Living in North Dakota, the Post About How Terrible Winter Is

So here's the thing about living in North Dakota: it's terrible.  For many reasons, but high on the list is the winters.  If you know me, you may say, "um, but Jay, it's not THAT different from Minneapolis, where you came from."  But you'd be wrong. It's way different.

First of all, when we get, say, 17 inches of snow in one storm, out here on the open plains, that shit blows everywhere.  Most of the time, it's not the snowfall that's even the main problem, it's the wind kicking it up into whiteout conditions and blasting it into  drifts 5 feet high.

Second, for an area that has snow sometimes literally 8 months out of the year, they're sure bad at dealing with it.  TWO DAYS after the last snowstorm, streets were still not fully plowed in the nearest major town.  When there is snow up to my car's bumper at major intersections 24 hours after snow has stopped falling, you have an infrastructure problem.  In Minneapolis, you better believe they know how to get the streets clear.  The second a snowflake gently drifts to earth, an army of plows are out.

But it's not just the city itself, you'd think every car with an ND plate was newly moved up here from Florida the way people forget how to drive in snowy, slippery conditions.  You have people either going comically slow or dangerously fast, good luck if you remember how to drive effectively, no one else will.

Third, it's just goddamn cold.  It was -21 a few days ago and it's only December. The real cold is still coming.  Combine that with a wind that never stops blowing ever and you get windchills at like -50 or worse at times.  There are days where the actual temperature is lower than -40.  At -40, you can throw a glass of water into the air and it will freeze before it hits the ground.  Water vapor in the air can sublime into ice crystals: you can get precipitation from a cloudless sky.  It's cold as shit here, and don't let anyone tell you they don't mind it, or that you get used to it.  If they tell you that, they're liars.

I might start a series of posts on why living here is the worst.  It's a good theme to revisit, because I don't know that I'll ever run out of ideas for it.  

Do I Really Need Another Place to Post My Art?

One of the original reasons I started this blog was to have a place that wasn't (ugh) DeviantArt to post my drawings.

But to be honest, I've really grown to love Instagram as a platform to share my art. If you want almost constant updates, click that link back there to go to my account.  But that's just it: I can snap a pic with my phone and post my sketches almost instantly, without scanning and trimming and uploading them.  I've met a lot of supportive and cool people online through Twitter and Instagram and it's a much more positive experience for me that DeviantArt ever was.  

I guess it doesn't hurt to post some stuff here, too, but mostly finished, colored stuff that is already on my desktop.  Sketches and works in progress will be more on the Instagram side of things. Below, you can check out some of my recent bits of art.  Though if you follow me on Insta, you have probably already seen them.

I'm constantly toying with Curt's design.  Since I settled on a rounder style, less angular, I've been much
happier with it, but I actually have a lot of trouble with male hairstyles.  I don't really know why.  Since
this latest incarnation of my comic has them as aging hipsters, I felt like this was a good look, and a bit
of an update on the existing one I'd been drawing him with for awhile, just combed instead of spiked.

The idea here was kind of a punky Batgirl, bright, dyed RED hair, kind of wildly escaping the mask, blue lipstick,
and a punk-rock sneer.  It's pretty quick and dirty, because I just kind of wanted to get the idea out, but I would
like to revisit it, given enough time.  I'm like, super, super lazy about that kind of thing, though.

Here's a panel from my upcoming webcomic relaunch!  More on that in January!  But I am very
proud of this drawing, and I put some extra detail into it so I can use it for promotional purposes.

Just a punk girl.  I really like how the color in the face turned out.

Doc Brown, from my favorite movies, Back to the Future!  The original color is much more vivid, but I liked the
washed-out look whatever Instagram filter this was, so now I consider that to be the finished version, haha!

Grant Morrison's Batman, or, "HH"

Obviously I'm a big comic nerd. I have been forever, since my Dad would bring me tattered Silver Age issues from Thrift stores or gloomy 80's post-Miller nightmares from the local Shinder's (that was a comic and card chain that I'm pretty sure doesn't exist anymore.)

I sort of fell off a few years ago, though.  In 2011, DC Comics (yes, I'm a DC guy first and foremost) relaunched their ENTIRE comic universe with the New 52, radically changing beloved character's origins, histories, and attitudes.  I chose the word radically, because it was a clear attempt by out of touch executives to make their "stodgy" classic characters like Superman TOTALLY RADICAL BROS!  They recruited a bunch of shitty, aging former Image creators (Image Comics is a whole post on its own) known for style over substance EVEN IN THE 90s and set them loose on Gotham and Metropolis.

And you got crap like this.

JOKER WILL BE SO MUCH MORE

XTREME WITH NO FACE, BRUH!!

I'm getting off track.  The point was, the world that I grew up reading about and loving changed.  And I hated it.  The weird thing was that this came right at the tail end of Grant Morrison's monumental 5 year run on Batman, a mad, brilliant, full throttle, completely insane, mind-f---ing celebration of all of Batman's continuity, all nearly a century of it.  And it almost seemed like a goodbye to that world I loved.

Look, everyone has their own interpretation of characters like Batman.  It drives my wife crazy, because she feels that there is no REAL version of that character.  I feel like Batman somehow does accommodate many different interpretations pretty well, but I certainly have my preferred version, and while Morrison's was not perfect for me, it's very close.

Look at me. Look--hey--look at me.

I'm Batman.

Morrison's Batman was almost superhumanly smart, an unstoppable intellect combined with unmatched will to combat big-idea threats.  He was driven by compassion and a desire to keep what happened to him from happening to anyone else, not by childish vengeance.  Morrison's Batman was scary because he was always 25 steps ahead of the guy who was 5 steps ahead.  This was a Batman who had a backup personality in case he was mind-wiped or attacked mentally, for gods sake! How cool is that?!  When Superman calls someone "the most dangerous man on Earth," you should probably listen, Protex.

If that IS your real name.

Rather than shy a way from the crazy, outlandish sci-fi era of Batman from the 50s and the camp of the 60s, like most modern Bat-writers, Morrison reasoned that all of these weird adventures happened, they just happened largely in his mind, as part of the "Black Casebook," a series of sensory deprivation experiments he participated in for the military. 

This embracing of stories that most modern batfans and writers were uncomfortable with, albeit through a modern lens, was unheard of and brilliant.  I loved that Morrison made it all work, and yeah, it was tweaked and reworked a little bit, but the idea that you didn't have to exclude the weirder parts of Batman's history was just so irresistible to me that I get excited just remembering reading it! I almost couldn't believe no one had thought of it before.

"Uh Oh."

A big theme of Morrison's run was death and the immortality of Batman as an IDEA.  "BATMAN AND ROBIN WILL NEVER DIE" as a rallying cry of hope and that some ideas are too big to crush.  Even when Bruce Wayne died for two years of his run, Morrison had former Robin Dick Grayson take up the mantle and become an upbeat, friendly Batman to a scowling, no-nonsense Robin in Damian, Bruce's son with Talia Al Ghul.  This reversal of the traditional dynamic was unexpected, well done, and most of all, fun. Honestly if there was even an out-of-continuity monthly book where Dick stayed Batman with Damian as Robin, I'd buy it religiously.

It was weird how Robin became a small 65 year old man.

Of course, eventually, Bruce came back, but asked Dick to stay in the cowl, and for awhile, there were TWO Batmen, and an entire team of allies in Batman, Inc.  When I heard this announced, to be honest, I thought it sounded stupid and yet, once again, Grant Morrison made it one of my favorite comics every month.  Giving obscure, forgotten characters and some new creations time to shine, he took the idea of Batman as a symbol and figure of inspiration to new heights, and made it a global force to be reckoned with. 

"TWO of them?  Well, there's a ONE of ME!"

It was in the middle of this high-concept book that the New 52 came crashing in, disrupting Morrison's obsessively plotted epic and forcing him to roll with it as best he could.  He managed to finish it in a satisfying way, with yet another threat vanquished, and a longtime foe seemingly dealt with for good (yeah, right) but I can't help feeling that the change had been a real problem for his plans.  The tiniest bit of enthusiasm was missing and the ending felt slightly arbitrary, too small for such a big run. 

I guess it may have been impossible to have an ending as epic as the rest of the run, after 5 years, anyone can run out of steam.  But I can't imagine having the rug you've built your entire tower of blocks on get pulled out from under you isn't frustrating. That the whole thing didn't collapse entirely is testament to just how good a writer Morrison is.

HOLY ERA THAT MOST BAT-WRITERS ARE UNCOMFORTABLE WITH, BATMAN!!

But as I said earlier, the whole thing in retrospect feels like a goodbye, a sendoff to the DC Comics I grew up loving, the Batman I grew up following.  Maybe Morrison sensed a change coming, and just didn't know the exact timing.  Maybe he straight up knew (though the whole New 52 seemed like a knee jerk surprise, given the reactions of many comic professionals.) Or maybe he just loved that character and his universe as much as the most rabid fan and wanted to pay the best tribute he could to an amazing, enduring character that's been around for almost 100 years and hopefully won't be going anywhere anytime soon.

I suspect not, after all, BATMAN AND ROBIN WILL NEVER DIE!

OMG THIS STILL GETS ME PUMPED UP

70s Action Vibe

Really wanted to go for a 70s action movie vibe.  I was originally gonna wash out the color, but I ended up liking the brightness, so I kept it.  I'm pretty happy with the final result; the gun could be more detailed, I guess.

Red Bull

Red Bull.  I used to drink it.  It was delicious, but now I drink coffee.

The Movie Post

One of my big passions in life is movies, and I love talking about the best films ever made, or my favorite films ever with people, and it can be hard to narrow it down, or even nail down what the criteria are to make such a list.

So with that in mind, and as an excuse to talk about some movies, I decided to come up with a list of favorite movies by definition of how rewatchable they are, or how often I can just put them on and watch them without doing other things.

1. Back to the Future

Specifically the first one, although Part 2 is pretty neck and neck for me, and really, I almost count the whole trilogy as one, because it's the best example of a movie trilogy in existence.  I've had the trilogy on VHS, DVD, and recently I got the Blu Ray, making them the only movies I've done that with.  If it's on TV, I will watch it, and I never seem to get tired of it.  The amount of detail put into everything, even little things that get changed in the background (like Twin Pines Mall becoming Lone Pine Mall after Marty runs over a sapling in the past) always gives me something new to notice, and the way the writing, acting, pacing, and music all combine to tell an adventure is just pitch perfect.  Everything about the films is iconic, and rightly so, if even one thing was changed, I don't see how the result would have been as good.

2. Avatar

Avatar gets a lot of shit, because it was so successful, people like to take it down a peg, but the truth is, it's successful for a reason.  You can say it's a bunch of tropes, but they're tropes because they work.  The visuals are INSANE, I could just watch it on mute and look at the pretty pictures, and when combined with the world-building going on, the drama of a stranger in a strange land, the excitement of an old fashioned war picture, and the romantic throughline to give it heart, it's an endlessly engaging movie that tends to suck me back in whenever I start watching it.

3. V For Vendetta

Hugo Weaving's performance alone is enough to make this list, because he's hypnotic using only body language and his voice.  But when you combine it with eye-catching visuals, a great supporting cast, and a fantastically written epic of anti-authority and class warfare, you've got a movie that entertains and, without getting too pretentious, gives you a little something to think about.  Even though it's been criticized for being oversimplified and preachy, I disagree, the movie holds up to a hell of a lot of viewings for me.

4. Fight Club

When I saw Fight Club on VHS at my friend's Mom's house in my senior year of high school, I'd never seen anything like it.  Like the Matrix, I think it really helped usher in truly modern filmmaking, and it blew my hair back.  I didn't realize how a movie could weave visuals, narration, and plot together in a way that was so engaging you almost forgot it was a movie and when the plot twist at the end hits you, it's just a gut punch.  Fight Club not only made me realize how much movies could do, it made me a lifelong devotee of David Fincher as well as Edward Norton and Brad Pitt.

5. Oblivion

I'm gonna throw a new one in as a kind of wild card.  I haven't seen is movie as much as the others on this list, but I can say with a lot of confidence that I will.  It's my favorite new movie in quite awhile, and I'm a sucker for good sci-fi. I love how it looks, the design is phenomenal, clean and sterile-looking but still interesting and even beautiful to look at.  I like Tom Cruise, and this is a good example why, he's holding the movie together by himself as the sole character throughout a lot of the movie.  The story is a little predictable, objectively, but it's engaging enough as a film that I didn't find myself trying to guess, just going along for the ride.  And that music!  M83 turned in what may be my favorite film score of all time, an epic, driving, beautiful electronic tour de force that sounds completely contemporary and cutting edge without immediately becoming dated. It's going to be a classic, when people talk movie music.

So there we go, what I'm going with as my favorite movies based on watch ability and my own personal engagement while they are on.  Honorable mentions: Indiana Jones (original trilogy), Elysium, Serenity, Iron Man, Alien (original trilogy), the Descent, Batman: Under the Red Hood, Captain America 2, Batman Returns, The Thing (1981), Heathers, way too many more....

Wedding Program

My friend asked me last minute to design his wedding program.  They wanted something in a comic book style, so I initially thought about trying to do an old school romance comic thing, but I really just didn't have the time, and anyway, that doesn't necessarily translate into the broadly understood cultural shorthand that was needed.

I decided to just kind of go with a simple design, two figures in a heart.  I still think this is the best, and I'll stand by that, especially since I was given ZERO direction, and just set free to do what I wanted, with little time to mess around.  I think it's clean and wedding-y while maintaining a comic book feel.  They also sent me a specific background they liked, so I did a version using it, although I tweaked the colors because it was pretty intense.  I really hoped they wouldn't do this one, because the printing would have been a mess.

The BG they had in mind

They ended up liking the first one, but wanted the colors more of a dark plum or purple to go with their wedding colors, but had I known that, I would have done something different, for more contrast, and not done the color outline, since it just bleeds into the black outline and looks extra thick!  I took the background out of the heart because that would have just been SUPER dark, and just kinda rolled with it.  

They were super happy with it, although they were really attached to that font in the middle one, because they pasted that in, instead of the one I used.  But for as last minute as it was, I'm pretty happy with the original, and it's pretty cool to see your art used and printed off like that.