The Many Faces of Art Forgery - William Casement

Casement divides his book into 3 parts. The first is a broad history of art forgery, what we know of, anyway, going to back to people in Rome creating sculptures and then carving the names of famous artists of ancient Greece on them. This section covers not only forgers, but what he calls "copyists", who apparently make reproductions of famous pieces, but are open about it. You know it's not an actual Rembrandt or Donatello, but something done to look just like one of their pieces.

As he moves into the 20th Century, he delves into greater detail about the backstories of known forgers, their techniques, preferred styles to work in, their trials (if there were any.) This was the part that dragged the most for me. He includes photographs of forgeries in the book, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about art to be able to tell anything, even when he puts a picture of the original alongside the fake.

Part 2 is largely a discussion of the concept of forgery, or perhaps the idea of what makes the actual artwork. Early on, Casement discusses how some people define a "fake" as someone reproducing an original, a copyist that doesn't admit it, while a "forgery" is when you make an original painting, but in the style of a more famous artist, and try to pass it off as one of theirs. Yet others would reverse those definitions. So Han van Meergen made Vermeer paintings, including one, Supper at Emmaus, that Vermeer never actually painted. Forgery, or fake?

This was the part I found most interesting, as it also looks at the notion of work-for-hire, or having "studio" artists like Rubens or Warhol, who may create all or part of the actual painting based off a conceptual sketch or design by their boss. From there, it looks at the notion of appropriation, first in taking an image or work someone else created and repurposing it into something else, and eventually cultural appropriation, in terms of who gets to make art in the styles of various cultures, but also, who gets to define what is the art of a given culture.

Casement talks a lot about Indigenous Australians in that section, and a Richard Bell who points out there are many Indigenous Australians who live in urban settings and whose work reflects that life. Does that mean their art isn't part of their culture because it doesn't match the conceived notions of what their art is "supposed" to be?

Although the main takeaway I had from Part 2 was that I consider conceptualism, where guys like Damian Hirst and Jeff Koons argue they're the artist even all they contribute is the idea and someone else actually paints or sculpts it, bullshit. When I go to a comic convention and ask someone to draw me a picture of a character, I'm not the artist because I suggested the idea, the person who actually drew it is. But Hirst and Koons come off as hypocritical tools in this book, arguing it's fine for them to appropriate other people's work, then getting huffy at the slightest hint someone might be doing the same with their work.

Part 3 is a discussion of moral arguments around forgery. Those used by forgers or others to justify their actions, but also the question of authenticity and historical value. Little bit of a Ship of Theseus situation over at what point in restoring an old painting is it no longer the original, but in fact a reproduction? Is it more important to leave the painting as is, allowing it to degrade over decades and centuries but always being the work of the true artist, or touch it up to try and maintain something approaching its original state, recognizing it may be subtly altered in the process? That gets into a discussion of the "perfect fake", whether such a thing can exist, the relative aesthetic value of such a fake relative the original, and so on.

The aspect I hadn't ever considered was the potential historical damage. On a individual scale, a forger can provide a false impression of an artist's style or focus based on the forger's level of skill and what pieces they choose to reproduce or create. If Vermeer didn't actually create many paintings, but van Meergen paints several that he passes off as heretofore unknown Vermeers, that gives people the wrong idea about what Vermeer was doing. Or suddenly we think van Gogh's "blue period" was much longer or more prolific because someone makes a bunch of fakes in that style.

But Casement also discusses a guy who created fake sculptures of Mesoamerican peoples that we don't necessarily have much art from. And in some cases, the sculptures weren't based on anything other than the man's own whims. Not knowing those were fakes, archaeologists and historians were reconstructing belief systems for those people that incorporated deities and styles that were never part of that culture. So that was a new thing to consider.

The writing is a little dry at times, but Casement seems to be pretty thorough in examining the different sides of arguments and theories, providing direct quotes from forgers, artists, art historians, critics and legal statutes, where applicable. And the book certainly did not fill me with the desire to create forgeries, especially since it sounds like the actual forger usually makes a fraction of what the art dealer who sells the forgery does. 

'Eric Hebborn, in making a thousand fake Old Master drawings, capitalized on the fact that the artists he faked seldom signed their works on paper. He was known in London and Rome to be knowledgeable about art and active in searching out old works, and often approached potential buyers with "finds" while leaving the determination of authorship up to them.'

Sometimes a Symbol's What My Mind (Makes Up) Of It

I mentioned in Monday's post that I thought some of Ferry's page layouts were kind of odd, and possibly were done to represent symbols or something that might relate to tabletop games, since the cast were stuck in one.

Kelvin asked if I could post an example, since I went with the enjoyable sight of Clea walloping Mordo mid-villainous spiel, rather than actually showing the thing I spent a paragraph of the review discussing.

I don't want to post too much stuff from a comic that came out just last week. Don't need to get Peter David on my case like he was after scans daily back in the day. So we'll stick to the page I mentioned first, seen above. This is the one that made me wonder if Ferry was making deliberate reference to something, because it really feels like something I've seen before. Circle atop three narrow (I suppose the middle one isn't so narrow) panels, though the image I see in my mind may have wings on either side of the circle.

None of the others produced as strong a reaction as this one, but that could just be a product of my upbringing, assuming there's anything to any of this. Or I could just be seeing things.

The Black Cat's Magical Introspective Journey

I said I wanted to try and go a little in-depth on the scenery Jed MacKay and  C.F. Villa used during Felicia's conversation with the ancient magic in Black Cat #3, so with no new comics for me this week, let's do that.

It starts with her in a circle of light in an otherwise featureless void, where she is promptly joined by the magic, taking the form of the Black Fox. It's got a sales pitch to make, and it chose her teacher, rather than her mother, her father, Spider-Man, either member of her crew, or anyone else. Could be because the Fox has a certain amount of status with her, or could be foreshadowing that she can't trust the Black Fox. Because the magic is trying to get what it wants here, by acting like it's giving Felicia what she wants. There's also a bit where's he's talking and circling her, and he's under his own, separate spotlight. He's got his own goals, and they don't necessarily align, or even overlap the Cat's.

After a brief check on what's happening in the world, they start their descent. It takes them across a chessboard, while the magic insists it just wants to run free, without being constrained by rules. Not a bad sales pitch to make to a thief. Only some of the pieces are identifiable, but it looks like Bruno and Iron Man are on one side, and Spider-Man and Odessa (and probably some Thieves' Guild lackeys) are on the other. I know one of the upcoming solicitations says Spidey's not happy with what Felicia's been up to, but the placement of Iron Man on what might pass for Felicia's side is curious. Unless it's simply because she was able to use his resources. And there's the fact they both walk straight across the board in one go. Which is restricted to either rooks or queens. Powerful pieces, but neither one is what you have to protect or capture to win. Not sure what the king would be in this case.

The path continues further down, and by this point, we can see that beneath the path is fire. Right at the moment the magic shares enough power that Felicia can carve up 5 symbiote dragons in one swipe. Is it salvation, offering exactly what she needs to save her and her crew from an ugly end, or is he leading her into Hell? The earth is, in a sense, burning right then. But there's also the question of what exactly the magic would do if it were given free reign. It might decide that fire is pretty groovy.

And just like that, Felicia and the Fox are in another odd little room, decorated in what I assume is 1960s style. It's got the mock-up of Warhol's Marilyn Monroe painting up, the TV's a distinctly archaic model, and Felicia's chair looks like something out of a period spy flick. Which is an odd choice. Compared to when Felicia first appeared in comics, setting her childhood (and the memory they watch is from that time) in the 1960s probably works chronologically, but it would put her in at least her 50s now. Unless it's some sort of notion of the slick cat burglar character being of that time. 

Or it's really about the Fox, since he certainly could have been active then. Felicia's caught up in both the Fox' game and the magic's, but they both want her to think it's her play. That she's the one who really wants this power, or that she really wants to rob the Thieves' Guild master vault. This whole issue, it's the magic, dressed up as Fox, that leads the way. From one setting to another, one part of its pitch to the next.

Two other points. One, the way Villa draws the room, it seems like the furnishings occupy only a small part. The walls, the ceiling, and the tiled floor are all featureless, empty. Maybe saying she hasn't really expanded her life much. She has a few friends, maybe, if her crew counts. A mother she mostly keeps at arms length. A succession of brief flings or failed attempts at more meaningful relationships. Taking measure of a life in terms of emotional connections, Felicia doesn't have much.

Or, it's just so nothing distracts from the sales pitch, which at that point involves reminding Felicia of how little she's been able to do at times. She couldn't keep her father out of prison, could only break him out to let him die at home. And Doctor Octopus once tore her up really badly when she tried to help Spider-Man. On cue, out in the real world, she gets more aggressive, actively taunting the dragons to try harder, even as she stomps on the neck of one.

Shift again, this time to a hallway filled with paintings. Spider-Man pushing her away because he doesn't think she's powerful enough to fight alongside him. Captain America and the FF telling her to hit the bricks when she goes looking for powers. The Kingpin, who gave her luck powers specifically as a way to take revenge on her and Spider-Man. And then Venom, who tore her up badly once upon a time. Which brings it back to her current situation, although I'm surprised they didn't use the time Carnage nearly killed her during Maximum Carnage. Not that I'm going to complain about ignoring that story, but it would have fit.

I wasn't sure why the shift from the TV presentation to the paintings, but maybe, since he also used the TV to show her what was going on outside, this was a way to cut her off from that. Keep her focused on his pitch, and not on how gleefully she's wiping out dragons, or how freaked out her crew and Dr. Strange are. There's also the sense that a painting is more permanent than a television show. Felicia could turn a TV off, but the painting suggests these are things she's always going to remember. Villa draws the painting as larger than Felicia, and she's shown looking up at both the Kingpin and Venom ones. They loom large. All these rejections, screw-ups, defeats, humiliations? They're going to stick with her.

But hey! Maybe this helpful source of old magic can give her the chance to do something about it! It's not like all these shitty guys that made her feel inadequate! The magic's really not doing a bad job here. Feeding her worst impulses by portraying itself as unfairly hampered by the rules of magic. Making her feel like she isn't good enough as she is, and reminding her of times she failed to drive it home. Ignoring her making Iron Man look a chump, or taking out Sabretooth by herself, or the fact that every time something she's tried hasn't worked out, she pulled herself back together and tried something else. 

It makes her angry, defensive, impatient, and that's when he makes his real offer, done up as a game show. Because this is all just a game to the magic, finding the way to get her to, as he put it earlier, 'say yes.' he even makes an entire audience of himself, although they oddly remain silently. I'd expect them to either encourage Felicia to take the deal, or encourage the Fox to offer her everything behind the doors. Which it could, but my acting like each thing on offer is its own discrete prize, it makes the magic seem so much more generous. It's going to give her what's behind all three doors, not just one. What a pal!

What's behind the doors? Well, the power to destroy all those people he just reminded her beat her up or made a fool of her in the past. Wealth, respect, her father alive and back with her mother again. Villa draws Felicia's mother leaning her head fondly on her father's shoulder, but both of them are looking proudly at Felicia. Finally, all those past loves back with her, and her on a throne no less. I confess I don't know who the brunette on the right is, in front of Flash and the Puma. I'm also curious at the implications of Odessa being there. Does that mean Felicia knows Odessa's in love with her, that this whole thing is more than just a power play by the New York branch of the Thieves' Guild?

And while he does refer to some of them leaving her, it's after he says, 'Every heart you've broken, healed.' Again, trying to make her feel like a failure, but one that this magic can fix. And the doors, and the versions of her behind them, are all much bigger than Felicia herself. Bigger, better versions of herself, hers for the taking.

Of course, it ultimately doesn't work. For all that the magic appeals to the rule-breaker in her by talking about how constrained it is by rules, everything it offers is based on the magic putting its own rules in place. That Felicia has enough power to kill Venom or Wilson Fisk, or bring her father back from the dead, or make people love her. Felicia doesn't let other people restrict her, but by the same token, she's not all that interested in locking other people up.

I still think the magic misreads her in that it thinks she just wants all this stuff handed to her. The Black Cat's whole thing is taking what she wants from people who think no one can take stuff from them. What's the point if it's just handed to her by an ancient source of magic? But I'm not sure that perception lines up with the text, beyond her refusal to use magic in matters of the heart. Maybe in the sense she demands enough power to protect her friends before she'll even really listen to the pitch.

I do like that the Cat seems to have managed to keep a little of that power even after rejecting the offer. The magic offered, and she held onto it, or stole it on the way out the door.

Same Character, Different Artists, Different Sides

Well, the comics didn't arrive. Thanks loads, UPS and USPS! The post office in town got it yesterday afternoon, but its acceptance is still 'pending'. Assuming they manage to show before Monday, I'll stick with the previously established plan for 2018's Year In Review, and do proper reviews of those issues (or what passes for that here) the week after.

In the meantime, I wanted to try and expand on some of what I was talking about in Monday's post, about the difference in how Nina comes off, depending on whether Max Sarin or John Allison are drawing her.

I grabbed a couple of sequences, one from the Where Women Glow and Men Plunder one-shot (drawn by Allison, seen above), and one from Giant Days #42 (drawn by Sarin, seen below). It's not perfect, since Ed's more the one feeling uncertain about himself in Allison's panels, versus Nina in Sarin's, but I thought they were both decent examples of a variety of emotions across 3 panels.

Allison draws her with a sharper chin, face is a little slimmer, smaller eyes, smaller mouth. There's a lot of hair, but it's under control. It reminds me of a 1940s noir femme fatale. Bit of Lauren Bacall or something. Sarin gives her face a more rounded, softer aspect, and everything is bigger. The eyes, the mouth. The hair is a bit more all over the place, even when she isn't just waking up. The blush isn't in the panels above, but it's there a lot.

Combining the big smile and the blush, Sarin's Nina seems apologetic or embarrassed a lot. Allison's version is more likely to come off as flirty*. Allison draws her touching her tongue to her upper lip a couple of times, a move I think Sarin has reserved for Esther so far. Sarin maintains that bashful look even in the issue that came out after their return from Australia. I mean even before Nina got completely hammered twice and had something to feel awful about. It just seems to be the approach he takes with her.

I think Sarin emphasizes the size disparity between Nina and Ed more. That Nina is an athlete, much more built than Ed, plus just flat-out taller. Not a lot, but I'm more aware of her being bigger than him. You can tell in the Allison panels she's taller, but not necessarily broader in the shoulders. Although Sarin also draws more panels from angles where we and Ed are looking up at Nina. Which is interesting, since the stuff I picked up in film classes makes me think that puts her in a dominant position over Ed, since she's towering above him. The whole "bashful" thing nullifies the effect. Until she's being a cruel drunk, at which point her looking down at Ed and us becomes highly effective. But that's only happened once. So far.

I wonder if Allison based his design for her off the story he was going to draw, or if that was how he always pictured her, and he's adapting what he's doing in the ongoing to how Sarin's depicted her. Sarin's had a few chances to draw Nina while she's being sassy or making smart aleck comments, but mostly she's seemed shy or eager. She made a few cracks during Ed's physical therapy, but she wasn't in those panels. In the one-shot, Nina's flirting with the Creek Boys to get information, or shutting them down with insults. Playfully teasing Ed, or keeping his confidence up. She seems entirely in her element, and the way Allison draws her reflects it.

I'd say it's a reverse of her and Ed when they're in England, but it's hard for me to picture Ed as confident and sassy. He's definitely more relaxed when they're together at the university than when he's trying to measure up in the eyes of Nina's family. But Nina hasn't really interacted with Ed's family at all that I know of, or even his friends prior to last month's issue. Is Ed actually the experienced partner is this relationship? That's a terrifying thought.

* I considered using some panels when she's trying to seduce an extremely jet-lagged Ed, since it would be the two of them in bed. But I thought it would be cheating, since their relationship was further along by that point than in the Sarin panels.

Sketchtober 2018 Review

Like last year, I decided to participate in Inktober in my own particular way. Meaning I used a pencil rather than a pen, because I need to erase stuff a lot.

I reused the same prompt idea as last year, my favorite games from each of the consoles I've owned. The difference being, rather than trying to do 35 sketches, I settled on 15. It gave me two days to get each sketch done, so my free time wasn't so entirely swallowed up by this as it was last year. 

The goal this year was to revisit the sketches last year that I wanted to turn out better. OK, almost all of them could have turned out better from my perspective, but I focused on the ones where I had some specific idea of what I wanted to do differently. The one exception was I did a picture for Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! this year, because I had an idea I wanted to try.

I consider the majority of this year's pieces an improvement. Not all - Thief: Deadly Shadows didn't come together at all how I hoped - and some of them would only be improvements because last year's piece was so poor.

I'm not gonna post them all, but here's three I was mostly happy with.

Day 1, back to Kirby's Adventure. Last year, I stuck with how the game actual makes you play the Metal Knight Level 6 boss fight, where you have to use the Sword ability. But the idea of Kirby instead unleashing his horrible voice with the Sing ability amused me. Kirby turned out well, the crooked sour notes turned out well, and I like Metal Knight's wide-eyed look. This was a very encouraging start to the whole thing.

Day 9, Super Smash Bros. Melee. Instead of last year's "everybody vs. Giga Bowser", I trimmed it down to Fox vs. Giga Bowser. Although Bowser looks less fierce than last year, I do like how the attempt at showing Fox's movement, from the Fox Illusion move to using the Blaster, turned out.

Day 12, God Hand. Gene looks closer to his game self, ditto Tiger Joe, although I'd change his posture if I did it over. Have him doubled over, a few more of the punches connecting with his face. Should have drawn the impacts of the fists like I did last year. Oh well, progress.

Movement, and how to represent it, ended up being a recurring theme in a lot of pictures. Characters teleporting, or moving fast, or just moving in general. And even when I wasn't necessarily happy with how the overall picture turned out, there were a lot of times I was at least happy with that part (The Dishonored picture for Day 14 comes to mind).

I was reading Greg Hatcher's post at Atomic Junkshop, on how he took part this year to show solidarity with his students, and I was kind of amused that we took almost entirely opposite approaches. Other than each of us using whatever art supplies were at hand, rather than going to find any fancy supplies. He set himself a hard 10-15 minute limit for his pictures. I think the fastest pictures I did took close to an hour.

I guess I don't think of these as practice sketches so much as things I really wanted to try drawing, so I could have them as finished pieces. Ideas in my head that need to look right on the page, or it doesn't do any good. I figured out this year, I'm really just using Inktober as an artificial deadline that I will actually respect. Since the arbitrary deadlines I otherwise give myself for other art projects don't seem to work. See also, I meant to have the Long Weekend in the Woods written and ready to start posting by the end of September, and it took three weeks into October.

Havin' A Dust-Up

It's never a bad time to see Krillin punching Vegeta right in his stupid face. I actually drew this three weeks ago, so this piece wasn't done in response to Monday's post, although parts of it come from the same place, distaste for Vegeta/his fans. My posting it is at least in part related to Monday's post. Also, I didn't have a better idea in mind.

Mostly I just wanted to draw Krillin doing something cool, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. All the usual nagging inner voices are mostly silent. 

Sketchtober Update - Yes, This Is The Last One

Like I said last time, the XBox 360 was the point where I started to get worn out.  It's probably reflected in the drawings. If the PS2 drawings went the best of any console, the 360's were. . . less successful.

Day 31, The Saboteur. This part of the drawing - Sean calmly lighting a cigarette - went very well. There was supposed to be this whole chaotic tableau behind him, or overturned Nazi trucks and watchtowers, stuff burning, dead Nazis. The aftermath of Sean's efforts. But I didn't seem to have the energy to make it turn out well, so eventually I just erased it all and this is what we're left with.

In a re-do, I'd probably have the explosions be happening in the background, and have Sean closer than he should be so I didn't have to draw as much stuff. A few shockwaves, some smoke and flame, part of a truck rising in the air, a section of Nazi being consumed by the explosion. Gotta learn to work smarter.

Day 32, Dishonored. Pretty straightforward idea: Show Corvo using the Blink technique to repeatedly advance towards the viewer, starting from the top of the water tower. Unfortunately, that meant drawing a lot of buildings, and incorporating proper perspective. Not my forte, as you can see in some of the windows. I'm wondering if I should have drawn something to show the little flashes are meant to be connected, Corvo zipping from one spot to the next. I thought that would clutter things up, but as it is, I'm not sure it's clear what I was going for.

Ambition outstripping skill again. Or I just needed more time to plan it out, redesign it. I think it's a cool idea, just didn't carry it off.

Day 33, Tales of Vesperia. I really struggled to come up with an idea for this one, but I remembered Zagi, who encounters Yuri early in the game and becomes obsessed with killing him, to Yuri's annoyance.

I wanted to try and open things up more in my facial expressions. My style as a whole is, "fussy" is the word that comes to mind. A lot of small, light lines, which I think works OK for quiet emotions, peaceful looks, but is lacking when you want someone to be enraged or look kind of crazy. If I could draw in a style similar to Skottie Young's I'd be friggin' ecstatic. But normally when I try to do that, I think it makes the faces look weird. So I tried to go against that with Zagi, at least. I think he certainly looks nuts, if maybe not crazy angry, necessarily. Still, I'm a little encouraged.

Day 35, Alice: Madness Returns. Singularity was Day 34, total disaster, so it gets skipped. Alice has a Dodge move, where she turns into a cloud of butterflies. Like Blink with Dishonored, it's probably my favorite thing in this game. So having her Dodge an attack an move to a position of advantage seemed a natural idea.

Probably should have drawn some scenery, a floor at least, but my energy was pretty low by this point. I was ready to just be done. Trying to get the pommel of her weapon right for that angle took several tries, but yeah, I'm pretty satisfied.

Lack of energy was the biggest issue this last set. Even when I had a good idea, I didn't feel I was bringing my best effort to it. Like, crap, I don't want to draw all these buildings/wreckage/dead Nazis. Anyway, that's that.

Sketchtober Recap - Still Working Through These

Not really an update at this point, since the project was finished a couple weeks ago. Of all the consoles, the Playstation 2's selections went the best overall. All the pictures went well. Combined with the last three days of the XBox selections, it was a good stretch there. Which is funny since about halfway through the PS2 was when I realized I had a week to go still and got briefly demoralized (which may have shown up more in the XBox 360 pictures).

Day 26 was Persona 3, which I'd classify as successful, but kind of basic. Day 27 was Ico, where I am really grateful that most of the enemies are creatures made of shadows. Only having to draw in outlines can be a real time-saver. You don't normally have to protect Yorda while she opens sealed doors, but I wanted her to get to do something in the picture, so that was pretty much the option. Also tried to draw her using the Ditko fingers as part of it, for the hell of it.

Day 28, DragonBall Z Budokai 3. You're goddamn right I drew Krillin standing on a mountain of KO'd jackasses. Having a chance to make those fights go the way I want them to is a big part of the fun of these licensed fighting games. Yes, that's Recoome's big, ugly butt in the middle of the picture. They probably aren't arranged properly to make a good pile, unless you assume there are other characters in the back somewhere. So you should absolutely do that. I guess I should have drawn Cell's entire body instead of just his head, but I was getting tired by that point. And Cell can suck eggs, anyway.

The idea for the picture came from a full-page splash Pete Woods did in Robin #85, Tim standing triumphantly atop all the villains he's overcome. Obviously there have been lots of versions of that idea, but that's the one I specifically had in mind. I'll post that scan one of these days, because I really enjoy it (and it's kind of cool considering the Joker is telling the story).

Day 29, Sky Odyssey. I picked the most frustrating part of the game to draw. The level where your engine catches on fire right as you emerge from a cave and you have to land on the river below and then float your plane to a dock. Died so many times on that level. But the engine bursting into flames just as the river flowing out of the cave drops off a waterfall makes for a heck of an image. And it's the part that sticks out most in my mind, other than giving the planes garish color schemes and designing symbols for them, which don't translate well.

Day 30, God Hand. I wanted to try drawing a character throwing a ton of punches, super-fast. The after-image thing you see in Flash or Spider-Man comics, or a lot of shonen manga. Simple as that. And Tiger Joe has a fairly look to use as a villain, although he should be taller here. His leg is raised because he was about to unleash one of his irritating flurries of kicks, but Gene caught him with a barrage of punches first. Not because he needed a pee break, although you couldn't rule out something like that in this game.

If I did it over, my goal would be "more". More fists, more impacts. Fill the space between them with arms and fists, cover Tiger Joe with impacts. The increase on arms and fists to draw would be offset by less of Tiger Joe to draw, so it's like getting more for nothing!

One last quintet left to cover, and then we're done with this exercise in humiliation. Unless I decide to do it again next year!

Sketchtober Update - Across the Finish Line

The project is complete. The last two were delayed, because I was at my dad's last weekend, so nothing got done. But I caught back up Sunday/Monday. Hooray!

We're still catching up with these posts, as I'm only up to the original XBox games today. A couple of them actually turned out really well, in that I'm genuinely pleased with the results. Some of the others, not so much. Angles and perspective seem to be an issue. Well, lots of things are issues, but those were the ones that reared their heads most this time around.

The weekend I was supposed to start these, I spent that miserable Saturday with Alex at Oktoberfest, so I had to cram Thief: Deadly Shadows and Phantom Dust in on Sunday. Except I couldn't come up with a good idea for Phantom Dust, so it ended up as a generic picture of the main character. It didn't turn out badly, other than I had a little trouble with all the pointless straps on his jacket, but it's kind of dull, so I'm not posting it. I'd rather post the interesting failure like this one.

There's an episode of Samurai Jack where he fights a ninja who blends perfectly into shadows. Jack ultimately wraps himself in white, and they fight in the ruins of this building, moving between shadows and rays of light, only one visible at any given time, the other suggested by the arc of their blade, or the other's reaction. That show was always really good at that stylistic stuff.

I wanted to do something similar, suggest Garrett's presence as a shadow flitting at the edges of the light sources, and show him moving through a house to his goal. I didn't commit to it enough, I think. I needed to draw each picture a lot bigger, zoom in more on the person with the light source, and then draw just a bit of Garrett in the background (his green artificial eye seems like it would be useful, but I'm not sure how to do that with black-and-white art). I still love the concept, but the execution is lacking. Another one of those ideas I need to revisit at some point when I'm not putting myself on an artificial deadline.

Beyond Good & Evil's (Day 23) another pretty basic idea, but it turned out well. Obviously I didn't draw all the stone in the wall around the entryway, but I drew enough to suggest the others, which is something I'm trying to get better at, as a way to counter the fact I hate having to draw stuff like all the bricks in a wall. The critical part of me feels I didn't capture her face properly. Maybe she should look less happy, but I was going for her feeling confident? Still nice feeling to be drawing something and actually feel positively about as I'm going along. Usually it starts well, but then there's a lot of erasing, and "I can't figure out how to draw that, how can I work around it?"

Max Payne (Day 24) took a while to come up with an idea. I didn't want to draw his back as he ran into a hail or gunfire. I also didn't want to do one of him running towards us (and a hail of gunfire), or leaping through the air firing two guns while going "ahhh". You can find all sorts of screenshots of that online; I'd just be drawing the screenshot. I have sketchbooks full of pictures that demonstrate I can draw somebody's else drawing (sometimes). So, a picture of Max downing some painkillers right before he charges into a hail of gunfire.

The perspective on the hallway is probably no good. It feels like the exit door should be smaller. Also, I should have drawn in at least a few stains on the wall, or wallpaper tears, or something. I was picturing this as part of Max's assault on that crappy hotel fairly early in the game.

The Crimson Skies (Day 25) picture drove me batty. OK, see the small plane in the lower left? Originally, that's where I was going to draw the plane now at the top of the page screaming down from above to attack the airship. Except something about the plane being lower on the page, even as it was supposed to be above the airship, was screwing me up. I couldn't figure the angle on the wings relative to the fuselage, while keeping the nose at the proper angle to the airship. I tried looking through some of the war comics from my dad's collection, hoping to pick up some clues from Joe Kubert drawing Enemy Ace, but nothing matched what I was trying to get at.

Even with where I ended up placing that plane, the angles still aren't entirely correct. The nose is aimed out too far, like the plane is diving on the other plane, rather than the airship. Which could work; the plane could be part of the airship's group, trying to protect it but I was picturing the planes as being a team working together. Also, I should have drawn the airship with its tail still partially in the clouds. Or not drawing the cloud vapor trailing off the fins. It looks like it's really booking it, which wasn't the effect I was going for. Still, the airship turned out better than I thought it would when I started.

Those last three were the start of a weeklong stretch where things seemed to be going well. Not spectacularly, but the ideas I had were mostly coming together. I'll get to the Playstation 2 next time.

Sketchtober Update - Not Quite

So October is over, but Sketchtober staggers on. I'm down to the last few days, the XBox 360 games. Recently, I've noticed I've been liking my concepts initially, but then I run out of steam on them quickly. Part of it comes easily, and then the rest is a struggle, if I even get it all the way there. I might just be getting tired of the amount of free time this is eating up each night in general. I can't really read or play a video game or do anything else while I'm sketching. I could solve that problem by being better at drawing.

This time around, Gamecube stuff, Days 16-20. Not one of the better stretches. A couple of them turned out miserably - in one of those cases, my inability to draw people throwing stuff reared its head again. The other three, we'll look at below.

Day 17, Metroid Prime. There isn't a point during the battle with Ridley where you can scale the ceiling to drops bombs on him. Mostly because you fight him in a big open area with no ceiling. Still, I had other pictures where I thought I was too beholden to the specifics of the game in question - see Kirby's Adventure - so I decided not to let that restrain me here.

All of which sounds better than admitting it was just a lot easier to draw Samus in her Spider Ball form than as a person in a suit of armor (armor falling under the category of mechanical stuff as something I don't draw well). Ridley's missing the connective tissue or energy that forms his wings, because if he could fly, climbing the ceiling wouldn't be as advantageous for Samus, would it?

Overall, not too displeased with this one. Got lazy on drawing the walls of the cave, though, which is typical. I rarely have the patience for that sort of background detail work.

Day 18, TimeSplitters 2. I struggled most of the day with what to draw for this one, before opting to focus on the random nature of its multiplayer. The variety of different characters available to play, the varied locales and weapons. Thus, a monkey firing a rocket launcher at a robot, while a third character ambushes the monkey. It's not a spectacular picture, but it turned out better than I thought it would when I started. The Spanish Mission level is one of my favorite multiplayer settings, along with the abandoned hospital.

There's a guy outlined in the doorway in the upper right corner, with what's meant to be the light reflecting off a scope. One of those times drawing things larger would have been advisable. Originally, he was going to be a dark shadow against a bright opening, but I was drawing all the other doors and windows as being dark, so I decided to go the other direction, have him be a white form standing in a dark doorway. Plus, the character I was thinking of was a gunman who dressed all in white, anyway, so it fit.

Day 19, Super Smash Bros. Melee. One I definitely drew too small, probably because I got too ambitious again. The original idea was just going to be Starfox fighting Giga-Bowser. I was going to draw an immense Giga-Bowser, with Fox darting about raining high-speed punches ineffectually. Think that cover for the "But Bork Can Hurt You!" story from the old Brave & the Bold, since that's what I was picturing. But once I started, I got the idea of a team effort, really sell the threat level. So maybe closer to the Justice League vs. Starro cover? It really needed to be bigger for that, but Giga-Bowser felt like such a daunting thing to draw I reverted to my default, tiny sketch mode. Also, he probably shouldn't be that much larger than all of them. Donkey Kong should at least come up to the knee. Eh, maybe he grabbed a Super Mushroom.

I would love it if that game would just let you fight Giga-Bowser whenever you wanted. Not as part of an event match where you fight him, Ganondorf and Mewtwo. And not at the end of a run through Adventure mode, if you can beat it fast enough on a sufficiently high difficulty level. Just pick him as an opponent the way you can any character, and go at it.

Next time, whenever that is, maybe next Friday, the XBox games. Which I was actually pretty happy with, overall. Even the one that didn't go well, I liked part of.

Sketchtober Update - Almost There

As of yesterday, we're through Day 25. Which means I finished the XBox Top 5, and am moving into the PS2 list. With five systems worth of these behind me, there are certain trends emerging. There is always at least one, usually two, of the five that end up going poorly. The other three go reasonably well, if not perfectly, but there might be one that I'm really, really happy with. Day 5, definitely Day 7. I looked at it again a couple of nights ago and was actually happy with what I saw. Normally when I look at stuff I draw, I only see all the things I screwed up, which is exhausting.

Anyway, the N64. I mentioned last week, the first couple of nights went poorly. Things improved a bit Days 13-15, but nothing spectacular. I'm not showing you the Goldeneye sketch, it was not good.

Day 12, Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. Like I said, I can't draw horses. I really struggled trying to come up with an idea for this. Because every idea I thought of, I realized I already had a desktop wallpaper of it someone else did that looked way better than what I could manage. Dark Link fight? Got a wallpaper. Spin Attack? Got a wallpaper of that. Finally, I remembered the guy you give the Bunny mask to when you're a kid, who ends up being super-fast when you're an adult. And who does run with his head down like that. You can race him, although you don't see him running. He's waiting for you when you reach the finish, always a second ahead.

Day 13, Starfox 64. It was either the final battle with Andross, or something about the Starwolf fights. Drawing a giant brain and his mobile, laser-shooting eyes seemed less daunting than drawing a whole bunch of spaceships. I'm not good at mechanical stuff. For some reason, I tried doing the after-image effect for the Arwing. Went better than I expected. The real issue was I couldn't figure out how to depict the deflector shield the Arwing produces when you do a barrel roll. After a few trials, I settled on a sort of faint oval around it. It's not great, but it made more sense than any of the others.

Day 14, Super Smash Bros. Looking around online, now I'm not sure you could even fight Crazy Hand in this game. He may not have shown up until Melee. Whoops.  Too late now. The original idea was to do the picture as a split-screen of what you see. Each side was going to be from a perspective just behind one of the brothers shoulders. So, Luigi would be in the extreme foreground, then we'd see Mario's back and beyond the, Master Hand, and then do the same from behind Luigi. But I spent Saturday at Alex', so I had to do this and Day 15 in one day, and opted to simplify the hell out of it. Hmm, looking at it, things might have been starting to go off the rails. It's more than a little rushed, and I'm drawing smaller, which is what I default to when I'm feeling unsteady or rushed (the same's true of my handwriting, it naturally trends towards tiny).

Day 15, Resident Evil 2. Took me most of the day to figure out what to even draw. But that Tyrant was always a pain in the ass. I always remember him smashing through walls to get pursue me, although that only happened once. I think Claire's a little long in the torso, and I probably should angled her more. The Tyrant looks a little too casual, but he was one of those slow, relentless threats. You kill him, he gets back up and keeps coming after you. Not personal, just what he's designed to do. I do like the bullet impacts on him.

By the next time I do one of these, we'll be out of October. Will I be done with all 7 systems, though?

A Midpoint Sketchtober Update

The sketch I did the last time I checked in, did not go as hoped. Remarkable how I can draw a friggin' earthworm in a super-suit, but I can't draw a human throwing a baseball.The difficulty with people reared its head the next night, for Goldeneye, then the day after that, it was trouble with horses. The next couple of nights were decent rebounds.

I'm partway through the Gamecube Top 5 now, and it's going much the same as the others. I'm reasonably happy with the ideas I'm coming up with, the execution is another matter. Anyway, here's a selection from Days 6-10.

Day 6, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. I intended this to be like one of those comic covers where Peter Parker and Harry Osborn are fighting at the bottom of the cover, but dominating the rest are spectral forms of Spider-Man and Green Goblin in poses mirroring the civilian i.d.s. Somewhat undercut that by focusing more of the page on the Pink Ranger fighting the Putty Patrol, but to be fair, the idea only hit me halfway through. I was coming off the Mega Man 4 sketch, and I was feeling my oats. "I've got this, I'm going to handle this challenge like a boss!" Silly Calvin of two weeks ago.

Day 7, Sonic the Hedgehog. This is the Scrap Brain Zone, the last Zone before Robotnik's fortress. This was my favorite level, in large part because of the music. It comes after an underwater zone, which are always a pain in the ass in Sonic games. Nothing like being forced to worry about drowning, while also being forced to move really slowly. I didn't want to do a featureless oval for the up-close Sonic, but I probably should have left it at drawing just his face, rather than adding the arms and limbs. Still one of my better Sonics.

Day 8, Earthworm Jim. The Snot a Problem level, where you engage in a battle of bungee jumping with Major Mucus, the loser plummeting to his death in the jaws of the monster below. My favorite level, but also preceded by a pain-in-the-ass underwater level. The angle of Jim's body compared to his head is off, but I like the placement of the monster, and the spinning of Major Mucus. Besides, he's a worm in a super-suit, his movements and the suits can be independent of each other, right? Right.

Day 9, Batman Returns. I thought of drawing the Level 3 fight - Batman vs. a Giant Robot - would seem random. So the final boss fight it is. Batman versus the Penguin and his duck tank! Which I always solved by using all the specials I'd saved up to call the Bat Ski-boat and blast him to pieces. Just hit him with those until he died. Boo-ya! But I sure as hell ain't drawing that. Lucky if I can draw a damn duck tank.

And I'm not showing you Day 10. Majors Pro Baseball nearly broke me.

Sketchtober Update

Made it through Day 10, which gets me through the Game Gear selections. Most of which went pretty well, although there is, as always, something that nags me about each one. An angle that's off, an appendage that isn't conveying what it needs to. The usual shit. Now it's on to the N64, where I have next to no idea what I'm going to do for most of these. Maybe I didn't think I'd make it this far.

The scanner showed up a week ahead of time, and I did say I would post some of the pieces. Day 1, Kirby's Adventure.

The Level 6 boss fight with Metal Knight. In retrospect, I regret two things. First, that I got too enamored of the game animation for Kirby's swing, which is that big crescent thing in the middle of the picture. A narrow arcing would have been better, and allowed for me to extend Metal Knight's sword to better convey the parry. Or, I could have been less hung up on the specifics of the fight and gone with my other idea, which was Kirby using the Mike power against him (basically, Kirby screeching into a microphone). That might have looked cooler. Maybe I'll try it later.

Days 2 and 3 didn't go as I hoped, so we're skipping to Day 4, Paperboy.

OK, that's not nearly enough obstacles for Thursday. It's more like Tuesday, Wednesday at worst. Scale is off, the Grim Reaper must be 20 feet tall compared to the guy with the jackhammer or the breakdancer. The Reaper not casting a shadow is intentional. I don't always remember to finish the shading, but it wasn't the case here. I thought it would emphasize its otherworldly nature. A looming shadow brought to life, not affected by the surrounding environment.

Day 5, Mega Man 4.

I don't know why the boss fight with Skull Man is the one I think of with this game. My success rate on even reaching him was maybe 60%. My winning percentage when I did get that far was considerably less than 60%. All because of that stupid skull force field he could produce. Guaranteed to turn any attack you launched into a harmlessly deflected bright orb. I made Mega Man's boots a little big, but I looked up stuff online and his upper legs are really small in comparison. I needed to finish shading on the legs. Well I need to do more shading on a lot of these. I really like how Skull Man turned out, but relative close-ups on face are one of the few things I can normally draw well.

I don't really have anything else to say, so until tomorrow.

This Is Mostly To Spur Me On

I wouldn't say I'm participating in Inktober exactly. For one thing, I'm not using a pen much, pencil is more my game. But I am trying to do some kind of a sketch every day, which is the general idea as I understood it.

My track is to start drawing, and then either hit a snag where I can't figure out how to draw what I want, or I finish the sketch, and all I see are the ways it isn't what I wanted. Then I lose hope and stop. I came up with something close to 20 sketches I wanted to do while stuck in this horrible week-long training back in January, and I've finished maybe 4 of them. So the "do a sketch every day" prompt seemed like a good push, especially now that I've publicly declared I'm doing it! You've all seen it, I can't take it back! There's only success or the abject admission of failure.

I've gone with the idea of doing a sketch for each video game in my Top 5 for each system. I got the idea from the Inktober sketch book I bought from Brian Rhodes at the 2016 Cape-Con, although he focused more on the games of his childhood. With seven systems, that's actually enough to get into November, but it could turn out I won't be able to decide on an idea for a game (I have no idea what I'll do for Phantom Dust, which would be the selection for the 22nd currently), and I'll need a stand-in. I'm trying to go with pictures that represent the game to me, usually some particular level or moment that is the strongest memory I have associated with it.

I recognize that isn't going to help much with that backlog I mentioned, but I'm hoping to figure a few things out that might help with those over the course of this month.

I figured I would work chronologically through the systems, so I started with the original Nintendo. Kirby's Adventure turned out pretty well, though I kind of wish I'd gone a different route. Not gotten so hung up on the specifics of the Level 6 boss fight with Meta-Knight. The Ninja Turtles 2 picture didn't go so well, needed to have a better sense of the layout before I started, but I just wing it on a lot of these things. The Super Dodgeball one was good in concept, and there's a couple of parts in particular I like, but the figurework is bad. Hands always seem to be too large. Paperboy actually turned out well, minus the perspective and scale being wonky. The Grim Reaper is probably 20 feet tall, given the distance and compared to other figures in the picture. Hell, it's an abstract concept personified, it can be as big as it wants, right? Right. The Mega Man 4 picture I'm almost entirely satisfied with, I just think Mega Man's posture needed to be a little more aggressive. On the other hand, him firing while leaping away from the bad guy is probably more representative of my playing style. I spent a lot of time on my heels in that game.

I'm going to try and do periodic updates on how things are going, as I move through each system. I did finally order a scanner, so if it arrives, and if I can get it to work, I may post some of the better results later in the month. In the meantime, Kelvin's doing a proper Inktober, which you can see here.

All Life Is Meetings, And Partings, And Reunions

I'm probably going to refer back to this post. I think that scene, and the one I want to discuss today, from Angel & Faith #25, make nice bookends for the Faith and Giles interactions. I've included to two relevant pages. Yes, the photos are a little blurry. Sorry. You can click on them to make them larger, though.

We start with Faith walking away from Angel and towards Giles (he was resurrected as a 12-year old, if you were out of the loop). Faith has just affirmed to Angel that she's still his friend, but she needs to get away for awhile, figure out who she is on her own. Working with Angel cost her everything of the life she'd managed to build around herself, with the younger Slayers and whatnot. That's pretty important by itself, since Faith has often seemed to be stuck with the castoffs other people didn't want, or if she starts to gather friends, she's accused of stealing them, as Buffy frequently (sometimes validly) accused her. Nadira and the other girls were hers, but getting wrapped up in Angel's quest to undo his screw-ups cost her them.

Anyway, Faith is resigning herself to working for Kennedy and going forward alone, but here's Giles - waiting for her, asking if he can accompany her in panel 2. Isaacs makes it clear Faith is both surprised, and touched. The smile, the hand over the heart gesture, this wasn't something Faith was expecting, but she's glad to hear it. Also, the shift in viewer perspective emphasizes how close they are at this point. Faith has definitely narrowed the distance between them from panel 1 to panel 2. One might even suspect the possibility of a hug. But panel 3 brings us Giles alone, as he lays out his current difficulties adjusting. By panel 4, as Giles admits to his need to find a new path, we can see Faith still looks relaxed. Her stance is easy, leaning slightly forward, there's what I'd describe as a curious look on her face, like she wants to see where Giles is going with this. But the perspective has shifted to a bird's eye view, which is more impersonal, making us less a part of the conversation, and more the audience in the balcony. It increases our distance from them, reducing the intimacy, and I think it makes the distance between the two characters appear greater as well, without either having to move.

And then in panel 5, Giles comes right out and says it: He wants to go back to Buffy, and we get a close-up on Faith's reaction. It's hurt, maybe angry, mostly resigned. This isn't really new for Faith. One of the other recurring themes of her life has been to be compared to Buffy, and be found wanting. Never as good, never as welcome, never anyone's first choice. It's what helped the Mayor sink his hooks into her, that he made her feel second to no one. It's part of why she's so ride or die for Angel, not just because he stuck up for her, but he did it against Buffy. Look back at the page in the older post. Where Faith comments she hasn't heard from Giles in a while, and he tries to apologize, she states it outright: 'You can skip the friendly uncle routine. I ain't your beloved Buffy.'

But a lot had changed since then. She and Giles had worked together for months, independently of Buffy. Even so, at the end of the previous season, there was a sequence where Giles rushes up to her, and Faith begins to assure him she's fine. But Giles is there to retrieve the scythe, because Buffy needs it. So he runs off to get killed, and leaves Faith with a bunch of burning Slayer corpses. But now she'd helped him return from the dead. Not as either of them would have liked, but still, it has to count for something. And still he wants to go back to Buffy.

Incidentally, I've been trying for some time to figure out the panels where the background is just one color, with no details. The best explanation I've managed is that it's designed to focus the reader's attention on one specific thing, typically a character's reaction. In this case, Faith's. Why wouldn't you? Her face is the only thing in the panel, so it gives the reader a chance to look it over a bit, let it sink in.

The second page starts with us back in the balcony. I think we're in essentially the same spot, but they've moved beneath us. Faith has backed up to the foot of Nadira's bed, and Giles is advancing, a bit of entreaty in his posture. I'd like to think he recognizes his mistake and is trying to mend the damage, but mostly he's offering more justifications for why he should get what he wants. A true adolescent. I wonder if the perspective, which lets us survey the whole scene, is meant to make us impartial? Giles does have a good point about being in an unusual circumstance and needing some help. That's about as impartial as I can be, I'm in the tank for Faith, if you hadn't guessed. Note the placement of Nadira and Angel in the upper right corner. Faith had been walking away from them originally, towards a future, possibly a very different one. But confronted with Giles using her as a way to hitch a quick, discreet flight to the States, she's backing up, falling back into her past. Heck, you even have a Slayer in a coma with a well-meaning (but seriously messed up) father figure next to her. Angel isn't anywhere near as close to Nadira as the Mayor was to Faith, but in each in his own way contributed to the girls' self-destructive paths that put them in those beds.

From there, we get another close-up of Faith in panel 2. The color choice is curious. Yellow seems like too cheery a color for a response whose word balloon could have those little icicles hanging off it. The angle is different from panel 5 on the previous page. We seem to have shifted into Giles' position, so that we're looking up at Faith. I think it's to set up panel 3, as she walks out past him, the old Faith armor firmly in place, trying her best to appear as if nothing's bothering her. Of course, Giles has spent enough time around her to know better, and his posture makes it look as though he wants to follow. Or at least raise an arm to call after her. But he doesn't. Maybe he knows better at this point.

What it boils down to is, Faith stopped retreating into her past and went forward, on towards that future she was headed to before this whole conversation. She goes right past Giles and out of the tent, leaving him with Angel and Nadira. All important parts of her past now, but not her future.

You can chart a difference in Faith in how she reacted in the older scene and this one. In the older one, she brought up that Giles hadn't been in touch, as a way of pointing out the distance between them. But when he tries to address it, she throws Buffy up as a wall, and tries to brush him off. Now, when Giles makes the initial point that she has people who care about her, Faith accepts it easily. There's no defensiveness to it, until she gets her hopes about Giles, only to have the dashed against the rocks of Buffy Summers' continued existence. She's progressed, but she still has trouble with getting too hopeful, and the letdown that comes with it.. However, whereas in the older scene she turned away from Giles, looking backwards to keep people at a distance, now she's moving forward, and if other people don't accompany her, so be it.

Angel Has More Than Two Expressions! Maybe.

I mentioned last Saturday I loved the expression Rebekah Isaacs gave Angel as Spike announced his presence. So why not look at it?

As best we can from this blurry photograph, anyway. Sorry about that. It looked better on the camera screen.

The upper and lower halves of his face tell different stories, don't they? The lower half is a slight frown, which might not even be notable. This is Angel we're talking about. Slightly down-in-the-mouth is his default setting. The upper half, though, has the raised eyebrow as he looks to his left.

Maybe it's different for other folks, but for me, a raised eyebrow doesn't usually accompany anger. A smug expression? Absolutely. A cocky grin? Hell yes. Admittedly, a cocky grin is more Spike's style than Angel's, but we know these two have been changing themselves in response to each other for decades, as part of some macho posturing, alpha male thing.

I look at the eyebrow, and I think Angel's smiling a little, maybe in spite of himself, but he is. Of course he isn't, but that only makes me believe he's suppressing it. He can't be surprised that Spike would announce himself with a jab at Angel. It's Spike. Poking fun at Angel is what he does. Maybe he's relieved. He's so close to being able to resurrect Giles, to set things right, and it's the moments when Angel's almost got what he wants when things tend to go south. Sure enough, there's a full-fledged demon between him and his goal, and he has to rely on a lot of brassed off Slayers. What's more, they Slayers are pissed at Faith, which means she's pissed at him, which means he's on the verge of losing the one person who's had his back throughout.

But here's Spike, leaning against the doorframe, the swagger, the cigarette, the little swipe at his grandsire. Even with everything else going wrong, Spike's the same as he always was. Has to reassuring after the shock Angel received when he ran into Drusilla.

I wonder if Spike knows about that. He has contacts. Could he have heard? I wouldn't be surprised if he was keeping tabs on Dru. Trying to make sure she didn't cause enough damage to land in the Slayers' crosshairs, for everyone's sake.

Do I Venture Back Into The X-Verse?

Marvel finally got around to releasing their solicitations for April last Friday, and they've provided me with my pull list decision for the month. Whether to buy the new Wood/Copiel X-Men series.

I didn't do a post for last month's solicitations, but if I had, the decision would have been whether to buy the next round of Atomic Robo Real Science Adventures in single issues, or tradewait. I've decided to leave that one up to the vagaries of Jack's attention to detail. If he notices it and orders it for me, OK then. If not, trades it is.

Back to X-Men. On the plus side, Brian Wood has a pretty good rep as a writer, though I don't have any more experience with him than I do with Cullen Bunn. But how do you get experience with someone's writing if you don't try it, right? Though perhaps corporately-owned characters which carry editorial constraints aren't the best assessment tool.

I have at least a passing fondness for all the characters involved, though Wood's writing is going to play a serious role there. I like Hawkeye, but I can't say he's been the strongest part of Secret Avengers, seeing as I haven't cared for Remender's rendition of him. Theoretically, there's a baseline of character history there to work with that can keep the characters familiar, but still let Wood have his own perspective on them.

The solicit doesn't have a lot of details, but offhand, it sounds like an interesting story. Aliens, old enemies, special babies, ancient conflicts. Maybe it's all tied together, or maybe they're separate issues, but it does sound intriguing, if vague.

Copiel's a pretty good artist, sort of. He can do some really beautiful work, detailed, with a strong sense of scale or majesty. That double-page spread he did for JMS' Thor run of the newly recreated Asgard is still one of my desktop wallpapers. He gave each character on the cover a different pose, and each one probably says something about the character. The more casual stance Rachel took, where shes partially obscured by Rogue, versus Kitty with a more straightforward, aggressive stance.

On the minus side, well there's still Copiel. I've never been that impressed by him as an action artist. Fight scenes aren't really his strong point. At least, they weren't in AvX. Maybe that was a reflection of his writers, as most writers at Marvel these days don't have a clue how to script an interesting fight scene. Probably because they're too busy working on their "clever" dialogue. Maybe that wasn't Copiel's fault.

He isn't exactly a swift artist, though. Marvel made him the artist for the Siege event, which was only a 4-issue mini-series, and he couldn't even keep that on schedule. If you pick up the book because you love Copiel's work, you better keep in mind the potential for another Cassady on Uncanny Avengers situation, where Copiel's gone in a few months. Who the hell knows who'll take over then? Might be an upgrade, might not be.

The other big minus is the $4 price tag. I'm kind of trying to limit how many of those books I'm getting, and as far as Marvel goes, there's already Captain America, which I'm sure I'll get to read one of these days. Not sure I want to commit to another one on top of that. I know Wood and Copiel don't set the price tag, but it does factor in. I need to expect - and get - more if I'm going to pay more. I don't mean more issues, mind you, Marvel can stop double-shipping any time now, the quality of the work needs to be higher. I don't know if they can pull it off. The last two $4 books I got from Marvel were Defenders and Secret Avengers, neither of which is a strong argument for the creative talent being able to give me my money's worth.

It's a question of how much confidence I have in Wood and Copiel. Alternatively, it's a question of how big a sucker I am. The answer has yet to be determined.

I Don't Want To Know What Yellow Bricks Are Made Of In Quor'Toth

I told you I'd get back to this cover eventually.

There are a couple of small details I like I want to mention fist, just to get them out of the way. One, Angel's cautious glance over at the spider, fitting for a Cowardly Lion to be nervous about giant arachnids. Two, Faith and Connor both have strides that suggest they're skipping, which fits with the the Wizard of Oz motif (even if Connor looks like he's skipping off the edge of the road).

OK, on to possibly more substantive analysis. The first thing, and it's something I just noticed, is they appear to be moving away from the Emerald City. In the original Oz story, that was their destination, to go and see the Wizard. So you could take it to mean they're completely lost. The goal of the trip to Quor'toth was to get Willow's plan to bring back magic in gear (and in doing so, get her to cough up the scythe and a chunk of Giles' soul). We could take it to mean they're going about this entirely the wrong way. Certainly, Whistler's plan suggests there are other avenues to explore which didn't involve visiting Quor'toth (but did involve killing lots of people).

There's another aspect to consider. In the original story, the quartet visit the Wizard because they all want something. What they find is they already have all the things they desire, meaning the Wizard was unnecessary. So this could mean Angel & Co. are simply smarter than a young girl from Kansas and her weird friends, and figured out what they needed and what they had before they started. The other side of it is that Dorothy and the rest had what they needed, but it took the Wizard for them to realize it. Which means by possibly forgoing a visit to the Wizard our heroes are ignorant of some key information. Perhaps Connor and the scythe could have been used to restore magic some other way.

There's also the matter of who the characters are depicted as. Connor's the Scarecrow, who wanted a brain. Connor seems to have mostly wanted a relationship with his father, which is more of a "heart" issue, but part of the reason he didn't have one is because Angel screwed around with everybody's brain to set Connor up with another family. A spell which crashed once magic vanished, meaning Connor has his true memories or the first 17 years of his life back again. At the same time, the family he was placed with no longer remembers him, so he's lost that period of his life. In a sense, mind is still an unstable thing when it comes to Connor, because there are always people he should be close with that he can't, because they don't remember him. If it isn't one, then it's another. At any rate, Connor does seem to have the relationship he wants with his father, as their jaunt to Quor'toth established. He has family, even if he doesn't always know it.

Willow's the Tin Man, who wanted a heart, presumably to be able to feel things. Willow wants to bring magic back, supposedly because the world needs it, but let's be honest here, she likes having power. She's always going to like having power, and she wants it back. Which is kind of interesting, as it means what she wants is potentially harmful to a lot of other people. I'm not sure how she already has what she's looking for. If we go with the idea that Willow wants control, it could be that with her brains and knowledge of computers, she already has what she needs. If it's more about how magic helps her feel connected to the world, well, it's not hard to envision Willow being so wrapped up in misery of magic's disappearance she's closed herself off, experiencing only anger and resentment. Most of what I've seen of her is angry retorts and sarcasm, which is really more Faith's bag, you know? In which case Willow, quite simply, just needs to get over her mopey, self-pitying self. Third possibility, that she's out to save the world, well, she has the scythe in the picture there. It has some connection to the Slayer line, plus it was used to smash the Seed/Egg, so why wouldn't there be residual magic stored within, along with Giles' soul?

We all know what Angel's after: yet another chance at the Big Redemption Play. I mean, Giles' soul. The Lion wanted courage, which was inside him all along, naturally. Angel is gathering up pieces of Giles' soul within him, but those are coming in from other places. The redemption thing is the key bit. Angel is always making this big attempts to fix things, as a way to try and make up for what he's done. This even as he acknowledges that he'll never stop paying, that it's never as simple as making the number of lives you save outnumber the lives you take. Which means, since he can never get clean, he keeps beating himself up over it. I think it boils down to the same thing it always does with Angel: he needs to stop trying for these big plays. Stop trying to fix the entire world, because that always turns him into a puppet of some big power. He needs to accept he did awful things, but now he's going to help people in need as he comes across them. Stop acting like Angelus is some other bloke who just happens to look like him, whose messes Angel is left with. He keeps trying to stick with that lie (as Dru pointed out), and it's a dodge. As long as he didn't do the awful things, he can't receive forgiveness for them, but he can still beat himself up for them, like a dog owner whose pet gets out and mauls someone. He's the only one who can make himself stop with that noise.

Finally, Faith. Dorothy was kind of the odd one, since she just wanted a way home. Home can be a state of mind, a place you feel uniquely comfortable, that fits you just right, but it was also a definite destination. I don't know if Faith has a home. Where's the place she feels right? She and Angel form a decent support group for each other, but they're different enough they grate on each other (Angel's perpetually dour mood would wear on anyone eventually). We've seen her father, that's a no-go. Even if Giles were alive, Buffy would always come first for him. I don't think she has a place, a person, who puts her first. Which is incredibly sad. Is that what Faith wants? Maybe on a macro scale. More immediately, for this story arc, I think she wants somebody else to take over. She keeps having people dump responsibility in her lap. She has to keep an eye on Angel. She has to keep an eye on Willow. She has to keep an eye on all these kid Slayers, including the revenge-obsessed one. And since she doesn't trust her judgment (because all everyone else has ever done is make her question it), she hates it. She can't make decisions without worrying she's wrong.

Dorothy wanted to go home. Even though home was a crappy little farm in Dust Bowl, Depression Era Kansas. Even though she was in a strange magical land where she had seemingly just eliminated the two greatest threats to peace and stability (I'm sure there were others, but at the time, the Wicked Witches seemed to be the only game in town for Evil). I thought perhaps Faith would rather be alone, no responsibility to anyone but herself. But, she's pretty happy on the cover, and they're headed away from the Emerald City, away from the Wizard who could tell her how to get "home".

Also, Dorothy killed one Witch without even realizing what she'd done, like Faith killing the Deputy Mayor. And in each case, it made things worse. Dorothy found herself targeted by the other Wicked Witch, Faith found herself hounded by the freaking Watcher's Council (good one Wes, you poncy jackass). What it really suggests, is two characters who find themselves the center of things beyond their control, that they either don't know, or don't care about. Dorothy had no grudge with the Witches, but finds herself a target. Faith isn't sure they should bring Giles back, but she wants to look out for Angel. She isn't sure going to Quor'toth is a good idea, but she gets sucked into that, too. And somehow, she's the one trying to keep things together, even when she'd rather be any place else.