Added 1 new A* page:The group art show I'm in opens tomorrow--er, tonight...Friday May 11th from 6-9 pm, at any rate! I will be milling around trying to look like I know what I'm talking about with the other artists, probably, so I will be ripe for the plucking if you want to stop by and bend my ear for a while. :) There will be lots of artists and art to see in this "portrait"-themed group show (my dad has a couple photos there!), so it should be a lot of fun!
This is all at the Chocolat Vitale fancy chocolate drink shop in Seattle's Phinney neighborhood:
My contribution is a signed and framed print from my digital A* days, as well as one from "The Princess and the Giant." So probably nothing you haven't seen before, BUT there will be lots to see from other artists, and probably loads to talk about. Probably also free tasty snacks of some sort, if you get there before the starving artists snarfle them all! :d
Also keep in mind I'm going to be having a solo show at this same location a month from now--yep, I'll have the place all to myself then! That's when I'll have a bunch of stuff on show, particularly original A* ink wash paintings, yay. =) There is a little more info about these shows here.
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Private company SpaceX just showed off their "Dragon" space capsule at the "first annual Spacecraft Technology Expo" (hm convenient! :D) at the LA Convention Center. There's a photo in that linked article, but eh it just kinda looks like a rounded-off and smoothed-out Apollo capsule, really. BUT the interesting parts start soon: on May 19th, one is flying up to the International Space Station on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. This trial flight will just be carrying cargo to the station, but it will (if successful) mark the first time a commercial spacecraft has docked with the ISS. And of course THE DRAGON (man it would be way cooler if they painted it with scales or something :|) is really intended for manned spaceflight, so the idea is for it to go on to bigger and bolder things, providing it passes little tests like this one.
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A workshop apparently used by ancient Mayan astronomers has just been found among "a large complex of Mayan ruins in the rain forest at Xultun in northeastern Guatemala." The walls of the 6-foot square room are covered with 1,200-year-old astronomical tables and figures in the Mayans' complicated calendar and numbering system, and include calculations of dates spanning about 6000 years; these newly discovered astronomical tables are by far the oldest found so far--600 years older than the previously oldest known ones. The article has some photos!
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A* forum poster AndToBeLoved just pointed out a surprisingly A*-esque comic series that ran from 1984 to 1986 in the British "2000 AD" comic magazine: writer Alan Moore and artist Ian Gibson's The Ballad of Halo Jones. Looks pretty neat! It's new to me but the resemblance probably isn't all that coincidental, as glimpses I've been getting over the past couple years of other, older British adventure serials--Jeff Hawke, primarily, and also tiny bits of things like Dan Dare and Garth--have increasingly been inspiring my work on A*. Those old strips really had something special about them--zest, spirit, and wonder combined with absolutely superb and even daring artwork--and they certainly seemed to have inspired a good deal of this latter-day "Halo Jones" as well.
(Let me not forget to mention that AndToBeLoved happens to be the writer of a couple fine webcomics: the eponymous young adult tale (some mature language) And To Be Loved, and the classic newspaper strip format humor comic, My Girlfriend's Dog.)
Halo Jones herself even looks remarkably Selenic in certain ways, if I may say so. Artist Ian Gibson's account of his side of her creation is an interesting read.
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I do think we should always be a little skeptical when men undertake to write women. Since I would be the last person to claim any particular insight into this endeavor, I just have to settle for trying to make my female characters interesting people (shock!).
There is one way in which I try to leverage my ignorance when it comes to writing Selenis, however, and that is to rely on the smoke and mirrors of mystery and distance--which is where a good deal of the whole femme fatale archetype has come from in our cultural output, I would guess. So we don't tend to hear her thoughts directly, unlike Vero's case with his frequent self-narration. This often forces long periods of silence on the comic, which worried me at first but which I have actually grown to enjoy, as it gives lots of opportunities to play at guessing what she's thinking. We have learned at least one thing about her, though: she is fiercely independent and determined to be second to nobody--not even the Grim Reaper!
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