Actual art post today! Can you believe it? I barely can. Anyhow, today we're talking about two brothers with a famous legacy in the business. Adam and Andy Kubert are not only two of the more successful artists drawing today, they also happen to be sons of the legendary Joe Kubert. Not just a pioneer in the business who's been working since the Silver Age, Joe Kubert has also founded the Joe Kubert School Of Cartoon And Graphic Art. Needless to say, it must get results, or talent runs in the family because Adam and Andy are quite accomplished. Both possess their father's touch for adding that dynamic flair to their art, but they are very unique in their styles. Adam's art seems to reflect a darker tone, more gritty than clean, but slick at the same time. Andy's art on the other hand is a classic example of dynamic figure drawing. Dramatic poses and panel layouts accentuate his talent for page design, and the readability of his art never comes into question. Both have worked on Marvel's best-selling comic X-Men and both have also had their turns on other classic characters including The Incredible Hulk and Captain America. Their long-running work on all of these titles is a testament to their work ethic, professionalism, and raw talent.

La la la

Big Time Reality
The Art Of Deception
Summer Movie Madness
The Anti-Green Party

They Flee from Me
by Thomas Wyatt

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle tame and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
And therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?

It was no dream, I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness
And she also to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindely am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

Saddle Shoe Haiku

My right, black shoelace
Lacks its small plastic tubing
So now... it's fraying.

Wow, been slacking so much no art post yesterday... but at least I'll keep you sated with a Free Will Horoscope:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22):One of my early astrology teachers, Isabel Hickey, had a favorite saying: "Before you can give yourself away, you have to have a self to give." This should be your seed meditation for the foreseeable future, Virgo. I am not implying that you don't have a self. But you do have a lot of work to do to define and strengthen your sense of who you are. In the coming weeks, I'd love you to visualize a flame in your heart growing steadily bigger and brighter and hotter.

No more lent means more of those things I've been craving. Or should I be a good boy and stick to the regimen?

Let The Games Begin
Who Wants A Piece Of The Spider-Man Pie?
Here's Who
Hello! McFly, Anybody Home?
Comix Awards Exposure

My blog hates me.

I post a whole grip of interesting links and it eats them all. Every last one of them. I'm inclined to hurl obscenities and such at my monitor, but what does that accomplish? Probably me looking quite insane for talking to an inanimate object in the first place. At any rate, I'm just going to repost.

We all like single-parent drama don't we?

Iraq sleeps with Russia. What else is new?

Teenagers like to help sell flavored milk. I know I did at my age. Especially if I wanted an internship.

laugh. Good thing, because apparently, we all need one.

Not again.

TNN is having an Identity Crisis.

Please, parents, don't feed your children Big Macs. It's bad for their health.

Lastly, find your origins so you know where you came from.

I offer you all my Free Will Horoscope:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22):"What if you stumbled on a person living in the dark, starved, chained, drugged and poisoned?" asks futurist Jay Gary. "You'd turn on the light, unlock his chains and nourish him back to health. That poor soul is the human imagination—yours and mine." I agree with Gary's assessment. Our imaginations are in bad shape, numbed by the media's nonstop onslaught of fear-provoking, spin-doctored, soul-killing "information." The situation is tragic. Imagination is not just a playful capacity we call on when we're making art, after all. It's our ability to form mental pictures of things that don't exist yet; it's what we use to shape our future. But here's some good news, Virgo: You now have special power to rehabilitate and reinvigorate your imagination. Get in there and turn on the light, unlock the chains, and nourish it back to health.

Being imaginative is a good thing. Especially for someone like me, being an engineer and all.

So nowadays our values are a little muddled. We can't even trust our closest allies at the moment, our local teenagers, or even our shoe companies. Maybe we need to turnj to

It's deja vu all over again. I feel like I've posted this before, but who cares, he still kicks ass. Berkeley Breathed is a legend in his own time. The man single-handedly made penguins cool, male insecurity rampant, and even entered the term "Ack, thppppt!" into the modern lexicon. Both Bloom County and Outland are classic examples of social commentary in the strips. Decidedly whimsical, Mr. Breathed's strip, set in a fictional world where dandelions are plentiful, immortalized an idealistic and naive penguin with a necktie and symbolized not only the cynicism of a decade (the '80's) but also the optimism people hoped for. His characters were flawed, unreal, and yet real at the same time. It's through these flaws that people could identify with their dreams and frustrations. Although both strips are out of syndication, they live on in my memory, as two of the most surrealy hilarious strips ever.

Eat your Headlines for Breakfast.

The Making Of A Movie
The Review Of A Movie
Lord Of The Flies, Extreme
Praise The Lord
Kimchi Saves Lives
Someone's Beating Their War Drum
April's Fools

Who needs Haiku Thursdays with Fridays like this?

The Tables Turned
by William Wordsworth

An Evening Scene on the Same Subject

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun, above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your Teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

Even Kevin Costner has a Free Will Horoscope:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22):
Famed TV producer Sherwood Schwartz had a hand in making more than 700 TV shows, and he co-authored theme songs for the sitcoms Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch. Every year he collects about $60,000 in royalties for those tunes, written so many years ago. I'd like to alert you, Virgo, to the fact that you're now in a phase similar to the one Schwartz was in when he got inspired to compose those long-term moneymakers. It's time to create a legacy for yourself.

My legacy: learning to walk and chew gum at the same time.

It's not easy these days, with war and all surrounding us, we tend to try and find the lighter things in life to amuse us and keep our minds preoccupied. We may want to keep those close to us treated humanely. We may even want to help out someone in need. The best type of distractions though, are ones that fulfill our life's dream. If we're not terribly careful however, computers will some day dream for us. This is why we need to keep in mind what makes us human. Not only who we are, but where we come from Maybe this way, we can learn to look past the negatives that surround us during these times. I happen to believe, this is sound advice.

I used to not like Doonesbury at all when I was much younger. It's social commentary, uniform panel structure, and rather realistic situations didn't seem to have a place in the comics page where most strips were bizarrely funny, had colorful characters, and seemed more interesting visually. As I've grown older, I've come to appreciate what Gary Trudeau does everyday in his strip. He helps us realize that reality can be bizarrely funny and contain colorful characters at the same time. He's introduced us to the iconography of our presidents, easily boiled down into something as simple as a cowboy hat, or a waffle. Always relevant, and always sharp as a tack, Doonesbury reminds us of the varying social, political, and personal climates we occupy during the decades. From the opulence and conservatism of the '80's to the vague media sensationalism of the '90's and to the current uncertainties of the new millenium, one can always count on Mr. Trudeau to have something to say about the current headlines.

Try to be brief, for work best needs be done with little distraction.

Street Fighter Comics, American Style
Automobile Of The Future
News On SARS
Touchy-Feely Robots
Los Angeles Angeles
Stick Out Your Tongue, Get Suspended
One Sick Fetish
Play With Fire, And You'll Get Burned

Avast me hearties! Read 'em and weep.

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat

by Edward Lear

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!"

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?"
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?" Said the Piggy, "I will."
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

Stage A Coup Haiku
Revolt and uprise
Against your televisions
For they rot your brain.

Things happen for a reason, even if it is your Free Will Horoscope:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22):
I love it when I'm so energized and purified from riding my bike up Mt. Tamalpais that I experience a lightning bolt of realization about some crucial truth. I love it when I'm walking through the city's trash-spattered concrete jungle and am suddenly blessed with the fresh smell of dirt from a renegade garden. I love it when the pathological decisions of bad leaders inspire my tribe to redouble its commitment to fight for outrageous peace, ingenious love, and wild understanding. What about you, Virgo? Where do you look for your breakthroughs and redemptions? It's time to be on high alert.

High alert? Am in the orange zone now?

Gonna keep update short today. Things are a-brewing busily at work with new technology on the horizon, things are always getting mixed up. So mixed up that myth becomes reality and geurillas are in our midst. Let's pray it all settles down real soon.

Even if yesterday's post had a small scripting problem, we move on...


Kenichi Sonoda is a manga artist with a love of machinery. Although some of this machinery happens to be guns, he also has a love for classic automobiles. Ever since I saw the main character of Mr. Sonoda's manga, Gunsmith Cats, tear around the corner in her '67 Shelby Cobra, I've been enamored with the work he's done. Mr. Sonoda has a keen eye for the power behind this machinery, and his liberal use of these cars shows he has not only great knowledge for them, but also great reverance. Technically, his art is a marvel. Very clean, and always dynamically structured, the violence appears more shocking through his art than through most I've read. His drafting skills are so impeccable, I'd be hard-pressed to find a technical drafter who can do it better. In other words, Mr. Sonoda is a master.