Strangers Who Are Like Friends

Over on Facebook there’s a Legion of Super-Heroes fan page called Legion World.
Quite some time ago my Ladies of the Legion posts caught the attention of the admin of Legion World who stopped by to compliment me on my work and began posting the images to the Legion World page.
This – understandably, I think – pleased me.
After a while the images were all collected into an album on Legion World.  An album dedicated solely to my artwork.  An album entitled “Artwork of Jon Maki AKA Heimdall.”  The description of the album refers to my artwork as being “stunning.”
This also pleased me. A lot.
After all, though you’d never know it from this blog – or really, any other part of my life – this meant that I actually have fans.
Granted, they may not count as *ahem* a legion of fans, but even so, it feels good to be acknowledged and appreciated.
(I always suspected that it would, but had never been certain until it actually happened.)
All of which is a bit of a preamble to the actual post here, which, I think, requires some additional introductory text.  Not just because I’m prone to self-indulgent walls of text, but because I need to make my intentions clear.
Some of the little self-deprecating shots I took at myself above – like the one about only suspecting that it would feel good to be acknowledged an appreciated – may come across as me fishing for compliments.  That’s not what I was doing – I was, legitimately, engaging in self-deprecating humor.  I mean, I do that.  When it comes to the jokes I make, I myself am, by a wide margin, the most frequent butt of them.
It’s how I am.  There may be some deep-seated psychological issues at the core of the personality trait, but mostly I make fun of myself because I know I can take it.  And besides, I’m just a jerk, so why should I care what I think?  Make fun of me all you want, me; I’ll just shrug it off and chalk it up to my jerkiness.
Anyway, where was I?
Right.  Legion World.
Every so often in my FB feed I’ll see a Legion World post with a reference to me, usually featuring another Legion-related image that I drew at some point, with a caption like, “Legion World Needs More Jon Maki!”  (My favorite was when there was a post of a picture I did of Scarlett Johansson that was captioned, “Now I'm not saying Jon Maki intended this image to be a take on Night Girl, but I am saying I needed a valid reason to post a Jon Maki image.”)
Most recently, I saw the image from this post pop up.
Looking at the post on Legion World I noticed that 34 people “liked” it and 11 people “shared” it on their own timelines.*
This leads me, finally, to the point of this post.
Unless it’s completely NSFW, any drawing that I post here I also post on Facebook.  Even when it is NSFW, I usually post a link (with a warning) to the blog post containing it.
Most of my artwork posts on Facebook go unnoticed except by a handful of my friends.  Said handful consists of a few people who can be counted on to regularly like or comment on most pictures, though there are a few “drive-by likes” from people who normally don’t hit the like button.
(Of course, even the drive-by likers tend to be a pretty consistent subset of my friends.)
In any case, I’ve never posted anything on Facebook that has gotten as many likes as that image on Legion World did.
Granted, Legion World has greater “reach” than I do, but the thing is, I don’t actually know any of the people who visit Legion World.
So I can’t help but wonder why it is that I can count on people I don’t know to like my arwork, but most of the people I do know completely ignore it.  Again, at the risk of sounding like I’m protesting too much, the point of this isn’t to try to lake a guilt trip on people in order to extort some praise and validation out of them.  Do I wish that more of my friends would like and/or comment on my picture posts?  Of course, but this isn’t an attempt to get them to do that.
Really I’m just thinking out loud – or at least thinking in a blog post – about something that I sometimes wonder about.
This isn’t something I lose sleep over, or spend a lot of time obsessing about, but it does come to mind at times, particularly when I see something like that post on Legion World.
I’m really just legitimately curious – why don’t more of my friends “like” my artwork?
I suppose that the most obvious explanation is exactly that:  they don’t like it, for whatever reason.  Maybe they find it offensive, or too objectifying, or they just plain don’t think it’s any good or just aren’t interested.
That’s certainly possible, and understandable – I do obviously tend to focus on pin-up/cheesecake-style images, and people have different, equally valid tastes when it comes to art.
I don’t discount this, but in my real-world encounters with people – many of them numbering among my Facebook friends – the response to my artwork is overwhelmingly positive.**
So I wonder.
And honestly, all I can really do is wonder, even here.  Because let’s face it, no one is going to bother leaving a comment here (which is something I've done plenty of whining about already), and I’m not actually going to put this on Facebook because despite – or perhaps because of – my claims to the contrary it will look like I’m saying, “Pls liek mah picz!  I can has validayshun?”
Anyway, while not discounting the “Your art is bad and you should feel bad” explanation, these are some of the other possible explanations I’ve come up with:

High Signal to Noise Ratio:  Unlike me, most people have a lot of friends on Facebook.  Far too many to actually even notice, let alone interact with.  Also, while I keep my newsfeed pretty readable by hiding a lot of irrelevant stuff like updates about game activities and whatnot, it’s possible that many of my friends don’t hide anything, and so they’re inundated with too much stuff to notice my pictures.

Unplugged:  Maybe most of my friends don’t actually spend a lot of time on Facebook.

Unsubscribed:  Maybe people want to maintain a connection with me, but they don’t want my frequent posts of pictures and random thoughts cluttering up their newsfeeds, so they’ve hidden all updates from me.  Which means that I’m considered noise rather than signal, and honestly, that’s just as hurtful as “Your art is bad and you should feel bad,” but still, it’s possible.

For Games Only:  Maybe all they do on Facebook is play games.  Given how many game update stories I’ve had to hide and game requests I’ve ignored, this one seems likely, especially given that once I finally hid all of those updates the amount of activity I saw on my newsfeed dropped exponentially, so clearly if they’re doing anything on Facebook at all most of my friends aren’t doing anything that shows up in my newsfeed, which leaves games as the most likely suspect.  (Though this could also be a result of their privacy settings and the utilization of lists.)

What Is This I Don’t Even:  Back when I had a display for Heroic Portraits during the craft show at work a lot of the people who stopped by my table – even the ones who were previously aware of my artistic endeavors – didn’t understand that I actually drew the Portraits.  I’m not sure what it was that they thought I did, but it was clear that there was, until I explained the process to them, no understanding of the fact that these images were hand-drawn by me.  I suppose that it’s equally possible that when I post a picture to Facebook – even when I actually use the words “drawing,” “draw,” and “drew,” – that they aren’t putting the pieces together and figuring out that this is artwork done by me.  Maybe they think they’re just some random pictures I found and posted – I don’t know.  But I have seen that there are people who can look at my artwork and not actually grok the fact that it’s my artwork.

So those are my theories.  Now I’ll set them aside and go back to not thinking about it except on those occasions when I post something that I’m really proud of and pleased with and find that it doesn’t even seem to warrant crickets chirping…and then on those occasions I’ll just remind myself that I have an album dedicated to my artwork at Legion World and I’ll find myself liking total strangers more than I like my own friends.

*Admittedly, this probably had more to do with the text in the image, which is very funny if you’re any sort of fan of the Legion, and not the quality of the quickly-dashed off art.  Trust me; it actually is really funny.  It’s the kind of thing that people who find that kind of thing funny will find funny.

**If sometimes kind of nitpicky.  “Why is her arm like that?”  “What’s wrong with her nose?”  “That doesn’t look like her.”

Compromising In The Face Of Armaggeddon Or I Watched The Watchmen

Yesterday I finally went to the Chiropractor’s, got adjusted, and pre-paid for a bunch of visits, with standing appointments on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday for the foreseeable future.
Oh, and I also went to see a little movie that you may recall me occasionally referring to here: Watchmen.
Despite the fact that I went decades believing that a Watchmen movie couldn’t – and shouldn’t – be made, there was never really any question that, if it happened, I would see it, if for no other reason than to torture myself.
Even in the days when they were talking about painting Arnold Schwarzenegger blue and shaving his head in order for him to play Dr. Manhattan – think about how terrible it was when they did exactly that in Batman and Robin for his role as Mr. Freeze – I probably would have gone to see it.
And I would have bitched. If this had happened back in the late 80s/early 90s as planned, I’d probably still be bitching now.
However, up until I saw the first trailer for this movie last summer, I never thought there would come a day when I’d actually want to see a Watchmen movie.
I could go on for months writing daily essays about how much I love the Watchmen comic book.
As an aside, let me say this: yes, it’s a comic book. People who don’t want to admit that they read or enjoy comic books throw around the term “graphic novel” because it sounds better. But within the world of comics, “graphic novel” has a specific meaning; it’s not a generic, “safe” term for comic book. It’s a specific kind of comic book.
And Watchmen? Before it was ever collected into a single volume that could arguably fit that specific definition, it was sold in the form of twelve individual saddle-stitched, four-color publications known as comic books.
Get over your prejudices and pre-conceived notions, and drop the pretentiousness. The Hugo award-winning story that was also one of Time Magazine’s 100 Greatest Novels is a comic book. In your face, snobs!
But in any case, I won’t go on about my love for this particular comic. Just understand that I do love it, revere it, cherish it, and hold it as close to my heart – maybe even closer – as anything you might love, revere, cherish, and hold close to your hearts. I read it – for the first of dozens of times – when I was 15, and it had a transformative effect on my life.
There were many reasons over the years that I was opposed to seeing it adapted to film – Hello? Did you see the part where I mentioned that they considered painting Arnold Schwarzenegger blue and shaving his head to have him play Dr. Manhattan? – and even now that I’ve seen the movie and actually enjoyed it, I still hold many of those reservations.
Let’s get that out of the way first. I did actually enjoy the movie. It ranks up there as one of the best comic to film adaptations I’ve ever seen. It was visually stunning, mostly well-paced, and there was a clear reverence for the source material. Most of the performances were solid – Jackie Earl Haley in particular did an excellent job – and even the ones that were only so-so were still decent.
There’s so much that I have to say about the movie, but like the movie itself in attempting to tell the story, there are far too many constraints in terms of time, format, and audience to engage in too deep of an exploration.
So, regrettably, I’ll just have to hit some of the high – and low – points and then just get on with the business of my usual pointless blathering.
Seriously, I could easily pull a Slacktivist and devote years to examining the movie and the comic on which it was based in order to present a complete comparison and evaluation.
Anyway, I’ll start off with some of the minor nitpicks that are specific to the movie.
The thing that bothered me the most was the terrible job done in terms of casting people to play real-life people. The movie’s Nixon was absolutely terrible. Ted Koppel? Atrocious. Lee Iacocca…what the hell was he doing in there anyway? I will say that the person playing Kissinger was decent, though.
The costume design was also bothersome. It was, in many cases, far too generically “super hero movie” costume design. I have no complaints whatsoever about seeing hot women in skintight latex, but Malin Akerman was playing the Silk Specter.
Rorschach’s costume was mostly spot-on, and the changing inkblots on his mask were great – and generally used to great effect - but that was an instance in which the material actually should have been latex. I’m not really sure what the material in the movie was supposed to be. It looked like cotton.
I did like the re-design of the original Silk Specter’s costume, though.
And let me just say that the lovely and talented Carla Gugino was, as always, lovely and talented, filled out her costume nicely, still looked great even when made up to look like she was 67, and was just generally painfully hot.
(As an aside, my birthday is coming up. Number one gift on my wish list? Carla Gugino. As Dave Campbell would say, “Give to me: Carla Gugino.”)
Anyway, at this point I should say that my primary feeling about the movie is one of relief, given just how bad it could have been. I’m thankful to Zack Snyder for staying firmly committed to providing a largely uncompromised vision of the original story.
That being said, some of the compromises that were made did rankle me more than a little, but that’s just me, and for those who have either not read the comic, or who don’t revere it in the same way that I do, they’re unlikely to diminish your enjoyment of the movie.
Still, every time I did see some element of compromise designed to appease studio executives and to appeal to mass movie-going audiences, in my mind I kept hearing the words, “Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise.”
While what was left out of the movie could actually serve as sufficient material for several movies – one of the many reasons I always viewed the comic as unfilmable – the essential elements were included, but there were some cuts that I found rather baffling. Mostly bits of dialogue that would not have added anything to the runtime, given the many scenes in which people were standing around silent – when they should have been speaking the missing dialogue – but which would have added much to the narrative.
The other thing that was lacking – and again, I understand that this was done for the benefit of movie-going audiences – was some of the subtlety of the comic. There were scenes of expository dialogue –much of it shifted around from the sequence in which it appeared in the comics – that positively screamed “Pay attention to this! It’s important!”
There were also scenes that might as well have had a big sign appear on screen saying “Foreshadowing.”
To get rather spoilery, one particular scene lost a lot of its power and significance due to the lack of subtlety. In the comic there is a sequence in which Rorschach recalls a kidnapping case he’d worked on years earlier. His inquiries – which mostly involved going around to dive bars and breaking limbs and other extremities until he got the information he needed – yielded a name and an address.
Rorschach goes to the house – the owner/kidnapper is not home when Rorschach arrives – and in a mostly “silent” series of panels, Rorschach puts together the pieces of a horrifying puzzle, and the reader, at the same time as Rorschach, realizes what has happened.
The same sequence in the movie does not provide the slowly unfolding horror, but instead hits you over the head with it. It couldn’t have been any less subtle if Zack Snyder had walked onscreen and yelled “The kidnapper chopped the girl up and fed her to his dogs!”
(The condensed nature of the part of the story in which we are presented with this scene is another drawback of the running time constraints. Also, I was annoyed by the blatant pandering to pet lovers in the form of removing the scenes of Rorschach going out and slaughtering said dogs. Sure, we see them dead after the fact, but apparently it would have been too horrible to actually see him go out and split open the heads of the fuzzy little kid-eating darlings. Of course, this wasn’t a problem with the human who fed the kid to the fuzzy-wuzzy widdle doggies, who were just soooo cute while they fought over the girl’s leg bone.)
Okay, there’s so much more I could say, but this is already way long, so I’ll wrap things up by saying that the movie is stunningly violent and has copious amounts of gore (and glowing blue wang), so it definitely earned its R rating.
I’ll also point out, again, that the problems with the movie were largely unavoidable. More than anything else, Watchmen the comic book is about its own structure, and what makes it such a crowning achievement of the art form is that it was designed to do things that can only be done in that specific medium. What makes Watchmen so powerful and compelling is exactly what makes it impossible to fully translate to another medium.
I’m still uncertain that there was a real need to try making the translation, but I’m ultimately relieved by and appreciative of the fact that since the attempt was being made it was done so reverently.
So, short version: go see the movie if you want to have an idea of what Watchmen is about in terms of the basic plot. But if you want to have the full experience, and to get a better understanding of what it’s about in a larger sense, read the comic.
Oh, and IMAX for the win.