Free Comic Book Day is this Saturday, May 2, so be sure to stop by your local participating comic store to get yourself some free comic goodness! I will be set up Saturday from 10am-4pm at the Jetpack Comics FCBD Festival in Rochester, NH, which will also include Ed McGuinness, Peter Laird and the TMNT guys, and many more!
Check out the full event listing here.
So I just got back from a two-week trip to California. The first few days were in San Francisco, where my wife was attending the Game Developer’s Conference. I spent the days wandering about, reading World War Z, and seeing friends, which was nice and relaxing. On Friday, March 27, I went to the Cartoon Art Museum, which had some great Stan Sakai (Usagi Yojimbo) and Watchmen exhibits. Nice to see some comic art museums out there since my local one, the Words and Pictures museum in Northampton, MA, closed several years back.
We spent the evenings getting caught up on the last 3 episodes of Battlestar Galactica, and I have to say I enjoyed it (and this whole last season) quite a bit, despite not having been sucked into the show as a whole as much as everyone else. I think, in general, it was just a tad too dark and overly-complicated for my tastes. But it ended well.
On Saturday, March 28, we hit Alcatraz, which was awesome, especially since I wanted to get some inspiration for a future jailbreak story I’m toying with.
From March 29 to April 7, I visited my brother in L.A., where I watched a lot more TV and ate a lot more food than I should have. For lunch one day, I visited David Schwartz (the writer of the Image Comics series Meltdown) at the Disney/ABC studio lot in Burbank. While I was there, I snapped a cool picture of an Ajira Airways truck (from Lost) on the lot.
We may have walked right past Colonel Tigh, who was on his cell phone outside a side door we walked through. I walked by him without noticing, but David said it was him, after we had passed. In restrospect, the voice did sound like him, but I can’t say for sure since I didn’t hear him say the words “frakkin,” “cylon,” or “frakkin cylon.”
One night in L.A., I got together with some cousins and a friends for a night of figure drawing. A couple of them are sculptors but like to keep their drawing skills fresh by doing private figure drawing sessions with a live model. That was pretty great since it has been a while since I’ve done any kind of life drawing. Had to fight the urge to add alien squid legs to every pose.
Finally, we went to LEGOland in San Diego this past weekend, which was amazing. The park consists mostly of rides and playgrounds for little ones (kids, not hobbits, although they’d probably enjoy it too), but in the center of the park, there is a “Mini-Land” that’s full of LEGO miniature versions of various cities, like NY, Las Vegas, New Orleans, etc. This was by far the coolest part of LEGOland for me, possibly because it appeals to my interest in architectural model-making, but most likely because it made me want to go Godzilla on all of it.
At the LEGOland gift shop, I finally got the see the LEGO Ultimate Collector Millennium Falcon in person, which is much bigger than I expected. Expensive too. But damn, I want that thing.
Anyway, that was my trip. Now it’s back to work…after I check eBay for that LEGO Falcon.
So I figure not every post by me will be RUNNERS-related. As a blog, I thought it might be nice to also include some random daily bits. But I’m curious to hear what you all think. If you like the daily bits, please let me know. If you’d rather I just stick to RUNNERS news, feel free to chime in. Now onto the post…
Way back in 2000, I printed out a list of the AFI (American Film Institute) Top 100 Movies of all time (they updated the list in 2007, but I’m going off of the original version). Since then, I’ve slowly been working my way through the list and I’m currently about a dozen away from having watched all 100 movies .
My wife calls these “homework movies” and isn’t terribly interested in many of them, so while she’s out of town at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco this week, I thought I’d try to plow through some of the remaining movies. Last night I watched “Birth of a Nation,” a 3-hour silent movie from 1915 about two families during the Civil War and Reconstruction period.
Wow. Talk about a time capsule, and not in a particularly good way. There’s something to be said about a movie where the Ku Klux Klan emerges as the heroic cavalry to save the white underdogs from oppression by the political and social powerhouse of the black populace. Weird. At times, I felt like I was watching some sci-fi movie about an alternate, mirror-universe Earth. I was almost expecting someone at the end to find a half-buried black Statue of Liberty sticking up out of the sand.
Anyway, I’m glad I watched it, but as far as silent movies go, I’ll probably stick with the Chaplin stuff.
David Monteith and Barry Nugent at Geek Syndicate just did an awesome review of RUNNERS: Bad Goods on their podcast. It’s Episode 110 and starts around the 51:00 minute mark, but I’d suggest listening to the whole thing since their podcasts are always highly entertaining. And chockful of charming British words like “bloke” and “mate.”
Check out the full podcast here.
Or check out just the review here.
I’ve been doing Runners for a while now, releasing the first story arc, Runners: Bad Goods, as five single issue comics and then as a graphic novel in 2005. But now I’ll be releasing the entire critically-acclaimed series for FREE!
Starting Monday, March 2, 2009, I will start posting the complete Bad Goods story arc here on runnersuniverse.com so everyone can get the chance to check out the series in its entirety. New pages will continue to post every weekday, Monday through Friday, 5 days a week.
Immediately following the first story, the long-awaited new color series, Runners: The Big Snow Job will begin posting, which should be around Sept 1.
I hope you enjoy the series and be sure to spread the word!
