Weekly Upload 03/05/22

Despite being a very meeting heavy week at work, I think things were generally okay. While I have a lot of stuff going on with my to-do list, it feels like the most obnoxious part of the post-holiday season is passing now. I got past my art block from last week (somewhat spectacularly, if I can brag for a moment), and the weather’s feeling more and more spring-like every day. I’m sure my mood has been helped considerably by Friday being an in-service day, which meant no students, which also meant I was free to work from home. Working from home is pretty great, and I sincerely hope it continues to be an option for in-service days going forward.

Art

I produced three pieces this week, which is pretty great given the amount of work that went into them. One was a riff on the classic cover of Lord of the Flies with the close up of the character Ralph with leaves and brush tangled up in his hair while he stares straight out at the reader. Because X-Men stuff is what I thrive on, I used Doug Ramsey in the place of Ralph, increased the amount of foliage obscuring the face, and decided to give it a creepy twist with elements of Krakoan vegetation and techno-organic material growing over Doug’s face. I’m not totally pleased with the finish on the painting, but I think I generally hit the vibe I was going for. Probably won’t do intentionally creepy stuff a whole lot, but this was a fun experiment, and I think the framing I did with the foreground elements is pretty strong. My other two pieces this week were a little more straightforward; one is a simple illustration of two characters in my fancomic meeting (I’m currently hashing out a story for them), and the other is an illustration of Magik and Mirage (good old standbys that they are when I just need to pick a subject to do some work) in variations on their “graduation costumes,” a set of looks that I have never thought were particularly interesting or engaging, even when Art Adams drew them. I mostly like the changes I made, but I think I whiffed a little on Illyana’s feet; her legs look spindly at the ankles.

Week 9 Art Output
I bounced back with a vengeance. #xmen #Cypher #Frenzy #Husk #Magik #Mirage #drawing pic.twitter.com/HnB2WKXGHS

— Jason Jones (@Jkjones2185) March 5, 2022

In other art-related things, I just got in the new Morpho reference book for clothing folds, and I’m excited to do some experimentation. I feel like folds are something that I sort of understand, and I have some guides in other books that explain the concepts, but they never go very deep beyond showing the basic ideas behind the folds on simplified shapes. I spent some time flipping through the Morpho book today, and it still has those core shapes at the center of its method, but then there’s like a hundred pages of sketches showing how they work in conjunction with different parts of the body. I’m hoping I will one day perfect the chunky jacket.

Comics

I know that I read some good comics this week, but I feel very much like there’s not much to say about them besides “They were good!”

I did read the second issue of the Cowboy Bebop series that Titan’s putting out (pretty unfortunate to be running a tie-in series for a show that was already canceled), and I’m really into it. Dan Watters is writing, and what he’s been doing in Home Sick Pilots was strong enough to get me to check this series out. The second issue is an extended riff on the Lotus Eaters myth, but it ends with everyone on the Bebop deciding they’d rather be bounty hunters because it’s just too boring being that happy all the time. The whole thing’s a very energetic take on the things that made the original Cowboy Bebop so much fun. I’m going to guess this is only going to be a miniseries in the end, but I’m enjoying the ride.

I also received my monthly grab bag of physical comics from my local shop, which included the conclusion of Dirtbag Rapture, a Chris Sebela-written series that I found delightful from the start, and the last issue of Volume 1 of a John Wick parody that imagines a world where John was killed instead of the dog, and now the dog’s out to get revenge for the death of his human. It’s called Good Boy, and while it’s probably not something I would normally choose for myself, there is a fun tongue-in-cheek feel to the hyperviolence of the thing. The set also included #4 of What’s the Furthest Place From Here, which I feel sort of ambivalent about, although I admit I find the weird post-apocalyptic setting compelling in a fun, creepy way. I genuinely wish the cast of characters were smaller because I can’t remember who anyone is from issue to issue. Last in the set was #6 of Sweet Paprika. That one’s a big shoulder shrug; it’s fun to read in the moment as a bit of fluffy romance, but I feel like the constant reminder that Paprika is just horny all the time kind of detracts from the things I enjoy in romance books.

Video Games

Rachael’s playing Ghost of Tsushima which is beautiful and a delight to watch. I’m picking at Neo: The World Ends With You, which is a great button masher action RPG with lots of collections to accrue. If I have one complaint about the game, it’s probably that the collecting element is so comprehensive that it’s really slowed down my story progression. I don’t especially mind at the moment, although the fact that I have a different, hundred hour long RPG playthrough that’s been sitting on hiatus for a couple months now waiting on the backburner makes me feel like I may have chosen poorly in my game palette cleanser.

Media

Severance is a great show. I’m into the absurd workplace comedy vibe of the interior parts of the show that rub up against the ongoing outside plot that reminds you just how horrible it is what these people and their employers have done to themselves. Rachael and I finished the utter train wreck that was Love is Blind season 2, and we agreed the best episode of the season is the reunion, because everyone, including the hosts, reads Shake for filth. While watching the thing we were convinced that Shayne was the worst person on the show, and he’s still pretty bad, but it was fascinating to see the cast confirm that the producers actually edited the show to make Shake look better than he was. Weirdest part of the episode was the compulsory trailer for a completely different reality show at the end that looks way trashier than Love is Blind.

Pandemic

The indoor mask mandate in Oregon is going to expire on March 14. All teachers are bracing for impact. Seems like an excellent recipe for ruining some spring breaks (scheduled to begin exactly one week later). On a more positive note, it feels good to spend time outdoors and relax a little bit about masks. We customarily go to the a local park for walks when it’s nice out, and we bring masks for politeness when passing folks on the trails, but it is genuinely nice to have just one less thing to think about when getting ready to go out for a bit of exercise.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week.

Full of Mercy

I mentioned previously that I went through a Japanophile stage when I was in college.  That was triggered by my exposure to anime in high school through the late night television block on Cartoon Network known as Adult Swim.  I don’t have cable anymore, so I have no idea what the state of Adult Swim is now, but when I was a devotee, it ran a range of shows from Futurama to Family Guy (which, coincidentally, were both cancelled at the time) to whatever anime could be affordably licensed.

I enjoyed it immensely.

Two shows of particularly high caliber came to my attention via Adult Swim all those years ago (I remember that my 10 year high school reunion is this month and feel weird about that): Cowboy Bebop and Trigun.  Cowboy Bebop was a fantastic show about bounty hunters in space that had some of the best music you will find in any piece of entertainment hands down.  I’m not kidding when I say it is, objectively, one of the best things.  Maybe someday I’ll wax poetic about the transcendence of that show, but for now I’m more interested in talking about Trigun.

Vash the Stampede in all his Love-and-Peace loving glory. (Photo credit: *Yu7yU*)

Trigun is my unqualified favorite anime.  It’s a sci-fi wild west story about a gunslinger named Vash the Stampede who has an enormous bounty on his head because of his single-handed destruction of the city of July, an event that he can’t remember.  Consequently, the planetary government has reclassified him as a walking natural disaster, because chaos follows wherever he goes (the irony is that the chaos is caused by the endless stream of bounty hunters looking to capture or kill Vash).  It’s an unfortunate situation, because Vash, despite being an ace gunman, is also a total pacifist.  He has never taken a life in the whole time that he’s wandered around the planet Gunsmoke.  He’s kind of like Superman in that he is unrepentantly idealistic, and has a lot of Mary Sue tendencies.  Despite that, I think he’s a fantastic hero, because as the series progresses we get to see Vash forced to deal with the reality of living in a violent world where he can’t protect everyone no matter how hard he tries.

Constantly trailing behind Vash are Meryl Stryfe and Millie Thompson, a pair of insurance agents who have been tasked with finding and following the Humanoid Typhoon so they can determine what insurance claims are covered by their company and which ones can be classified as Acts of God–those things that happen because of natural disasters, like Vash.  Millie and Meryl are excellent characters, who are shown to be highly capable on their own, although they do occasionally end up in situations where Vash has to save them (like in the very first episode…).

Wolfwood with his Cross Punisher (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Rounding out the cast of heroes is Nicholas D. Wolfwood, a traveling Christian priest who is trying to earn money to support an orphanage that he runs.  He earns his money by working as a hired gun; unlike Vash he has no qualms about killing.  In fact, he carries a large cross with him that functions as a portable arsenal; it has contains a rack of about a dozen semi-automatic pistols, a machine gun, and a rocket launcher.  When Vash (or Millie; I’m a little fuzzy on details) picks up the cross before it’s revealed to be a weapon, he mentions that it’s pretty heavy.  Wolfwood replies, “That’s because it’s so full of mercy” (read: bullets).  Wolfwood is one of my favorite characters, because he struggles with his environment in a much more serious way than Vash does.  While Vash has superhuman speed and skill helping him keep the body count at zero, Wolfwood doesn’t have that luxury, and he doesn’t grouse about what he has to do to survive.  More typically, he complains because while he’s hanging out with Vash, he’s forced to adhere to nonlethal methods of getting out of trouble.  This is some of the best conflict in the series.

I bring all of this up because I was recently reading an article at Slacktivist, a blog that I frequent, about how Rick Santorum is getting into the movie business as CEO of a faith-based film studio.  There was some ridicule over this news because Santorum is a politician, and the kind of films that his studio will be producing are likely not going to have wide appeal outside of the conservative evangelical Christian subculture.  Santorum said that entertainment “can be strength and light for people who want to be uplifted and reinforced in their values.”  That reads to me as code for, “my company will not make anything that is intellectually or spiritually challenging, because I want to appeal to my base so they will give me money for my next campaign.”

I’m a little cynical of politics.

In the course of the discussion about the films that the studio has made and will be making in the future, there was some discussion about portrayals of Christian characters in media that do have broader appeal, and Wolfwood was brought up as an example.  Anime fandom is still very much a subculture, just like conservative evangelicalism, but it appeals to a base with a much broader range of ideologies and perspectives.  I loved Trigun many years before I loved Jesus, and its themes surrounding the question of what role mercy has in a harsh world resonated much more strongly than anything that I’ve seen the Christian film industry produce.

Wolfwood is the only explicitly Christian character in the series, and he is also the only hero who makes his living as a killer.  When he encounters someone so Christlike (and make no mistake, Vash is every bit a type of Christ in the same way Superman is), he’s forced to reconsider how his way of life intersects with his faith.  Ultimately, he chooses to love mercy (read: not bullets), but not until after some very wrenching decisions.

So, I find Wolfwood’s story arc to be incredibly moving.  It’s one of the reasons Trigun is my favorite anime.  There are others, but I’ll spare you the details for now.

Have you ever dipped into the world of anime?  If so, what did you think?