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I've been having trouble logging in to my website. Just want to see if I can do it now.

The Golden Compass

Watching this fairly awesome looking trailer inspired me to download and listen to the audio version of the book it's based on, which is called "His Dark Materials, Book One: The Golden Compass" (also known as "Northern Lights" in its native England) by Phillip Pullman. It's really great, and now I absolutely can't wait for the movie version.

The story revolves around a young girl named Lyra Belacqua who lives in a world in which every human is born with a sort of "spirit animal" called a daemon. The daemon is akin to a soul and takes the form of a physical talking animal that accompany their human at all times. It is taboo to touch someone else's daemon and separation of a human from his/her daemon causing unbearable physical and emotional pain on the part of both human and daemon, and often results in death. Lyra finds out about an organization that is kidnapping children and forcibly removing them from their daemons because they believe that "impure" thoughts and desires are caused by the daemons. Battles ensue, people get killed, and there are talking polar bears that wear armor.

This is crazy shit but somehow it all works, and it's real good. This is a trilogy, so I've still got two more books, and I can't wait.

Bridgman

Emaline

A character from The Sundays. She shows up in, like, issue four or five.

Bridgman

New FoLD website layout

This is not a working page yet, just a layout I made in Photoshop. So I'll probably have to make some tweaks to this, but you can get a good idea what the Flight of the Living Dead website will look like when series two starts (probably in September). I'm doing three pages every Monday for six weeks in a row.

Bridgman, nudes

I haven't been able to keep up with my Bridgman sketches because of my computer issues (I only have a PDF of the book, not a paper copy), but here's a sketch from the book I did weeks ago. Now that I've got my computer back, I'm going to start this back up again.



And in the meantime I did sketches out of a couple nude pose books I have ("The Figure in Motion" and "The Nude Figure").

Comic Book Recommendation of the Week

First, I managed to get my computer working again via some questionable methods that are possibly dangerous and very likely a fire hazard, but never mind that. There's new Flight of the Living Dead on its way and The Sundays will be sent out to prospective publishers within the week.

The Girl From H.O.P.P.E.R.S
By Jaime Hernandez

Now, what I've really come here to talk about is my latest comic obsession, LOVE & ROCKETS, which was recommended to me by my friend Joe Frontirre. The comic, by Jaime & Gilbert Hernandez, has been published on and off since the early 80s, but they just started releasing these big trades of all the stories in chronological order, so I picked up the first one, "Maggie the Mechanic," a few weeks ago and absolutely loved it. I've been itching to read volume two, "The Girl From H.O.P.P.E.R.S.," since then but was only just today able to find a copy at my local Borders.

Jaime is a fantastic artist and impresses me with his talent on every page. He also writes convincing and natural sounding dialogue, despite writing mostly for female characters. This is one of those indie slice-of-life comics I'm always going on about, and fans of other similar stuff like "Strangers in Paradise," "Wet Moon," or dare I say it, "The Sundays," should maybe check it out. There's a third volume called "La Perla Loca" out in December, and there are already two volumes of Gilbert's stuff as well. I'm not as familiar with Gilbert (having only read his Vertigo GN "Sloth" and one regular issue of "Love & Rockets"), but I'm looking forward to picking up his trades as well.