A Bureaucracy of One

A Muse Like No Other

Oh Internets, you know me so well! It's Day Four of this thing, and I still haven't figured out how to plan ahead and get a topic lined up for the day's post. Not that this is an unusual behaviour for me; homework assignements, projects, and papers were always being saved put off until the last minute. It's not so much that I crave the thrill and excitement of shaving it down to the wire, oh no! It's just that nothing focuses the mind quite so wonderfully as imminent death.

A friend of mine told me that if I fail this 30 Day Challenge, I have to film myself watching 2 Girls 1 Cup. And that. Ain't. Happening.

Death of Decency and Good Taste is Death all the same, so it was with a little bit of elation that I ran across something that caused ideas to gel, and my Muse to visit me from whatever part of my mind she usually resides.

Oddly enough, it was a comic about a writer's muse, from the excellent (and strongly NSFW) webcomic Oglaf. Seriously, DO NOT click any of these links if vaginas, naked breasts, or Ents with very literal morning wood offend you (or would get you fired).

Truly, anyone who with a creative bent knows how horribly demanding a muse can be. (Un)Fortunately mine's ADD is just as strong as my own, so she gets bored quickly and leaves. Which is only one-third of the excuse for the brevity of this post. The other two-thirds are that it is bloody difficult to type one-handed with an 18 lb. cat purring on your chest, and the fact that I really didn't put much more thought into this at all.

 

Comicsense: Supermassive Black Hole A*

A while back a friend of mine asked me to do an infrequent blog post about some of the webcomics I read; giving a little bit of what I liked/disliked about them; what drew them to me in the first place; and why I keep reading them.  I said, "Sure, no problem!" and then promptly forgot about it.  Well, while reading through my webcomics last night some thing caught my attention, as some things are wont to do, and it reminded me of my promise to my friend.  So, here goes.

 

Of the thirty-one webcomics I regularly read, Supermassive Black Hole A* has possibly the most unique art style and layout of any of them.  

Using only black, white, and every shade of grey in between, artist Ben Chambers has created a noir-esque space opera that, while still managing to hit several scifi tropes, avoids the cliches that cripples so many others.  And he does so with a single-panel format. Granted, they are very large panels, but he gets away with it by updating multiple pages at once.  More importantly, he has a firm grasp of "show, don't tell", and lets the action tell his story for him.  In fact, he has another comic done in the same art style, The Princess and the Giant, that is completely dialog-free.  I haven't really gotten into that one yet, but the narrative does not suffer from it's lack of words.

So, what was it about SMBHA* that reminded me that I had a promise to fulfill?  It was a news post titled Phil Foglio AAAAAAAAAAAAAA (or words to that effect - I think I'm missing some A's), wherein Mr. Chambers waxes ecstatic about meeting Phil Foglio at a comic convention, and then completely (and justifiably) loses his shite when he learns that the esteemed Mr. Foglio reads SMBH. 

Why is that a big deal?  For those who don't know, Phil Foglio is a four time Hugo Award winning-author/artist of many, many things comic/scifi/fantasy-related.  Girl Genius, for example (for which he and his wife have won two of those Hugos).  Dude's big news.  And he reads SMBH.

So, when I saw that news item I realized that SMBH was the first comic I needed to write about (and given my track record, it might be the last), as knowing that Phil Foglio also read the comic cemented SMBH in my mind as being a tier one webcomic.  Maybe it doesn't have the following of Something*Positive or Questionable Content, but dammit, it should!

On Reasons to NOT Get a Golden Doodle

Otter writes and draws one of my favorite webcomics, A Girl and Her Fed, and on occasion, she has shared details of the disaster that is life with her parents' golden doodle, Toby aka Filthspigot.  Let me tell you, from what Otter has relayed in her blog posts, the dog has earned that moniker!

I bring this up now because Otter has written an open letter to President-Elect Obama on what sort of dog NOT to get his daughters, and posted it to her LJ.  Read it as not only is it a cautionary tale of a run-away eugenics program by god dog breeders, but it is also gut-bustingly funny!

Dark Horse's War of the Worlds

Did you feel let down by Tom Cruise's portrayal of Tom Cruise Witnesses the End of the World in 2005's War of the Worlds?  Were you highly entertained, and then utterly confused, by the War of the Worlds television series in 1988?  Did you find the rather clumsy use of religion (the Martian craft crashing just before it was to destroy the church) in the 1953 War of the Worlds to be a touch insulting?

Well then, Dark Horse has a version you will enjoy.  It is a graphic novel adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel, and follows fairly faithfully from the source material.  No impenetrable shields here!  Oh, and it is free to read on the web.

Enjoy!