This week began with controversy for The Oatmeal and over the silly Catwoman 0 cover. At the time I was agonizing over a trio of badly executed illustrations, including one Scott Pilgrim-Avengers mashup.  Ron Rosenberg's Tomb Raider quotes were stirring up more gender controversy, and someone setup Rachel Ray to sound like a cannibal.

The whole week I was watching streams of Spatsula working on her Avengers piece for animethon, and much inspiration was had.  In the meantime I read the heck out of The Ultimates and started reminiscing about The Authority, and also tried to trace back when I first read one of the Ultimates 2 GN's.  Apparently, it was a long time ago, probably before this blog.

I discovered musicshake because of Puiupo..  And I discovered I wasn't following John Allison on tumblr.  How foolish!  And then I fell asleep one night with my computer on and firefox installed an update that saved over my 3.6 exe.  I fiddled with an old restore point to keep everything in order before just caving in and using the 12.0 exe.  Now things run quite seamlessly, but a lot of neat add-ons are sorely missed.

My favorite lesbian cosplayer couple broke-up earlier in the week and I sympathized for both of them.  Feels.  Someone introduced me to Noxi's art, which is very good.  Somebody linked to Animatrix Second Rennaissance so now I have to mark it in my eternal mental queue of things to find later and watch.  Because Emmy was struggling with painting clouds, I found out about this great cloud painting tutorial.

I followed up on the work of Darryl Ayo and read Little Garden and some newer comics.  I read up about Renae De Liz and Ray Dillon and Womanthology, and her recent health woes.  Did a little perusing through my blog archives and found out my linkbunches are all broken. And then I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out where all those preloaded songs from my Zune went.  So I just went and got all the albums---mostly all of them.  And then on Saturday I slept a lot, watched a bunch of Baman Piderman, Korra, Scrubs, Corner Gas, and Psych.  Then I sketched a little.

So now it's Father's Day Sunday.  I'm taking off in a bit to a barbecue and some lazy, tortured time in the sun.  I'm sure I will have a mix of nausea and fun.

I got back into CrossGame and read all the way through the first book (?).  It was a mix of sweet, mysterious, and tragic.  Adachi sure has this stuff down.  I also began to really appreciate the understated quality of those elegant, acutely rendered, architectural backgrounds so many manga have.  I love that inking technique.  It reminds me of the bird ink drawings of George Miksch Sutton.  At first I was always bothered by how overtly technical those kind of drawings were that they tended not to emphasize a particular flow pattern, or how little high contrast was used to give the eye locuses of visual interest.  However, these days I can appreciate the sublime beauty of creating time and silence in an understated exterior shot.  Or maybe it's that Adachi uses these visuals more competently.

Uploaded by IAMVxCentraI on Jul 24, 2011