How to watch Star Wars

I know, I know--if you're talking about the prequels, don't bother, right?

Anyway, I've long felt that the best way to watch all six Star Wars movies as a consistent narrative is to start with "A New Hope", watch "Empire Strikes Back", and then go back and watch Episodes 1 to 3. Then come back and watch "Return of the Jedi".

This way, the secret that Vader is Luke's father isn't "spoiled" by the story, and narratively it comes as a big shock, the way it should. Then, once you know, you go back and get the whole backstory on what happened to Anakin Skywalker and why (presumably) he should be considered sympathetic and his redemption would be a positive thing.

In the films, obviously Luke freaks out when he hears the truth but between the two movies he matures a lot and has given the matter serious thought. I've always thought one of the strengths of Luke is that his love redeems his father, even when everybody else was telling him it wasn't possible. Obi-Wan, Yoda, Leia, everyone told him it couldn't be done but he refused to believe them and made it happen himself.

Giving the prequels more credit than they probably deserve, if you assume you can watch those movies and see Anakin as sympathetic, they fit in perfectly as an extended flashback between "Empire" and "Jedi". You come back at the beginning of "Jedi" knowing exactly what happened and ready for the real climax of the story.



UPDATE:

I love that they’ve got Newt Gingrich talking about Star Wars on this History Channel special. Newt himself was namechecked in Phantom Menace as one of the scheming, slimy Trade Federation aliens who invades Naboo.

One of the leaders of the Trade Federation is named “Nute Gunray”. “Nute” is obvious, take “Gunray” and reverse the syllables… :)

Phantom Menace was made in 1998 and ‘99 so I really think it’s unlikely to be a coincidence that Newt pops up as a reference.

Star Wars/Boogie Nights trailer mashup

(from Kottke)

Bug

Saw William Friedkin's "Bug" today.

Great movie, unnerving and creepy from the first frame. I really didn't know what to expect when I went in--or rather, I thought I did, I was expecting something like "Slither", a modest and decent special effects monster/horror movie. What I got was something entirely different--to discuss it much at all would be to give too much away, really.

Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon both really delivered, they made me care about their strange, lonely characters and their sad little lives. Friedkin let the actors shine, using a lot of long takes and not cutting too much. The camera placement, the lighting and the sets made Ashley Judd's dirty motel room feel real, feel lived in, and made it feel subtly menacing throughout. Very well done.

The one thing I could NOT believe was that a couple was sitting right behind me with a child who couldn't have been more than six or seven years old. This movie is a dark, demented film with cursing, nudity, drug use, blood, horror, sex scenes, and all kinds of things that a six-year-old kid should not be watching yet. It was hard to pay attention during some scenes because the kid was clearly really uncomfortable and disturbed by this shit he was seeing. I'm all in favor of showing kids kung fu movies and stuff, but this was just wrong.

Color Nana

Color Nana
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

Another color pic, this time using the acrylic tools in Painter.

This one's inspired by my new favorite artist, Shunya Yamashita.

Heroes finale

I seem to be almost alone in this, but Heroes really lost me about six episodes ago or so. I haven't enjoyed it nearly as much as I was hoping this year, especially since the plot kicked up into "high gear" and all the characters left their native environments and so on.

For me the big downside of Heroes is that the characters don't make any sense in just about anything they do. And since the characters don't really get *developed* as such, and they serve only to advance the plot, their actions and the plot should seem to tie together in some way to be at least plausible.

I'm not talking about the powers, but just simple stuff like "Why is DL still walking around?", "Why did Claire just leave with Mama Petrelli and Nathan in the carpark?", "Why does Peter keep telling people to shoot him in the head?", "Why does ANYbody believe this vast conspiracy to blow up half New York will have any positive effects?", "Why didn't Hiro bother to step outside and tell his friend 'Hey Ando, Sulu knows about my powers, we're gonna train swords, I'll be back in a bit' to stop Ando running after Sylar himself", "What was the point of Linderman's power if he's just gonna get killed?", "Why does anybody think Claire's dad is a sympathetic character?",

and my favorite--

"Why weren't any of the characters besides Peter and Sylar REALLY involved in the climax?"

Seriously, Hiro had his little part to play but otherwise everybody else was really just laying on the sidelines bleeding. The Sylar/Peter fight from the alternate-future was WAY cooler.

This was all contrasted with a really kickass season finale of 24 in which a bunch of cool stuff happened over the last few episodes. And a terrific Office with some great climactic events!

I can't help but compare Heroes to Buffy, in which all the characters had really strong personalities, character arcs, and where all the stories revolved around the characters' personal decisions, problems, and choices... rather than the bizarre random-clockwork nature of Heroes.

Progressions X highlights oral pleasures in erotic pinup series

This week and every weekday in May, Progressions X is featuring a new color pinup of a Progressions X star, focusing on a different erotic fascination each week.

The third week of May focuses on the oral pleasure, beginning with another erotic Pam Sage pinup! Today Pam practices her native tongue...

Nana 2

Nana 2
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

Another angle of a study for a new look for hair and eyes. Ai Yazawa also has a completely different look for her eyes than most manga artists--instead of the elaborate shines, highlights and gradients, she basically just scribbles the eyeball.

I'm going to give that a shot in some tests and see if I like it enough to adapt it for my own use.

Nana 1

Nana 1
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

Testing out a new look for hair and eyes inspired by Nana's Ai Yazawa. I've never been happy with the way I render hair, especially blonde hair, so I'm looking for a new look that's not TOO high-maintenance.

A lot of manga artists lavish an incredible amount of work on hair, rendering seemingly every strand, curl and braid. I don't think that'd suit me but I love the way Ai Yazawa draws hair, with long simple lines showing the flow of the hair from root to tip.

Yazawa uses a single-width line for the majority of her cartooning while I use a brush-style so it should make an interesting combination.

I Love You, Beth Cooper

I Love You, Beth Cooper
Originally uploaded by Jeff Coleman.

Marguerite Sauvage

Marguerite Sauvage is a French illustrator with a gorgeous fashion-y style.

She also counts Rumiko Takahashi as one of her main influences! She says it was Takahashi's "Lum" which inspired her to start drawing and which influenced her style of coloring in the shoulders and knees of her characters!

I'm not sure how old Ms Sauvage is but when I lived in France in 1990, children's television was PACKED with Rumiko Takahashi, along with lots of other anime such as Dragonball and Fist of the North Star. That's where I discovered Takahashi's "Maison Ikkoku" aka "Juliette Je t'aime" and "Lum/Urusei Yatsura" aka "Lamu". It was a little before Ranma so they hadn't started showing that by the time I moved back in 1991.

One thing I remember was that there was some controversy over the violent nature of anime like Fist of the North Star, but that it was so devastatingly popular they had to keep showing it or they would've faced mobs of angry kids storming the studios!

(hat tip to the always excellent illustration blog Drawn!)

Today, I finished the lettering on "The Appearance of Respectability" and did the rough sketches for next week's series of pinups. It was a pretty good day. Posted some more notices at Comixpedia, Comicspace, and decided to start using my Livejournal for posts as well.

Pretty good day.

Also, Google Docs needs to add the ability to post a doc to more than one blog. I've been wanting the ability to crosspost between my Blogger blog and my Livejournal. I use it now to post to my Blogger site, but it supports Livejournal posting as well, and I'd love to be able to use both.

Working in Manga Studio

Jeff

Another Progressions X record!

Progressions X had its best day ever yesterday!

389 unique viewers, breaking the record from January 15 or so of 323 viewers. I'd kinda slacked off promoting the comic around the web, since then especially, at Comixpedia. I also made my first post at the Talkaboutcomics blog on the subject of the new pinups series.

I have to admit I'm a little surprised by the relative success of Progressions X, which has consistently been among the top-viewed comics at Adultwebcomics since it launched. It started out as just a little side project for fun, but seems to be doing pretty well.

I'd love to get feedback from any readers, especially anyone who's curious about the fate of Progressions X and Chastity Towers, my new upcoming series for Adultwebcomics.

On the subject of Chastity Towers, today I redrew a few of the sketched pages of the first story, "The Appearance of Respectability", in accordance with some changes I'd made to the script, to tighten up the non-action scenes and give the sex a little more room to breathe. It's still a relatively slow build, compared to the quick bursts of Progressions X, but I think it'll be worth it. I plan to finish the lettering for the 32-page story within the next couple of days and get started on drawing the actual final pages.

I've also figured out the themes for the next Progressions X erotic pinups series, which will be posted weekdays throughout May, but I'll leave those as a surprise til they happen!

Ghetto Librettos

This is just too beautiful not to post.



From Henry Jenkins: Ghetto Libretto: The Sexy Comics of Mexico

Progressions X hit 300,000 pageviews today! And this week I've lettered pages 1-17 of "The Appearance of Respectability" and drawn five Progressions X pinups to start posting on Monday.

Since the final Progressions X story finished last week, and Chastity Towers won't begin for another month, what I've decided to do is to draw a series of pinups focusing on a different fetish each week. The first week covers facials, and I've drawn closeup portraits of Pam Sage, Mad Morello, Ariane Usher, Jane Cutler and a combined pic of Ariane and Isabel.

Instead of Prog-X's regular update schedule of several pages on Monday, these portraits are going to post each day from Monday through Friday. Next week will cover a different topic, and so on, until Chastity Towers begins. Who knows, I may continue doing something similar even after Chastity Towers starts. It's fun and they're full color! So it's been a great exercise in doing more color.

(WARNING: Not safe for work (NSFW) discussion follows.)

Speaking of color, I learned quite a bit about doing fetish artwork from doing this series of pinups. Obviously when the subject matter that's fetishized is a woman's face covered in semen, the way the cum is rendered makes a big difference to whether it's an appealing image or not. And if that sort of thing isn't a particular fetish of yours, it's going to look ridiculous anyway!

In this case I tried about half a dozen different ways of rendering the cum until finally settling on what ended up being the simplest way to do it AND the most effective. The drawings are done in a stylized cartoon method with thick black lines and fairly flat colors, but I started out working on nearly photo-realistic renderings of the shapes, color and texture of the semen. That just looked freaky, so I tried mixing the realistic coloring with black outlines and that still didn't work.

What I was trying to do was based on the way it looks in real life--our brain wants cum to be WHITE, but in most cases it's translucent and reflective, so it's got a lot of variety in color, especially depending on the skin color underneath it. So I was trying to stay faithful to that reality, and finding that it was just not working against the cartoon style of the portraits.

I then decided to reduce it to three colors--a base color, a white highlight, and a darker shadow. I really wanted it to be shiny and get that highlight, but I found that in every case, if I made the base color dark enough to make the highlight apparent, it didn't look like what it was supposed to be. It just looked like a grey or tan fluid, and that was not right at all.

So finally I stripped out the highlight and colored it with a single near-white base color and a simple shadow along the edges. This gave it exactly the kind of volume it needed, it was consistent with the cartooning style of the portraits and communicated exactly what was necessary to the brain.

In the end it was the absolute simplest way possible to do it, but I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't gone through all those steps first.

Fry the batter to E sharp exactly

In July 1966, en route to London from Manila, the Beatles made an overnight stop in Delhi, their first visit to India. They asked to see the best musical instrument store and were sent to Rihki Ram and Sons, a Connaught Circle fixture since 1947. In a fort-five minute spending spree they bought a sitar, tabla, sarod and tempura, posing for photographs with the staff while fans gathered on the street outside. "The crowd started to be annoying," says Ajay Sharma. "So they asked my father, Bishan das Sharma, to take the intsruments over to their room at the Oberoi Sheraton. When he was there he taught Mr. George Harrison to tune his sitar and Mr. Paul McCartney to tune his tempura. My father made the sitar that Mr. George Harrison bought, and this was the one he would later play on Beatles' records."

Steve Turner, The Gospel according to the Beatles, pg 137


Does Mr. Turner need a proofreader or did The Beatles pick up some Japanese food at the Indian music store?