When the Tim Burton/Jack Nicholson/Michael Keaton Batman came out I was quoted in The Press Democrat saying something like, “It’s the best movie they could have made about a guy who dresses up as a bat and fights crime.” (I happened to be walking out of the theatre when there was a reporter looking for a quote.)

With the new Batman Begins I’d say they’ve now made a better movie about a guy who dresses up as bat and fights crime.

Of course, it’s a matter of how much you care about Batman. And which version you care about. I didn’t read Batman comics as a kid. I was mainly a Marvel zombie. I knew of Batman from the Adam West/Burt Ward TV series, which I liked. As a kid I thought it was cool, more or less. The heroes and villains wore colorful outfits and got into fist fights. I hadn’t a clue what camp was. Camp isn’t something a kid gets. The first Batman comics I bought were the Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers run in Detective Comics during the time when DC was apparently seriously considering cancelling the series. Those comics are among the comics I wanted to keep when it came to sorting out my collection last summer.

You’ll find plenty of folks on the net who can tell you what was great and what was not about BB. I thought it was fun because it paid attention the history of the character and crafted a story that worked without changing that history too much. It’s a depiction of Batman that’s closer to the comics than any of the previous films.

I’ve added the Wogglebug to the Who’s Who page. The Professor is my greatest intentional departure from Neil’s illustrations. I say Neil’s illustrations because I haven’t seen him depicted by many other artists and, when I have, the illustrations have had Neil’s model as their base.

I don’t consciously use Neil’s illustrations as models but his version of the Oz characters are usually the first images that come to mind when I think of them. Oz Squad is set in our 21st century (more or less) so most of the characters have had decades of change happen to them since the Baum books. I try to reflect that when I do their portraits. For some the changes have been major. Dorothy has grown up. Nick and the Scarecrow have had numerous changes and repairs to their bodies. Cap’n Bill has a new leg. For others – the Woozy, the Lion, the Tiger – there’s been little apparent physical change. I just draw them as they are described and that more or less goes along with what Neil drew. (How many ways can you draw a Woozy?).

The Professor got reinvented for a couple of reasons. I wanted him to look more like a magnified bug and I never liked Neil’s version. He’s creepy. Reminds me too much of a scary clown.

Yesterday Nizzibet was interviewed and photographed for Beautiful Women – A New Definition. Nothing for me to add to that. She’s a babe. And she’s brilliant.

We cleaned the house (well, the living room) on Tuesday night in preparation for this. Which means we swept all the clutter into the rooms we aren’t using and shut the doors.

Nizzibet and I watched the 1979 Dracula last weekend. I liked it better than any other version of the story I’ve seen. Frank Langella manages to be creepy, attractive and threatening. The story moves at a good clip. I just wonder … was there ever a time that Dracula turning into a bat was scary? As a kid I think I thought the bat transform ability was neat. Who wouldn’t like to fly. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t think it was scary. It’s definitely not scary to me as an adult. Turning from a brooding powerful man into a squeaking, flapping furball? A flock (swarm?) of bats could be scary. One little squeakerdoodle is not.

I’ve noticed that the bat transformation part of the vampire myth hasn’t been a part of any bloodsucker movie made in the last 20 years.

I took an hour or so to finish one of my giant monster drawings. I’ve got over a dozen of them in various stages of done-ness. It’s nice to feel like I’ve finished a project every now and then. Each kaiju is a separate project in my mind so I only have to finish the one drawing to be done. Kind of like writing a poem or short story as a break from writing a novel. I guess.

This one is inspired by the creatures in The Mole People, a movie I haven’t seen. Yet. So many cheezy movies, so little time. It will probably get remade before I get around to seeing the original.

Not that I’ve got anything to say at the moment. It’s before dawn right now. I’m up early to work on art. I went to bed early last night. Tired. Spent a good chunk of time reading The Tombs of Atuan to Nizzibet. The more we read of the novel the less resemblence there is to the TV miniseries. Once again I find myself wondering why anyone decides to adapt a novel (or comic or cereal box) if they’re going to ignore the basic story that they’re adapting. I don’t mind changes if they make sense. But the changes made in the miniseries, for the most part, don’t make sense. Combining Wizard and Tombs makes a certain amount of sense in a mercenary way. You get both male and female protagonists that way. High adventure and more domestic drama. But adding a power hungry Kargish warlord and a prophesy? So generic and lazy. It’s one of the things I like about the Earthsea novels – no dark lords and no saviors foretold of in prophesy. Especially no saviors foretold of in prophesy. Bleah. Prophesies are generally badly used in fiction. If your hero is destined to be the Hero then usually the only conflict for him/her is whether he/she will accept his destiny or not. And so we, the audience get to suffer through a bunch of whiny heroes who don’t want to be Heroes. Feh. Shut up. You’re destined to be the Hero. Go kick some ass and quit whining about it. Leave the whining to the rest of us who don’t know what the purpose of our life is.

Coming home from work has been interesting lately. Glenn has been shipping boxes of hoarded ephemera up from PassedAwayMother’s house. Most of the time it’s just been a box or two. I usually wait to open them until I’ve been home for a couple of hours. Then I just give them a quick glance – old letters; magazines, zines and minicomics I’ve contributed to or traded for. Stuff that I don’t want to start unpacking until I’m in a more permanent residence.

There were twelve comic book long boxes and one magazine box on the porch yesterday. I’m not opening those. Comics. Once I open those it will be hours before I’m useful again. It was hard enough sorting them last year in California without looking through them. Then I had a deadline.

Most nights I read to Nizzibet. Lately I’ve been reading from the Earthsea novels by Ursula K. LeGuin. We’re currently about halfway through The Tombs of Atuan. The Earthsea books were examples to me of how a story changes depending on ones age. When I first read them as a kid, when there was only the Earthsea Trilogy, I remember liking A Wizard of Earthsea and being mostly bored by Tombs. Lots of stuff happens in Wizard. Ged travels all over Earthsea hunting the shadow he’s loosed. Tombs?. Arha/Tannar lives a life of ritual at a mostly forgotten temple in the middle of a desert. Not so exciting to me as a kid. As an adult now (and as a young man the second time I read it) the story is engaging and interesting because the writing is.

I started reading the series because we’d watched the SciFi Channel’s Earthsea miniseries and Nizz had enjoyed it. I couldn’t remember enough of the original novels to tell her what SciFi had changed. Ursula LeGuin has complained about the miniseries but her complaints have been primarily about casting. Rereading the novels has been great. The Earthsea of the novels is not a perky place.

I’m going to be submitting an image a day to Epilogue.net for my gallery. That doesn’t mean there’ll be a new image every day. Epilogue reserves the right to refuse any piece that doesn’t meet their standards. Epilogue can get backed up and images won’t appear for two or three days after submission. Still, I’ve done enough work lately that I can probably submit a piece a day for two weeks and still not give away the store.

Today I submitted a panel from Strange Eggs. Resubmitted actually. It was rejected the first time. Often times the rejections don’t make sense to me. This time they said the image was too small. That’s easy. I’ve resized and resubmitted. Time to wait.

My latest submission to Epilogue.net has been posted. It’s from the last Worlds of Cthulhu, number 2. The illustrations I’m working on currently are for the sequel/continuation of an article on playing Call of Cthulhu in the Wild West.