Dull-plicity

Duplicity is a film about two stars, a director, and a supporting cast trying to convince viewers they’ve made something clever and intriguing when they’re really turned out a lethargic, lifeless, dreary waste of time. Thankfully, I figured out this twist less than halfway into it and quit watching…

Chalk It Up…

When Susan and I went to Athens a month or so ago to see the Embroiderers’ Guild exhibit, it just so happened that there was an exhibit of pastel art on another floor of the same facility. We took the time to check it out and I was quite impressed–but the exhibit also reminded me how much I used to enjoy working in pastels when I was a teenager.

I didn’t think much about it, but Susan apparently remembered. For an early birthday gift, she got me a set of pastels and some textured paper. I haven’t gotten around to actually doing anything artistic per se, but I’ve played around it a little bit with it just to remind myself of pastel techniques and to get used to the feel of it once again. Pastels still rank right up there with watercolors as one of the media that I most enjoy and most admire.

Have no idea if I’ll produce anything worthwhile, but it doesn’t matter; I think I’m going to have a good time with it, at least…

Where Has the Time Gone?

Has it really been more than two weeks since I wrote anything here?

Wish I could give a tangible explanation for my absence, but there hasn’t been one. I’ll chalk it up to the general malaise and gloominess that has hung over me since late July. It’s starting to lift a bit now, and I guess I’m ready to come out of my bunker and face the world once again…

Sharing a Sorrow

My aunt Barbara called yesterday because she had seen my 7/19 post about my cousin Frank and was concerned. I realized then that I had never written anything further about Frank’s condition; I think I was just avoiding the subject. Frank’s struggle against numerous cancers came to an end in the late morning on Monday, July 20th, when he died in hospice care after a rapid decline. Up to the very end, Frank had told his family of his hope to “beat this bastard,” as he referred to the cancer that took him from us. The fact that he held it at bay for so long, enjoying an active and happy life up until the very end, is testament to Frank’s strength and tenacity.

Going Our Way

When I was a child, one of the first comic strips that totally enthralled me wasn’t anything I read in the pages of the Rome News-Tribune or the Atlanta Journal. Instead, it was a strip that was published decades before I was born. I found J.R. Williams’ “Out Our Way” in a collected volume on my parents’ bookshelf; it was the only book they had that seemed to be entirely comic art, so I was instantly hooked. I fell in love with Williams’ meticulous line work, and was intrigued by his view of the not-so-Old West… a view that stripped away the mythic Western elements and pointed out the mundanities and ironies of life in the West.

It’s funny–I haven’t seen this book in forty or more years, but I can still see Williams’ lovely linework (an ink style that seems to have influenced Frank Frazetta’s work, in fact). There are no mass-market collections of Williams’ work that I know of–but there should be. He’s too good to be forgotten, as this one panel so aptly illustrates.

Defaming the Joker

Well, it’s appropriate–his motivations seem senseless, his methods certain to cause pain and suffering to almost everyone, and he is robbing everyone blind to support his strange schemes.

But the Joker seemed to know what he was doing, at least…

Trouser Press

Pardon My Planet is one of the reasons why I was glad to get an online subscription to the King Features Comics website; neither of our area papers carries it, so this is the only way I can see it every week. Today’s was particularly fan-oriented: