ANIME IOWA: ESCAPE THE MOON!

It's done! The painting for "Escape the Moon" is done and uploading to Peter at AI as I type. The sane-sized 100 DPI file is viewable at DeviantArt.com.
This is my first watercolor painting since the cover for the Rumble Girls trade two and a half years ago. Dadgum.

Clicky on the piccy for FULL VIEW GLORY!



Also, for those completely creeped out by the moon, an LJ userpic JUST FOR YOU!

(Credit me if you yoink it.)

DUMBASS

Girl and I found this at YouTube doing a keyword search on "dumbass."
There's a bit of a build up--but it is WORTH IT.

Work-safe, but not drink or eat safe. Certainly not "laugh until the boss visits your cube" safe.

Superman Documentary!

My good friend Tasha Lowe-Newsome worked on the A&E documentary The Amazing Story of Superman, acquiring images from 1990 forward.
I was introduced to Tasha and her husband Yuell Newsome (who is a film librarian at Warner Bros.) through arcana_j, and they helped me through some of the worst of my grief over quitting comics. (Mainly by telling me side-splitting stories about Hollywood.)

Tasha and Yuell also rescued me from the shittiest Holiday Inn Evar when I went to LadyFest (Girl Power? SINGULAR!) L.A. in 2002. They fed me chicken and showed me angels, and took me to lunch where Larry David was eating.

The Supes doc is on A&E tonight June 12 at 8:00 pm. I'll be watching!

That's It, I'm Moving Back to the San Fran Bay Area: CARS

This movie, if you haven't seen it, is better than you think. It's so much better than the sneak trailer, there might as well not be a sneak trailer. Forget the sneak trailer--it told you NOTHING about Cars.

The same way The Incredible made me realize I didn't dislike superheros, but LOUSY superheroes (and most of them are excruciatingly bad), Cars made me realize no one's ever put so much heart and craft into anthropomorphic objects before. Well, not since Toy Story--but who doesn't wonder what the toys do when they're not looking? I mean non-human, non-animal-looking anthropomorphics.

The trailer didn't tell you you'll care about them. Care. Kid you not.
Or that you'll laugh at the million little jokes and in-jokes. (A Japanese TV station, for example, is called "OEM", the swear "Jesus Chrysler!", the appearance, as a rock formation, of the Caddilac Ranch, the hippie-ish van in the Scooby-Doo Mystery Machine color scheme with a low-hanging front plate that suggests Shaggy's soul patch.) I actually started taking notes in the dark.

The opening is cinematic in a way so many films, never mind animated ones, just wish they were. You get tossed right in to the drivers' seat and go. The hero, Lightning McQueen, is prone to self-psyching and vivid daydreaming, and you go right there with him.

It makes no damn sense to anthropomorphize cars (at least to me), until I was leaving the theater and realized, der, what do you SEE in most places, going from here to there? Cars. Not people. Cars. It looks like car-creatures are doing things, not people. Cross that with Doc Hollywood (a sweet and funny Michael Fox movie which is clearly in Cars' pedigree), and you've got another damn movie from damn Pixar that makes you glad you got dressed, bought a ticket and a criminally expensive beverage and sat with strangers.

The closing credits are a whole set of treats unto themselves. It's like Team Pixar, after already stuffing you full of many courses of hope and angst, bittersweets, goodwill and happiness, rolls out a dessert cart of funnysweet petit-fours to stuff in your pockets in case you get hungry on the way home, God forbid.
And for the Route 66 lovers out there (and I am one), Cars will bliss you out with nostalgia. (Pixar people went all over Route 66 to research Cars, and it shows.)

I had a terrible crush on Pixar after The Incredibles. Now, I'm ready to move back to the Bay Area, because, dammit, I want to work at Pixar and make movies that make people happy.

For the more black-hearted amongst us, the short with Cars is "One Man Band", a tart little meditation on the dark side of competition and embarassing pursuit of piddling rewards. It's really evilly funny and loaded, like all Pixar films, with glorious and loving details.

CARS. Go see it.