Well, not working on that Halloween special (the first portion of which is online, remember), means I'm able to enjoy all sorts of luxuries, like watching television, taking a shower, eating oatmeal (it took too long), and drinking vodka. So there's that.

So I've kinda sorta done something for Halloween, for once. I suppose I'm happy enough for that. I'm actually more disappointed by another fruitless endeavour I engaged in yesterday. I really must make a point of avoiding vain exercises. Maybe I'll do a twenty four page comic over the course of two years, doing one page a month . . .

Anyway. I've got things to do now, so I leave you with a Halloweenish Morrissey video. My mouse has been jittery lately; it sort of feels like using a Ouija Board;

Ah, hell, I worked too hard on it.

Here's the first half of my Halloween special. Volume 1, if you will. I'll put up the second half next week.

It's always Halloween somewhere in the world.

Robert Goulet is dead.

As Kenny Rogers would say, sometimes you gotta know when to fold 'em.

I fucking hate Kenny Rogers.

At around 1am last night, I was colouring page eleven of the Halloween special and thinking to myself how close I was cutting this thing. How I would just barely make it if I worked until at least 4am and worked all day on Tuesday (to-day). I thought to myself, "Gee, if something unexpected happens and detours me for, oh, four hours, I don't think I can do this."

And then there came a rapping on my chamber door.

It was my grandmother, who needed to be taken to the ER. She'd had surgery on her gallbladder that morning and now she was worried because she was getting sick and her blood pressure was up. Sitting next to her at the hospital, I felt one hour turning into two into three into four . . .

I coloured one page to-day, as quickly as I could, cutting a few corners, and found I wasn't able to colour it in under an hour. If I really put pedal to the metal, and sacrificed quality, I still couldn't finish this thing before to-morrow. And I don't want to sacrifice quality.

So I've decided I'm going to shelve this thing until next Halloween. I'll finish it over the next couple of days, and if you're a friend of mine and you want to see it, e-mail me and I'll send you a copy. But I'm afraid the rest of you will have to wait for next year. In the meantime, I'll be starting on a new project. A project I'll be giving myself at least a month to finish.

Gee, damn, as Holly Golightly would say. Ever get the feeling the gods really don't want you to do something? I worked twelve hours a day for two weeks on this thing, blowing off friends and movies and television and books . . . Bah, fuckbug.

Not really any time to blog to-day or to-morrow. Yes, it's 80s montage time;

Well, it looks like I'm actually going to be able to pull this off. I pencilled two pages yesterday and inked four, catching up to my pencils, which means I have twenty pages pencilled and inked. All this in just about two weeks. I'm still pretty behind on colouring--I only have six pages totally finished and six partially coloured, but at this pace, I ought to be able to get them all done. Looks like the wildfires are almost entirely contained, too, so they won't be getting in my way.

I changed a few lines of dialogue yesterday, which is always a risky thing when I'm in the middle of drawing a comic, as my perspective on the big picture is inevitably skewed by this point. I also experimented with a colour palette that I think is going to pay off--see, I have a minor problem in that a lot of this comic takes place in places where there are dim or no light sources, and since I'm a big fan of natural lighting, I'm compelled to completely obliterate a lot of what I've drawn with darkness. Ultimately, I still see this as a gain. I like darkness to look like darkness. I love it when filmmakers have this sensibility--look at David Lynch. Twin Peaks is especially illustrative; if you compare the Lynch directed episodes with the others, you'll see Lynch has these wonderful pitch black forest night scenes, lit usually only by a shaky flashlight. In the pilot episode, you have that oddly scary shot of James and Donna's pale faces close to each other surrounded by blackness. And yet, in a later episode, when a different director takes us to the same location, also at night, the place is lit by a boring ambient yellow.

I took another cue from Lynch last night, though, by using a general dark blue lighting for pitch black, a sort of wild artifice I borrowed from a scene in INLAND EMPIRE. It serves a number of functions for me; it marks the passage of time, it reflects the mood of the dialogue, and it makes everyone's faces visible, all while being artificial enough to cue the reader into the fact that the characters can probably see less than we can.

If nothing else, this is going to be the best looking comic on my web site. I've scanned the pages at a much higher dpi than Boschen and Nesuko and Moving Innocent, and, for the first time, I'm using a ruler on the edges of the panels when I ink them. I always kind of wanted a slightly squiggly quality to the lines in my comics previously, but jeez, I like how this looks. I'm getting comfortable with it; hopefully I'm not on the road to putting cg AT-ATs and dewbacks in my old comics.

Last night I actually listened to a commentary I'd already listened to before--Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince's commentary for Kagemusha. But it's such a dense commentary, practically a history lesson, there's no way I could retain it all after just one or two listens. Kagemusha is a movie thick with historical references left utterly unexplained that nonetheless are crucial to the viewing experience, so a history lesson is rather useful. I wonder if Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas knew what they were getting into when they decided to fund the film.

Prince talks about the fact that Kagemusha was originally planned as a comedy, written to star Shintaro Katsu, a well-loved comedic actor best known for playing Zatoichi. Unfortunately, Katsu showed up on the set expecting to direct his own scenes. I suppose you have to admire the chutzpah of a guy showing up to work on an Akira Kurosawa movie and telling that legendary director he's going to take the reins. But of course, it simply meant that Kurosawa fired him on the spot, and called in Tatsuya Nakadai as a last minute replacement. I like Tatsuya Nakadai, but I rather think the movie would have been better served by having someone more suited to comedy in the role to balance out the dense historical drama and bloody battle scenes of the rest of the movie. It might have made Kagemusha as good as Ran.

Ever since J.K. Rowling announced that Dumbledore is gay, I've felt somewhat deficient, not having any secretly gay characters. So I've decided the guy on page 119 of Boschen and Nesuko with the black moustache and pink scarf is gay. Secretly gay.

But, by the way, I'm quite certain Rowling made Dumbledore gay because Ian McKellen is gay. Dumbledore is Gandalf. There, I said it.

A while ago, Caitlin spoke in her blog about hearing Tori Amos' cover of The Cure's "Lovesong", saying she felt that Amos had completely missed the point of the song. It's only recently I've come to understand exactly what Caitlin meant. I guess don't wholly dislike Amos' interpretation, but yeah, The Cure version has a great, quiet thing.

Compare for yourself;

Looks like it's probably going to rain to-day. That'll be good.

Lots and lots of colouring last night. I worked until 4am, again. I listened to the Desperado commentary, which was informative. It's nice to hear a director like Robert Rodriguez who sounds like he's genuinely interested in providing valuable commentary. I had no idea Desperado was such a low budget movie (seven million dollars). Rodriguez explained all the techniques used to make it look expensive, like using only two stuntmen for the whole movie, serving as his own editor, and hiring the bigger name actors, like Steve Buscemi and Cheech Marin, for only six days a piece and using creative editing to make it look like they were there longer.

I was surprised to learn that Salma Hayek was the first female, Mexican lead in a Hollywood movie since Dolores Del Rio in the 40s. But gods, Hayek looks good in Desperado. It's no wonder the studio abandoned their desire to cast a blonde after Rodriguez showed them Hayek's screen test.

Anyway. Let to-day's marathon begin . . .

No commentaries yesterday. I ended up listening to Morrissey, William S. Burroughs, and lots of David Bowie, starting with Space Oddity and working my way up to Hunky Dory. It always seems to come as a revelation to me how much I really, really love The Man Who Sold the World. And Space Oddity's good for more than the title track. I quite like "God Knows I'm Good" and "Letter to Hermione" makes me a little sad knowing he never got back together with her. I guess even David Bowie gets his heart broken.

I pencilled two pages and inked two pages, and then I cut my thumb on the lid of a bean can while I was trying to make myself a burrito. I somehow managed to make the little Mexican meal I was hungry for one-handed while my other started bleeding profusely. Unfortunately, it was my right hand, so I only coloured for the rest of the night, which, well, I really needed to catch up on anyway. I think my thumb's basically healed but hopefully it won't split open while I'm drawing.

The Chargers are actually going to play at the stadium, which I guess is why they're forcing evacuees to move out. Nice, guys. But the flames do seem to be on the retreat.

Now I'd better feed the cats. My aunt's moving out, and soon the cats won't be around anymore. I'm sure gonna miss those little things. I can't say I blame my aunt, though, considering how Republican my grandmother is about cats. I think the last straw was when my grandmother wouldn't let my aunt feed an elderly, skinny cat that's started hanging around the backyard. My grandmother said it was because it made her sad to see the old cat. If you ever wondered why someone would vote against S-Chip, there it is.

Things seem to be getting mildly better around here. Part of me thinks it's just that people are tired of things seeming completely unmanageable and are just reflexively calling conditions improved. But a lot of the evacuations have been lifted.

You know, I ought to point out that this whole thing hasn't actually impacted my life very much. Aside from worrying about the proximity of the fires, I've pretty much conducted my life this week exactly as I would have if it weren't for the fires. The 2003 fire had much more of an impact on my life, since the power was knocked out for a day and we did have to evacuate. So I've been pretty lucky. Then again, it's not over yet.

Last night, I dreamt Kingston Falls was burning and Phoebe Cates was presiding over it, laughing sadistically on a hilltop even as her own flesh was burning. I don't know why my subconscious was so harsh to Cates, but obviously I did end up listening to he cast commentary for Gremlins. It was fascinating in a weird way--it almost had a dramatic arc, where a group of unlikely cohorts are reunited, their personalities clash, but they pull together in the end. The commentary featured Phoebe Cates (Kate Berringer), who had very little to say, and sounded almost like someone who wasn't even in the picture, as the others continually prompted her to tell stories she had absolutely no memory of, though apparently her favourite part of the movie, as a viewer, is when Gizmo spawns the other mogwai. Howie Mandell (the voice of Gizmo and some of the gremlins), on the commentary, comes off as a mildly funny douche, as after Cate giggles at her favourite scene, Mandell asks Joe Dante, the director, if those furballs are actually his balls.

Mandell obviously seems to think he was the star of the movie. I kept wishing that someone would point out to him that anyone could have done Gizmo's voice.

The main drama on the commentary, though, was provided by Joe Dante and Zach Galligan (Billy Peltzer). Galligan comes off as an eager nerd, chomping at the bit to tell every little story he can think of, sounding both like someone who rarely gets a spotlight anymore and also like someone who genuinely loves DVD commentaries. It was during one of his early, excited ramblings that Howie Mandell interrupted to point out that he'd be pretty annoyed if people were talking over the movie when he was trying to watch it, and what's the point of commentary anyway? It's not the first time I've heard an actor gripe like this on a commentary, but I'm always impressed by the level of stupidity required to spawn the comment*. Joe Dante somehow managed to explain to Mandell, without calling him a moron, that people can turn the commentary off whenever they want, and that it's meant for people who've watched the movie before.

But later, when Galligan started going into a story about a scene that had to be filmed at 6am, Dante interrupted to say that it was that sort of story he'd probably edit out of the commentary if he could. Galligan replied with a very subtly, but obviously deeply felt, hurt, "Why?"

Dante gave an awkward excuse and a tense silence followed. Finally Dante started blabbing about this and that before anyone else felt comfortable talking again.

And somewhere in all of this was Dick Miller (Murray Futterman), who didn't seem to quite understand the sense of humour of all these young people and stayed quiet for most of the commentary. But he made everyone laugh when, at the very end, he said, "Oh, I just thought of a good story."

Phoebe Cates has one of the sexiest voices ever, I must say.

I pencilled two pages yesterday, inked two, and coloured quite a bit. But I'm still very behind on colouring, so I need to buckle down.

I went out yesterday to get shaving cream and decided to eat lunch at a tiny Mexican restaurant next to the CVS. An eight year-old kid rang me up and brought me my food. I could see that he and his father, the man making the food in the back room, were the only people working there. It was like being in a Robert Rodriguez movie, which reminds me I have the Desperado commentary to listen to . . .


*It's worse when it comes from people I have more respect for, as when Stanley Donan said it on the Charade commentary, or when Lucy Davis said it on the Shaun of the Dead commentary, though at least she was cute about it.

Things are still unchanged here, though ash is starting to fall from the sky more noticeably. I'm trying to keep myself steeled.

I had dinner with my mother and sister last night, which is why I didn't get as much done on my comic as I wanted to--I pencilled two pages, inked a page and a half, and coloured a fourth of an MST3k's worth (The Starfighters, one of my favourite episodes. The refuelling sequence alone is worth watching the episode for). But I am now halfway done with all the pencils.

I listened to the cast commentary for Re-Animator, which was a fun commentary. It's fun listening to Barbara Crampton giggling over her own gratuitous nudity, and hearing the guys trying to sound detached (Jeffrey Combs; "Look at that lighting fixture." Barbara Crampton; "Look at those breasts! They're right there!").

I'm starting to run out of commentaries. I think I only have Gremlins left, though I'm oddly looking forward to hearing what Phoebe Cates has to say.

Google maps has an interactive map for the San Diego fires. Gotta love Google.

I see they're calling the fire to the north the "Witch Creek Fire", which is better than the local news channels referring to it as the "Witch Fire". Are police looking for a practitioner of the black arts here?

What am I saying? Witch Fire sounds much better.

Anyway, things still seem to be okay in Santee . . .

Still no call to evacuate. But evacuations were ordered in El Cajon yesterday, and now, I see there are some being ordered in Rancho San Diego--both of those areas are south of here. So we seem to be in the eye of this thing here.

I keep seeing guys on CNN talk about the similarities to this and Katrina, and how federal and local responses seem to be much more effective in this case. There have been two deaths so far, compared to Katrina's much larger, untold number. But I would argue there are a number of other differences--aside from the fact that the federal government is obviously going to want to skip to faster this time for purely PR reasons, there's also the fact that mobility is far easier. I've heard of only a couple roads being made unusable to emergency vehicles, and besides this, the roads and places in Southern California are much more spread out than in most of the country's older cities. San Diego's also the fifth most expensive place to live in the country, which means there are far fewer people unable to transport themselves.

President Bush is supposed to be here for a photo op on Thursday. How much you want to bet he plays it as St. George conquering the Katrina dragon at last?

I've given up trying to sleep. There're evacuations now in Lakeside, which is on the side of Santee (where I live) opposite where the fires were (and still are) yesterday. There's been no mention of Santee in the news except to say that Santana High School, my high school, is being used as a shelter for Lakeside evacuees.

They're still calling this fire completely uncontained, so I'm nervous, as you might expect. I'm going to start making a few preparations.

I mean to work on my comic to-day.

Yesterday I listened to Peter Bogdanovich's commentary for The Searchers and producer Richard Shepherd's commentary for Breakfast at Tiffany's. The Bogdanovich commentary was easily more interesting and informative, though the producer's perspective on the Audrey Hepburn movie wasn't without interest. He talked about choosing Hepburn over Marilyn Monroe because Audrey seemed to him to have more of an innate sensitivity.

Martin Balsam's character calls Holly Golightly a phoney, but a real phoney, which is a key observation to her fantastically, perfectly formed character. She makes fantastic promises she can't keep, but she nonetheless makes those promises in all earnest. She has a thousand superficial relationships not because she's cold, but because she's so sensitive that the promise of depth in a relationship derails her in ways she cannot admit to herself because to do so would be to acknowledge a weakness in herself she so often speaks derisively of in others.

"Okay, so he's not a rat, or even a super rat, just a scared little mouse." She had that Brazilian guy pegged better than Paul.

Anyway. I better get to things . . .

"President Bush has authorised FEMA to help Arnold Schwarzenegger."

Is it too much to ask for one encouraging name in that sentence?

Having a croissant instead of oatmeal this morning really paid off--by 2am, I got everything done I had scheduled for myself; I drew two pages, inked three, and did as much colouring as I could for the duration of a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode (I'm not measuring the colouring in pages since, as I'm using the same colour palette for all the pages I currently have scanned, I'm colouring single components straight down the line . . . That's not very clear, but I'm tired, so deal)*

So I guess I clocked another twelve hours to-day. Maybe more like eleven, if you take out lunch and dinner. The fire situation hasn't seemed to change--a couple news sites say it's certain to get worse to-morrow, so we're a long way from being out of the woods. It still doesn't look like it's going to come this way, but it's still only about thirty miles away, and is spreading uncontrollably.

Here's a spot I drive through frequently--I drove through here when I went for sushi on Friday;



I was only away from the house for two hours, remember, so factoring in that I bought Dune and read some of it at the restaurant, you can see this is indeed very close. This satellite photo from CNN isn't encouraging;



Of course, also discouraging from CNN was Glen Beck taking a moment to say, "I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today."

There's some perspective for ya. Don't let the lava scare you away from grabbing the Ring of Power . . .


*Red Zone Cuba was the MST3kepisode, by the way. Crow: "This movie dares you to watch it!"

I woke up to the smell of something burning to-day. It was, of course, San Diego. Again. I guess this is what the orange-red dryer was up to (maybe the guy was saying, "Orange County Fire"?). The southern perimeter is the 56 freeway, which is about thirty miles northeast of here. The fire's supposed to move to the coast, but who can predict these things, especially when the Yahoo! news site says it's "zero percent contained."

The last time this happened, in 2003, it was also around Halloween. I wrote in my blog;

Driving on Fletcher Parkway, into the cancer yellow haze, I looked up and saw, in a half constructed tower on the corner, the dark shape of a rotted corpse, silhouetted against the diluted sunlight, hanging from a noose.

Wouldn't it be funny if Armeggeddon happened on Halloween? The thought's crossed my mind more than once over the past couple days.

So God doesn't want me to finish this Halloween special comic, eh? Bah! It will be done, if the flesh melts from my fingers!

"There are only two creatures of value on the face of the earth: those with the commitment, and those who require the commitment of others." - John Adams

I now have eight pages drawn and four inked. That's almost the equivalent of a Boschen and Nesuko chapter in just four days. Now I just need to do this 2.5 more times. Plus colouring. I shall!

Last night I listened to commentaries for 1776 and Secretary, which I think must be the sweetest movie ever made. In all, I worked about twelve hours yesterday.

And here I go again . . . !

Rigorous night of drawing last night. I guess I started at around 3:30pm . . . I took a two hour lunch break, bought a copy of Dune, started reading it while eating sushi, came back, continued drawing, stopped to log briefly into Second Life where I found the desert planet, well, deserted. Which was probably just as well since it meant that I continued drawing until the wee hours.

I have to face the facts; if I want to get this done, there'll be no Second Life, no movies, no hour long breakfasts until Halloween. But I think I can do this. I just hope doing so much in such a short time doesn't affect the quality of the drawings.

I remember drawing, inking, and colouring the last four pages of Boschen and Nesuko's chapter 6 in one day. That took sixteen hours . . . It's hard to say if this had an effect on quality. There are a number of problems I have with those drawings, looking at them now, but I'm not sure how much of this has to do with the fact that I wasn't as good of an artist back then. In any case, I guess it works well enough, even though I made everyone's necks weirdly long. I do like how I blocked panel 3 on page 56. It looks almost like a Kurosawa arrangement. Though Kurosawa probably would've figured out how to get Boschen in the frame.

Thank the gods I have such a backlog of DVD commentaries to listen to--I had two especially good ones keeping me company last night; the scholar's roundtable commentary on the new Criterion edition of Seven Samurai, and David Cronenberg's commentary for The Fly.

Spending so much concentrated time on a comic is bringing back a lot of old feelings. You get strangely intimate with the characters . . . I remember always feeling like Nesuko was there in the trenches with me, and I'm starting to feel that way about the characters in this Halloween comic. The title, by the way, is Kim, Kimberly, and the Snake. I like how it sounds almost like a cheesy 1980s detective show. I was tempted to call it Kim, Kimberly, the Snake, Mrs. King, Simon, and the Fat Man, She Wrote.

It'll be nice to have a new 24 page comic on my web site. I haven't put one up since Moving Innocent, way back at the beginning of this year. I'm still happy Sonya seemed to like that thing so much. She's a good person.

Well, back to the comic mines with me . . .