to pull my copy of the book down from the shelf for a quick re-read.

And if some newly exposed material sends readers back to this remarkable work, then what else does it really have to be?

200 Words on Comic Books

My relationship with comic books is fraught! I can't hardly stand it! They're art, you see.

Comic books are literature, and they're graphic arts. They're stories to divert, and myths to edify. They're genre, they're media, they're artifacts of the times. They document, reflect, and they hope. They make people into eye candy. They glorify violence, and they parody glory. They satirize pedestals, and build them.

They take our money, and then ask to be stuffed into plastic bags, hoping someday to repay our wallets. They take our love, our dedication to the stories we love, and every few years change the rules, destroy the universe, and ask us to fall in love with those people all over again for the very first time. Then we wonder if all those people we cared so much about in our past, for good or ill, are still worth that effort. Like people from high school, or college, or past jobs, these comic book people pull at our hearts.

Comic books are more than super heroes, and some of my favorites are, for instance, non-continuity titles. Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children. Brought to Light. Grey.

Comic books. Difficult to love, like buttery escargot.

Weekend Video: Dripped

Sometimes creating things is a hunger you just can't avoid.

Dripped from ChezEddy on Vimeo.

And sometimes the art you create is wildly different from what you set out to do.

Coming Soon! The World is Bigger than an Ell

"The World is Bigger than an Ell" is in final review for submission to the e-pub platforms! I'm very excited. The cover art just came back from the artist Stephen Brom, and I am very pleased. I feel the art and text design each reflect the theme and central concern of the story very well. The spiraling vine pulls the eye deeper into the image. I like the way the text design reflects the story's concern with how words shape and convey meaning.

Here's a short excerpt:

In spring it was more words on more things than just stop signs. When the leaves began to bud, I saw green letters popping out of brown limbs and branches. When I looked closely, I saw the word “leaf” in green letters on a green background, wriggling smack up against a brown on brown “branch.” It went on like this, more words showing up on more things every day for weeks. On Summer Solstice, we had dinner with my wife’s family. This was our thing, a thing like clockwork, twice a year, under the turning of the sky.

I expect to have the final read-through of the story ready for formatting according to the e-publishing guidelines by the end of the weekend. "The World is Bigger than an Ell" is a short story of about 3500 words, and will come bundled with a couple of bonus short-shorts.

Happy Labor Day!

I hope you had a great time enjoying the Labor Day festivities in your life. We did. Here's something we did that turned out to be pretty fun.

Who doesn't like water balloons, after all?