Now Boarding

Flight of the Living Dead starts right now

The Best of 2006

My picks for the best stuff of 2006, in response to a poll at ANP:

: 1. Top 5 movies

5. The Departed
4. Borat
3. Pirates of the Caribbean 2
2. A Scanner Darkly
1. Little Miss Sunshine

: 2. 5 worst movies

5. An American Haunting
4. Eight Below
3. The Hills Have Eyes
2. Final Destination 3
1. When a Stranger Calls

: 3. Top 5 TV shows

5. Heroes
4. The Office
3. Battlestar Galactica
2. Lost
1. Dexter

: 4. Top 5 comic books

5. The Walking Dead
4. Wet Moon 2
3. Fables
2. Flight 3
1. Strangers in Paradise

: 5. Top song

"Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley

: 6. Top album

"The Life Pursuit" by Belle & Sebastian

Diary 12-27-06

FoLD pre-reviews

Here's what people are saying about Flight of the Living Dead before it's begun!

"..from what i've seen of the pages every time i enter our studio space, it is fantastic... " - Joe Frontirre, studiomate and Kubert student

"..it looks like such a great idea. Just from the cover design you know just what the book is about. I think you could sell it as a film just based off of the poster for it." - Mark Smith, writer of Amazing Joy Buzzards

Hopefully they don't retract those statements when the comic actually premieres.

Flight of the Living Dead is taking off early

Rather than putting up the first eight pages tomorrow night at midnight, the first FOUR pages will be going up tonight at midnight, and the next four pages will be up tomorrow night. The rest of the year will be going ahead as scheduled, one page per Monday until December 31, 2007. So check back in... about six hours forty-five minutes for the start of Flight of the Living Dead.

James Randi lecture from 2001

New Grind House Trailer

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/grindhouse_hd.html

Go Away Pac-Xon!

I've just realized that while I posted the Pac-Xon game on my blog so that I could play it easily whenever I want (at least until it disappears into the archive and I have to search for it), the theme music plays every time someone goes to this page. So I've changed it to a link. It's worth playing, though, if you haven't. Check it out two posts down from this one.

New Version of the FoLD Cover

Go Pac-Xon Go!

Go Pac-Xon Go!

Twenty-five

That's how many years I've been around now.

Grind House Trailer

I don't know how this movie escaped my radar until now, but I'm very excited about this: Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez are directing two feature-length horror movies that are being shown together (with fake movie trailers in-between) with the title Grind House. Here's the trailer:

http://mftm.blogspot.com/2006/10/
grind-house-2007-scream-awards-trailer.html

Rodriguez's segment will be a zombie story (and we all know how I feel about zombies), and Tarantino's segment features Rose McGowan with a machine gun for a leg.

I feel like this movie was made just for me.

EDIT: Rose McGowan actually appears in both segments, but only with the machine-gun-leg in Rodriguez's story. Which also features TV's Naveen Andrews (Sayid from "Lost"). Whee!

Dexter

"Dexter" is such an amazing show. Well-written, well-acted, interesting plots, twists and turns, tension, and all the stuff that makes great television shows great. Apparently the first season (which is twelve episodes long) is based on the book Darkly Dreaming Dexter, which I bought today from Borders along with the second book in the series (upon which the second season will apparently be based), Dearly Devoted Dexter. From what I understand, the third book in the series, Dexter in the Dark, is coming out this summer. I hope they never stop making them. In the absence of new episodes of "Lost" (at least until February), "Dexter" is my favorite show currently on the air.

And I think this is the first time in my life I've ever bought a mystery novel.

New Jam Strip

New jam strip starring the Joes (Frontirre and O'Brien, respectively), and Kyle Haase.

Flight of the Living Dead Update

Did a new page today. I really love this comic and I'm enjoying the hell out of drawing every page. The main purpose of doing FoLD was, well, mainly to get back into doing webcomics, since it's sort of where I got my start and I enjoy the structure of a serialized story where feedback is instantaneous. But the purpose was also to push myself over the next year into doing some more experimental stuff and figuring out what works about my style and what doesn't work, and getting faster at producing pages on a regular deadline while still trying to maintain a standard of quality.

What this means is that sometimes I try stuff in FoLD that I wouldn't do normally, just to try it. There will sometimes be stuff that will look out of place or awkward, because I'm trying it out for the first time. I might decide to do a page in a stark, black-and-white Frank Miller style or incorporate photos or try other things that I might normally shy away from. I might even do a page or two in color. The first eight pages are all being done in inkwash, which is something I've tried before but have never really embraced fully. These pages look good, though, and I'm liking the way the gray tones complement my line work. It's giving my stuff a Ross Campbell feel that I really enjoy.

The comic starts three weeks from tomorrow, and continues every week for the next year. I cannot tell you how excited, but also scared, I am about this. I fully intend to meet every deadline and make sure each page goes up when it's supposed to. For someone like me, who is used to missing deadlines and shirking responsibility, that's terrifying.

And if this goes well, I've recently come up with a name for the sequel, which (like Flight of the Living Dead) is another zombie title I can't believe hasn't been used already.

ComicSpace

MySpace for comic creators, I guess. Here's me: www.comicspace.com/scottewen.

Bookworm Adventures

Found this game through Penny Arcade, the writer of which describes it as a "Scrabble RPG." You create words from tiled letters, and the better your word, the more damage it does to your opponent. Insanely addictive. Here's my top ten word list:

Both "Lex" and "Scott" are me; Lex is the default name and I just played through the demo twice. Even though "nuisances" is worth more points, I cannot tell you how happy I was to pull out "juxtapose." I don't know what a "vocabular" is. I was trying for "vocabulary" and didn't have a Y, but the game took it anyway. I suppose it's someone who vocabulates.

The Lost A-Team

I like this comic strip

Found a link to this over at the Intelligent Brian board. It's one of the strangest comics I've ever read, and it's hilarious.
Ged by Kyle Baddeley

New Sketch!

In the sketches section, there's a drawing of Kat Cooper, main character of FLIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, as a zombie. Done for my buddy Dave.

Kyle at desk

Pennies abound.

Read the first seven pages of THE SUNDAYS #1

Right now! More soon.

Comic Book Recommendation of the Week

Acme Novelty Library #17
By Chris Ware

This is my first experience with Chris Ware's narrative work, having been impressed with his art after seeing it last week at the New York Jewish Museum. His art is very simplistic and clean, and he writes the kind of comic stories I love to read, the "slice-of-life" type stuff seen in Daniel Clowes and Guy Delisle's work.

Also read this week:

The Punisher vol. 6: Barracuda - Possibly my favorite of the Punisher MAX stories so far.
The Punisher X-Mas - One of the first non-Ennis written Punisher stories I've liked. Definitely better than last year's Christmas special.
Supermarket - I liked this story a lot until the ending, which seemed rushed. The artwork is very good, though.
The Walking Dead #32 - Really good. I'm glad the story's starting to pick up again after a few issues of not much happening.
Batman/The Spirit - I loved Darwyn Cooke's artwork, but Jeph Loeb's story just seemed cheesy and unnecessary. It seems this book was made for no reason other than to team up Batman and The Spirit, not because there was a good idea for a story. I'm looking forward to Darwyn Cooke's ongoing Spirit comic, though, since he's writing it himself.
Criminal #2 - Tops even the first issue. This is a really great series. I'm going to have to go back and pick up Sleeper now.
Gorillaz: The Rise of the Ogre - Being a huge fan of both the Gorillaz' music and Jamie Hewlett's artwork, this was a no-brainer. Haven't read it all yet, but it's definitely a funny and beautiful book.
David Boring - The second act of this three-act book by Daniel Clowes seemed a little out-of-place, but overall it was very enjoyable and beautifully drawn.

Audiobooks are fun

Oftentimes while at my desk working, I like to listen to podcasts such as The Ricky Gervais Show, Penn Radio, or Party Truck USA. I just discovered audible.com, which lets you download audiobooks for much less than they are in the store (usually less than $20).

So far, I've listened to about half of Eragon, which is shit. And I've just downloaded David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day. I'll let you know how it is.

Photos from Studio Like

Reference for THE SUNDAYS:




A few weeks ago, we started leaving pennies anonymously on Kyle's desk because he got annoyed when he found them there. A few days ago we started taping them to the underside of his desk. He has yet to find them:

Scientology: TR Demo