Holidays

No more posts until the new year. Here's to a restful break for all.

Scott McCloud

Scott McCloud, author of the great books Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and the new Making Comics, was in Halifax last night, at the Strange Adventures Comic shop. I was lucky enough to meet him and to get him to sign a copy of Making Comics.

Scott has thought more about comics and how they work than anybody else I have read. When I read his books I feel that thrill that comes from reading something really insightful. And it happens over and over again.

When I started writing the Daisy Dreamer comic about six years ago, I didn't really know what I was doing. I had some idea, and a good example to follow in the scripts of my Daisy predecessor, Mark Shainblum. But I hadn't thought deeply about how comics worked. Reading Understanding Comics changed that. Suddenly, it all made sense -- and it helped make me a better writer too.

Scott asked me if thinking about what I was doing made it harder for me to do it. That can happen sometimes, but in this case, not at all.

Scott and his family are on a mission to visit every US state and Canadian province in the coming year. If he's in your town, try to go and see him.

(Cross-posted from my Daisy Chains blog.)

New proofreading symbols!

Courtesy the comix page of Geist Magazine.

Includes new proofreaders' marks for comments like "Remove permanently from your lexicon" and "You wish."

There sure have been times when I could have used these -- and some of the others -- as a proofreader.

George W. Bush Singers

Here's a group that sets the sayings of Bush to music, sung with a full choir. Most songs include him speaking, along with a choral interpretation.

They take stuff like this and turn it into this.

Monday morning Tom Tomorrow routine

Tom Tomorrow is a long-standing leftie cartoonist who can be hilarious and biting ("Action McNews!). Lately, he's been a bit tired -- but hey, he has been at it for a couple of decades, and, like many on the left, seems to be demoralized and finding it harderand harder to find humour in the horrors of the Republicans.

Tom's cartoon, This Modern World, appears every Monday on Salon, and I almost always check it out. Even more entertaining than the cartoon sometimes (though also very tiresome) are the comments (aka "Salon letters") readers post. One guy is always first off the bat to say how bad the cartoon is. Others follow, either to agree, or to tell the guy to get a life. Week after week.

How high is the level of debate here? Well, here's what Salon's editors think. Last week's cartoon: Letters on this article: 17. Editor's choice letters: 0.

Fat: The Upside

A Florida businessman wants to sell liposuctioned fat to Norway, for use as bio-diesel.

His company "is in the process of signing an agreement with US hospital giant Jackson Memorial. This deal would give Venøy & Co. around 11,500 liters of human fat a week from liposuction operations, which is enough to produce about 10,000 liters of bio-diesel."

Full story here.

Zaccardelli: The Volpe Defence

It must be a witch-hunt launched because he's Italian.

First snowfall of the year

The Muddy Hill has become the Icy Hill. Like so many Canadians, I'm shocked. I know this happens every year. But again? This year? Really?

Neo-con fantasies

Rick Salutin's latest column (behind the Globe and Mail firewall, but available free through Rabble) and the most recent Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon complement each other nicely.

Salutin takes a hatchet to the loathsome David Frum, who apparently still doesn't get that his big ideas when it came to democracy in Iraq could have anything to do with the reality of thousands of people being killed every month. (Mark Allan Stamaty's "Boox" cartoon of Frum from February 2003 is a more hilarious send-up of Frum -- who is cited as author of two of the three words in the phrase "Axis of evil").

Tom the Dancing Bug takes us into the world of Nate the Neoconservative, who returns from work at the end of the day to the wrong house. He refuses to allow the reality to intrude into his own notion of where he is, and blames everyone around him for the ensuing chaos.

Both are worth a look.