The Penguin

This is a review I wrote for the Livingston Post website. Only the Insane Jane portion of the review will be available on the Post; you can find it here [link].   Bluewater’s Movie Hopefuls Jane Floats; Tom Corbett Sinks The recent explosion of comic book-to-film adaptations has proven a double-edged sword, both for comic franchises and their fans. Some excellent recent movies, such as The Avengers , have shown the storytelling potential of the movement. At the same time, this burgeoning trend has had the opposite effect: more bad movies are made out of comics, and more bad comics are made into movies.             Bluewater Productions comic book label has recently paired with Pleroma Entertainment, an independent film studio, to bring two of its comics to the big screen. The first is a solid entry, an original series called Insane Jane. The second is a less noble endeavor, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, based of...

Hello, Gentle Reader. You're probably a-bed now (if not, stop reading and go to sleep), but your intrepid author is wide awake, thinking blearily about his professional life choices, musing and brooding on the future. I imagine myself as a Byronic figure, glass of Port in hand, looking out over the moors from the moon-filled window of my empty, haunted manor. Brooding is a boring business, and requires a little bit of drama whenever possible. My egg for tonight (get it? "Brooding"? Never mind...) is Blind Alley Comics, and namely, what we're going to do with ourselves. It seems the gloomy utterings of my co-conspirator, Joe Haines, were prescient on several points, my own blathering enthusiasm notwithstanding; it was he who predicted that our sales will be very small, and skewed cynical on the subject of putting our products in stores. I'm beginning to agree with him that there's a lot of wasted effort going on here, if not in the fact that we are putt...

THIS!!! That's the late Jean Girard, aka Moebius, aka His High Surreal Majesty. He died earlier this year. This guy was a great influencer of Hayao Miyazaki, if you can't tell, as well as many other artists, filmmakers, and comic book writers. His work with Alejandro Jodorowsky also "influenced" Luc Besson's The Fifth Element , resulting in a bit of a lawsuit (although I'm not complaining - TFE is one of my favorite movies of all time). Enough talk. Here's more: And more: And MORE: Okay, just one more: That last one is from his wordless comic masterwork, Azarch . Perhaps it's a reaction to my own cartoony style, but I love his very European graphical approach: spare lines, flattened surfaces, luminous colors. The second-from-last image recalls my favorite computer games of all time, Homeworld (1999); you can see the amount of influence Moebius has had on video games and comics throughout his career. I suppose I'm doing...