The Truth Revealed!

Once again, comic books succeed in uncovering the truth where religion and science fail!
As we can see in this panel from Justice League of America vol. 1, no. 76, homosexuality is neither a choice nor an inborn trait: it's caused by rays!


Here we see team mascot Lucas "Snapper" Carr getting zapped by a "gay ray" by the fruitiest looking alien ever, though it might have been more appropriate to shoot him in the ass. In any case, soon afterwards, "Snapper" ditched his date and was later found at Justice League HQ making Aquman extremely uncomfortable in the locker room.

The End Of An Era

For the past few weeks Brian has been spending two out of our three work days sitting at another desk in order to be cross-trained.
A little while ago our boss came over to let us know that, as of today, Brian has officially moved over and is no longer on our desk.
And though he's just in another room, he might as well be a world away as he stops becoming one of us and becomes one of them.
So it's the end of an era as we bid farewell to our fallen comrade.
If this were a comic book - and if we weren't holed up in a dark, windowless room unable to see the sky - Scott and I would talk about how Brian is gone but not forgotten while his ghostly image smiled down at us from among the clouds...

Balls To The Wall

Whatever else you might be able to say about his on-screen persona, nobody can deny that Stephen Colbert, as he himself will tell you, has balls.
If you haven't watched The Colbert Report, you should, though you could just watch the conservative commentators he's lampooning, as the truth is virtually indistinguishable from satire in this case.
I'm not sure if that's a testament to Colbert's skill or an indictment of the lack of bias and journalistic ethics of the people whom we're supposed to trust to give us a "fair and balanced" look at wold events.
In any case, a while back Colbert took his act to the White House Correspondents' dinner, engaging in a performance that was, as Jon Stewart put it, "balls-alicious," standing up in front of the President and, in the guise of praise, pointing out his criminal levels of incompetence, and drawing attention to the complicity of the press.
Though it was funny, nobody laughed.
Worse, almost no one even mentioned it in the press the following day.
Dough Elfman of The Chicago Sun-Times has an interesting take on the whole thing, which is worth checking out if only for the complete transcript of Colbert's remarks (more than any of the digs on the Prez, it's the last dig on the Press that really stands out for me).
Whether you agree with Colbert or not, there's one thing you'll have to admit: he has balls of steel.

Nobody Kicks Ass Like The Easter Bunny

When Katrina was showing us some of the animations of our mascot, and when I was actually paying attention and not thinking about banging her, I found myself wishing that there were some footage of our mascot doing something like this:

The Easter Bunny Hates You (Warning: Do not watch if you have any cherished memories of Peter Cottontail.)

My thanks to "Zalfiro" for sharing this with me.

What The...?

I've Got Issues Department:

During one of the presentations today, the speaker asked us, as sort of an exercise in recognizing "brand identity," to close our eyes, think of the company that is our favorite "brand," and imagine what it would be like if that company opened a hotel.
She asked us to imagine what the doors would be like, whether or not there would be a doorman, what the lobby would be like, etc.
The point of the exercise was to recognize the fact that you know the values of your favorite brand well enough to be able to imagine the details of hotel designed and run with those same values.
For my part, I couldn't think of a favorite brand of anything. There are products I buy consistently, and companies I will regularly do business with, but I couldn't really think of a "favorite."
Still, I tried to play along and sat there imaginatively creating a hotel that, while not adhering to any sort of "brand values," was at least in line with my sense of aesthetics.
It was actually pretty generic, more or less your standard high class metropolitan hotel.
The one thing that stood out in the imaginative lobby, though, was the attractive young woman working at the front desk.
I ended up doodling a sketch of what she looked like on the little notepad after the exercise was over, and, for the purposes of sharing it here and for messing around with some different features and techniques, I scanned it and cleaned it up.
Here's what I imagined:





Okay, that's she's attractive and rather buxom I get, but why does she look so snide? I mean, everything about how she looks is disdainful, and I can just hear her saying, "Can I help you?" in such a way that you know what's she's really saying is "You don't belong here."
I mean, what is up with my brain that when I'm free to imagine any sort of circumstance I want, imagine something like this?
It's like I've gotten to the point that I even fantasize about being rejected by women.
Oh well.
At the very least, odd though it may be, I'm pretty pleased with how the sketch turned out after I cleaned it up and colored it.
So that's one good thing, I guess.

We Are The (Brand) Champions

Though I had to be up early today, I stayed up until about 1 am last nigh working on the picture in the previous post.
Naturally, because that’s just the way things work, I didn’t manage to fall asleep for well over an hour, resulting in me having to operate on about 5 hours’ worth of sleep today.
The reason I had to get up early was to attend a training session for work.  The time was set as 8:30, though that was just an attempt to make sure that everyone showed up by 9.
Even though it was only a drive of 10 miles or so, it took me almost 45 minutes to get there, though I was still (just barely) on time, even for the made up, half an hour early start time.
Because the rules about that sort of thing are nebulous at best, I never come out and explicitly say where I work (though many of you know, and others of you could probably guess).
I figure that it gives me a little bit of leeway to talk – in general terms, at least – about some of the goings-on at my workplace if I never come out and explicitly state that I work for “Company XYZ.”
In any case, my company has been trying to sort of reinvent and reposition itself in the market place.
As part of that initiative we’ve changed our logo and, recently, changed our name.
In order to make sure that employees our all on the same page about what kind of image, or “brand,” we’re trying to create in the minds of consumers, the company offers a series of training seminars that explain what kind of image we’re trying to project, what some of the reasons behind choosing that image are, how we went about deciding on this particular image, and how we intend to go about projecting it.  The idea is that if, as stakeholders in the company, we’re all well-informed about this sort of thing we are better equipped to serve as advocates, or as they called it, champions, for our brand.
Scott, Brian, and I saw it as a relatively easy way to earn some overtime.
Also, free food.
Beyond that, we got a few little souvenirs that showcase our brand (notepads, pens, T-shirts, and even a little 32 MB flash drive, which was kind of cool, despite the anemic storage capacity).
The downside was that we had to engage in various group activities, but they weren’t too irritating, I guess.
Beyond the activities, various people involved in our brand initiatives got up and made presentations about the whys and wherefores of the whole thing.
In addition to changing our logo, we also made a change to what can best be described as our company mascot a while back.
This woman named Katrina got up and talked about mascots in general, the history of our mascot, why the change was made, how the change was made, and what options are available to us in making use of the mascot on the Web or in print.
The main thing I took away from this presentation?  I want to bang Katrina.
(While she was speaking, I used one of the notepads to inform Scott of this, writing, “FYI, I’d bang Katrina.”)
That probably tells you all you need to know about what I took away from the day.
Honestly, some of it was actually kind of interesting, and much of it was rather familiar, especially the stuff about proper logo usage and style guides, as I used to be involved in that sort of thing back in my days of working in PR (Public Relations, not Puerto Rico), as (among many other things) I was the person who had to ensure that the logo was always used consistently and that various style guidelines were adhered to in all internal and external communications.
So overall, despite having to get up early, it was an easy way to earn 8 hours’ worth of OT, and it will serve as a nice addition to all of the OT I’ll be getting next week from my Red Hat training.

Picture Now, Proper Post Later

I'm on something of a Jessica Simpson kick lately.
Here's a picture of her now that she's gone red.
I kind of like it; it has something of an old-fashioned pin-up quality to it.
Be back later with a real post.

More Random F/X

Here's the latest result of tinkering around with the picture of Jessica Simpson I just drew.
I present Robo-Jessica!



I really like the effect on her bikini. It has a sort of "Tron" look to it.

It Shouldn't Be That Hard To Connect Speakers To A Computer

Friday was Cinco de Mayo and, as per usual, it went past me largely unnoticed.
This is hardly surprising, in that 1. I’m not Mexican 2. I no longer drink (and even when I did, I didn’t drink tequila, Corona, or Dos Equis, nor did I need any sort of excuse to drink:  I would typically get just as drunk on July 3rd and 5th as I did on the 4th).
Still, there is some significance for me in that it was on Cinco de Mayo in 2004 that I quit smoking.
So I’ve got two years in.  Yay me, I guess.
I was supposed to do some work on the Heroic Portraits site today but so far I haven’t managed it.
For one thing, I actually slept in until almost 10:30 and it took me over an hour to get motivated to take a shower and get dressed, at which time I decided to head out into the world for a bit.
The speakers I had for my computer have had some sort of crossed wire for a while that can often lead it do things like turn the volume all the way up when, in fact, I’ve turned the volume all the way down.  I’ve been meaning to replace them for a while, but this morning was kind of the last straw, as I just hit the limit of the number of time I could put up with the volume mix up.
So I headed to Super Target and checked out their selection.
I don’t really have any way to set up surround speakers, so all I really needed was a half-way decent 2.1 (two speakers and a sub-woofer) set up.
I already have an okay 2.1 set up on Munin, my secondary computer, which is honestly more than I need, so I considered just buying a cheap set of two speakers, and swiping Munin’s speaker set up for Hugin.
Ultimately I decided that I might as well have 2.1 on both, so I bought a nice little Altec Lansing set for Hugin.
I got home and started to hook it up.  As is pretty standard for computer speakers, the controls are on the right speaker and the left speaker is actually connected to the right.
The set up was a little odd in that the sub-woofer didn’t plug into the computer’s sound card, the right speaker did.
But whatever, I thought, and got things set up.
Eventually.
The cable connecting the right and left speakers wasn’t really long enough for me to position the speakers where I had the old ones, so it took me a while to position them.
Once I did I ran into another problem, namely that I have about a billion devices plugged into Hugin, so there are wires and cables all over the place (I really need to either go through and organize them or, better yet, hire someone to come and untangle that mess) which, in addition to simply increasing the difficulty of setting up the speakers, what with having to thread them through the tangled mess, was actually causing some interference.
Basically, the left speaker kept emitting static whenever I did anything on the computer.
With the shortness of the cable connecting it to its twin, there was no way for me to reposition it to lessen the interference.
Ultimately I ended up having to swap speakers between Hugin and Munin, as those speakers have a much longer connection between the two speakers, allowing for interference-free positioning.
I would have been better off just saving $30 and buying the cheap speakers like I’d considered doing.
Oh well.  I do have most of my mp3s on Munin’s drive anyway, and rather than bothering with streaming them to Hugin I usually play them through Munin’s speakers.  The acoustics in here are such that the sound travels pretty well from the kitchen to the bedroom, so I suppose it’s just as well that I have decent speakers on Munin now.
Once I got all that sorted out I decided to take advantage of the weather and go for a walk, though just as I was putting my shoes on my phone rang.
After getting off the phone (it was my mom), I went for a walk for about an hour, then came home and decided to go out on the hammock and do my daily crossword puzzle.
And now here I am.
So yeah, putting together a Heroic Portraits Web site today?  Not so much.
I’m not sure when I’ll get around to making one.
Tomorrow I’ll be in a class all day.  Thursdays are always short, and most of next week will be spent taking a Red Hat class.
I guess I could crank out a quick, no-frills site that has prices, a gallery, and my contact info, then just fix it up later.
I was thinking about taking a Flash class anyway, so I guess I could just wait until after that to jazz things up.
We’ll see, I guess.

No Escape?

For whatever reason, AOL Radio has a station called “Top 111 Worst Songs.” Why 111? Your guess is as good as mine.
At any rate, one day while at work we were listening to that station (Every other station I tried was overloaded with music that sucked so I figured I’d just get it over with and listen to stuff that’s supposed to suck) and the song “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” came on.
You know the song: guy decides to cheat on his wife/girlfriend because he’s sick of her and responds to a personal ad placed by a woman who seems appealing. They plan to meet and lo and behold the woman who’d placed the ad was his wife/girlfriend who was just as sick of him as he was of her.
Anyway, in listening to the song I noticed that the place they chose to meet was “a bar called O’Malley’s.”
This stood out for me, as that morning on my way in to work I’d been listening to the song “O’Malley’s Bar” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, featured on their album Murder Ballads.
As the name of the album suggests, all of the songs involve murder, and “O’Malley’s Bar” is certainly no exception.
Told in a first-person narrative, the song takes us through a rather fateful night at the titular bar in which the protagonist decides to brutally murder everyone present. We never get the “why” of it, but we get a very detailed description of the “how.”
The song is brutal and vicious and ugly and discordant and cacophonous and darkly funny.
(For those interested, the lyrics are here, but are decidedly not for the faint of heart)
In any case, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a connection between Nick’s song and that infernal paean to thwarted infidelity.
While I can’t quite bring myself to say that they would deserve it, I do find myself amused by the notion that as the couple realizes that they’ve both been trying to cheat on each other and that they already had what they were looking for all along they share a pina colada and are viciously gunned down by a lunatic who claims to have no free will.
I thought about it for a bit and realized that among the victims at O’Malley’s there is, in fact, a married couple (two married couples, actually, but I’m not counting the O’Malleys themselves).
The coincidence goes further, though, in that the Pina Colada song was performed by Rupert Holmes, and the married couple that gets murdered at O’Malley’s is a Mr. and Mrs. Holmes!
That’s where the coincidence ends, though, as it is a Mr. and Mrs. Richard Holmes.
Still, the speculation was fun while it lasted.

A Fitting End?

For whatever reason, AOL Radio has a station called “Top 111 Worst Songs.”  Why 111?  Your guess is as good as mine.
At any rate, one day while at work we were listening to that station (Every other station I tried was overloaded with music that sucked so I figured I’d just get it over with and listen to stuff that’s supposed to suck) and the song “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” came on.
You know the song:  guy decides to cheat on his wife/girlfriend because he’s sick of her and responds to a personal ad placed by a woman who seems appealing.  They plan to meet and lo and behold the woman who’d placed the ad was his wife/girlfriend who was just as sick of him as he was of her.
Anyway, in listening to the song I noticed that the place they chose to meet was “a bar called O’Malley’s.”
This stood out for me, as that morning on my way in to work I’d been listening to the song “O’Malley’s Bar” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, featured on their album Murder Ballads.
As the name of the album suggests, all of the songs involve murder, and “O’Malley’s Bar” is certainly no exception.
Told in a first-person narrative, the song takes us through a rather fateful night at the titular bar in which the protagonist decides to brutally murder everyone present.  We never get the “why” of it, but we get a very detailed description of the “how.”
The song is brutal and vicious and ugly and discordant and cacophonous and darkly funny.
(For those interested, the lyrics are here, but are decidedly not for the faint of heart)
In any case, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a connection between Nick’s song and that infernal paean to thwarted infidelity.
While I can’t quite bring myself to say that they would deserve it, I do find myself amused by the notion that as the couple realizes that they’ve both been trying to cheat on each other and that they already had what they were looking for all along they share a pina colada and are viciously gunned down by a lunatic who claims to have no free will.
I thought about it for a bit and realized that among the victims at O’Malley’s there is, in fact, a married couple (two married couples, actually, but I’m not counting the O’Malley’s).
The coincidence goes further, though, in that the Pina Colada song was performed by Rupert Holmes, and the married couple that gets murdered at O’Malley’s is a Mr. and Mrs. Holmes!
That’s where the coincidence ends, though, as it is a Mr. and Mrs. Richard Holmes.
Still, the speculation was fun while it lasted.

Totally Random

I started messing around with various filters and effects on my latest Jessica Simpson picture and ended up producing this, which I thought I'd share with you all.
Enjoy.

You Really Can't Judge A Book By Its Cover (Though You USED To Be Able To)

So I spent most of today working on the second visual aid that I mentioned last week.
It turned out very well, I think, and serves as a perfect counterpoint to the first.
Of course, those of you who were enticed by the “mysterious” aspect of it all will, no doubt, be very disappointed by the actual post that the two visuals were created to support, and you may want to just take note that the post is about comic book covers and just skip ahead to look at the pictures.

For those of you who didn’t skip ahead, I’ve noticed that comic book covers have changed a lot since I was a kid.
If you’re into comics at all, covers are very important, as, all too often, comics actually are judged by their covers, so as a fan there are certain elements that you’ll look for, and as a publish you really need to be aware of what the fans are looking for.
(It’s worth noting here that it’s an established – albeit bizarre – fact in the comic book industry that a comic book, any comic book, that features a gorilla on the cover will experience increased sales for that month.)
In any case, when I was a kid, you could look at a cover and have an idea of what was going to happen inside, as the cover usually depicted a scene that was at least representative of some element of the story.
(As another aside, during his tenure at DC Comics, the late, great Julius Schwartz would often have an artist come up with a cover image for a book and then task the writer to come up with a story built around that cover image. Shortly after his death, as a tribute, several writers and artists put out new stories based on some classic “Julie” covers.)
Covers often featured some expository text that would help to entice you further, often incorporating the book’s title, providing you with something like this:




(Note that while it lacks a gorilla, this cover does feature a weeping character, which, oddly enough, has also been observed to increase a book’s sales. And for the record, this cover is probably unnecessarily [as opposed to necessarily?] mean to Ashlee Simpson, but it’s just a joke, and I must admit that she has actually been looking pretty damn good lately, though the real point is that hotness is relative, pun intended, and compared to her relative, no matter how good she looks, she’ll never, ever achieve a Jessica level of hotness.)

John Byrne in particular loved to use the expository text/book logo device.
These days, though, you will never see a cover featuring expository text, particularly in the style above, and it’s increasingly unlikely that you’ll see a cover that has anything to do with the story inside at all.
If it’s a “team” book, the odds are it will just feature a random picture of one of the team members (if it’s an “X” book, said member will, more often than not, be Wolverine), or of the entire team.
Certainly it won’t give you an idea of what’s actually going on inside.
These are the sort of covers that were reserved for “special” books back in my day, like an anniversary issue or something.
Now they’re the norm.
Worse than that, though, are the totally misleading covers. These covers not only fail to give you an indication of what’s happening inside, they don’t even give you an idea of what the interior art is going to be like.
It used to be that the artist who did the interiors also did the cover art. Not so anymore. There is an increasing number of comic artists who make their living almost solely from drawing covers.
Many of them are extremely “hot,” and a cover done by one of them will, like a weeping gorilla (or the color purple; another odd sales booster) will bump up the sales dramatically.
Is that really a problem? Honestly, I love a great Alex Ross, Greg Horn, Adam Hughes, Greg Land, or Frank Cho as much as the next fanboy, and there’s no denying that a comic book cover like such as this one has a definite appeal:




But the problem comes once you flip the book open and find that rather than some beautifully painted Ross artwork inside you’re greeted by what looks to be the manic scribblings of a chimp armed with a crayon.
(During a particularly irritating part of its run, Marvel’s Elektra was the worst offender, featuring lavishly detailed Greg Horn covers with interior art that looked like it was pieced together from random doodles I’d done when I was five.)
Still, all things considered, this current trend is nowhere near as irritating as the foil/hologram/velvet “variant” cover craze of the early 90s, so I guess I can’t complain too much.
Even so, I do miss the days when you actually could judge a comic book by it’s cover.
The real point of this entry, though, was the creation of the visual aids. I hope you enjoyed seeing them as much as I enjoyed creating them.
I know that there are some “in-joke” elements that will leave you a little puzzled (The “XYZ+” on the second cover, for example, is meant to spoof Marvel’s incomprehensible rating system. WTF is PSR+ supposed to indicate?”), but I think they work pretty well to illustrate the differences between the covers of today and the covers of my distant youth.
I think both are suitable candidates for inclusion in the Heroic Portraits gallery, as I can imagine that there are people who might like to see themselves featured on a comic book cover.
Speaking of Heroic Portraits, I’ll need to devote most of tomorrow to actually putting up a site.
Somewhere along the line I’ll try to crank out a more traditional Threshold entry.