A work in progress

Just felt I should spread this post that was added to Jim Lee's studio blog last week. The master was recorded while doing a 1-hour-challenge piece. It's very cool to see the process from conception to finished product... very few get to witness what happens between a comic artist sitting down at a blank sheet of paper and then turning out a fully inked drawing.

gelatometti: Crosspost from Myspace
Iron Chef Battle 2005:
Gelatomettisti Jim Lee vs Mike Turner

And now you are one of the few! ^_^;;

The Micro-Samurai

Something I picked up yesterday at the local comics specialty store. I normally have an aversion to any "varient" designs on my favourite characters - and it gets worse when it comes to in-house designs toy companies come up with that have nothing to do with the story as is.

(yes yes, Batman is a trained martial artist, but he was never a Samurai).

This is however a "Microman" - old school folks will remember these babies from the late 70's as "Micronauts." And in a strange irony, this variant design looks more like a Microman figure than any of the other licensed "Micro-Action" series figures I've ever encountered (exception being another Batman shown here which actually does have the "all chrome head" scheme familiar to Micronauts fans. I've since fallen in love with both and intend to hunt down last year's "Cyborg Superman" as well.

Sadly, mine had cracks in the plastic arms at the elbows. I don't know if the plastic was brittle and was already cracked when I bought it or it my manhandling the box out in the freezing cold yesterday on my way home had anything to do with it. I've repaired it as best I could with super-glue but that makes for permanently positioned joint... it's just too delicate to make a working hinge out of the remains. Too bad.

a few leagues short

I had a funny thought during lunch today.

"40'000 Leagues Under the Sea" doesn't add up.
http://www.rain.org/ocean/ocean-studies-challenger-deep-mariana-trench.html
The deepest part of the world's oceans is the Mariana Trench which reaches as far as 10'923m, which if one does the math using 1.6km to the mile and 3 miles to the league, is actually only about 2.275625 leagues. It's just a tad shallow. This is all relative of course.

Besides, giant squid have been found before (although not quite as large as Disney would have you believe). But who knows? Really.

things missed and things bought

For a guy with so much experience buying stuff on-line you'd think I would've embraced the opportunity to reserve stuff at my local brick and mortar stores when they started offering such a service (save on shipping and guarantee what you want to be there when you arrive, etc...).

Remember that door-crasher camera that was always sold out during the boxing-day sale? It was a 6mp camera and this week Futureshop offered a deal on the 7mp version of the same thing (I even went to the trouble of doing the research on this baby). I was trying to figure out why the 6mp version was priced higher than the 7mp version. Seems like they essentially swapped some functions out, etc... But really, I doubt I'd miss anything since well. The last camera I bought was a 1.3mp POS that quite frankly offers an improvement over ...a camera phone. And the only reason for that is... well, my phone has a camera on it.

Back to the story at hand: apparently I have some kind of mental condition that prevents me from making commitments to buy things. This psychological effect leaves me unable to reserve stuff on-line to pick up later. When I woke up this morning I made my decision that this price was right. So I made my plans to head over to the brick and mortar (stupidly forgetting to check on-line if they even had it in stock anymore. And of course, when I got there, it was sold-out ...of course.

On the bright side of things. By being there I stumbled on another deal I didn't expect - I found out that 4Gb memory sticks are on sale this week for only $100. If you didn't realize, it's essentially getting 2Gb for free because the 2Gb sticks regularly retail for that much.

Did I also mention I'm the kind of person with a mental condition that isn't satisfied until the money burning a hole in my pocket gets spent? Hmm... now to figure out what I can stuff onto my PSP with so much room to play with.

Powers - 1st arc complete!

Powers is Law&Order set in a super-hero world. Now is a good a time as any to remind everyone that Daily Powers one of the coolest freebies on the web. This week Daily Powers finished their first run of a-page-a-day publishing on the first storyline about a couple of street-beat cops living in a world populated by super-powered heroes and villains.

Check out the archive of the first book here!!
http://comics.newsarama.com/powers/

The first arc "Who Killed Retro-Girl" is a full 139 page story. It's been a bold experiment and I think it worked out for the most part (except for days where you had a large single-panel splash-page published; those were the times frustratingly little story occurred while a miniscule amount of plot unfolded over the course of several days). Did I already mention this is free? ^_^

Anyway, I encourage everyone to give it a try. And as they've just announced, Daily Powers will present the next arc "Powers: Role-play" very soon.