Platypus of Truth

  There were too many games. I didn't have time for a 40k knock off. Blood Bowl, Man of War, Necromunda, 40k, and Fantasy Battles all needed time and funding. Seige of the Citadel was frightening and fascinating (there's a special place in my psyche for the Ezoghoul), but getting into the whole Mutant Chronicles was a bridge too far. Imagine my nostalgic delight, then, when I discovered the 2008 movie Mutant Chronicles staring Ron Pearlman! It has all the best parts of Seige of the Citadel and no 40k shoulder pads. It's like a Steam Punk "Doom". It's light watching, but I did enjoy the movie's theme: "The Darkest Age is Yet to Come: Have Faith!". It's not just the theme of the movie, it's also the mechanical principle upon which it runs. I would love to have a sequel that focuses on "Where will you put your faith?" It's a critical discussion for our present moment. Anyhow, above is my personal version of The Mutant Chronicle...

  Lorna from Over the Garden Wall. Great character from a great short that plays its twist well. Poor Wirt. What a dupe! 

 Metroid, Alien, and Terminator all factor in to this WIP.

 In 1989, our family moved to Southern Connecticut so I could begin receiving cancer treatment. The house wasn't haunted, but for a brief time I was. The Warrens lived in the next town over. We were Protestants. We prayed. It stopped. The Haunting in Connecticut is a merely competent horror movie. It deserves the two stars Ebert & Roper gave it. It also deserves the praise they gave to the core actors. While the movie is wildly beyond anything I ever experienced (and isn't even shot in CT), the texture of non-paranormal elements is jarringly real. In some sense, it's validating: cathartic. There are only so many people who have lived in Connecticut. Far fewer are childhood cancer survivors from the 80s-90s. I'd be willing to wager even fewer have been haunted. It's such a small, small segment to base a pop movie on. Honestly, I have a hard time connecting with others. I've just accepted that I'll always be a sort of platypus. But people watched this movi...

  The pageant of Hannibal rises to the level of Greek Tragedy. It is Art for the Middle Class. I'm having fun with my pastels now as my homages to this micdropping series continues.

 

 

 A lighter note for season 3...

  Wendigo's Daughter 

 And we add pen...

 Poor Wendigo. No Abigail. No Will. No Kidneys...

 The Goofy Movie, Dead Poet's Society, The Haunting of Hill House, Midsommar, The Thin Red Line.

There are two innovative bits of cinema I've been watching over the past week. Each deserves attention as works of art, but also as pieces that authentically put women and minorities to the fore of a genre in which they have been all too often absent or exploited. The first is Netflix's Dutch horror series, Ares . Ares  follows the biracial and poor Rosa's initiation into an elite college fraternity with connections to the highest circles of Dutch society. The portrayal of the the way in which elite groups draw in their members, separate them from their families and values, make them complicit in the group's guilt, foster predatory competition, and ultimately claim to offer absolution from the corruption through radical loyalty to the group works as well for cults and political factions as it does for honors colleges and classics programs. I can't speak to how it actually portrays race and gender in Holland, but I can affirm that this is what it feels like to be a...

I'm still thinking about Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House . Over the past year, I've read the book twice, moved on to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle , watched Netflix's adaptations of both and a further adaptation called The Haunting . As it turns out, I'm not alone. Stephen King has called the Netflix adaptation "close to a work of genius" and Quentin Tarantino says that he keeps returning to the Netflix adaptation as well. Stephen King's interest in Hill House made sense, but Tarantino's interest fascinated me. It's not something I would have expected. Then I remembered how much a fan of non-linear storytelling Tarantino is. Whether it's Pulp Fiction , Kill Bill , or The Hateful Eight , Tarantino likes the slow reveal and opportunities for slow reveal and character focus that telling a story out of chronological sequence opens up. Beneath all the homages and obvious shock-schlock is a reverence for the art of Story....

Adding some fine point pens to my collection and trying them out this week. Here, we have a illuminated manuscript doodle, a few doodles from Netflix's adaptation of Blame! and some fan art for Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle . October is almost over, and we will be watching the 2018 adaptation of We Have Always Lived in the Castle  along with staples Coroline and Over the Garden Wall.  We are, of course, waiting for The Haunting of Bly Manor  as The Haunting  series continues. Speaking of Netflix horror offerings, I particularly enjoyed watching the French series Marianne . Fair warning, it's a binger. Also an unexpected delight was the Korean zombie flick Train to Busan . Good horror is never about the horror, but about how the horror sheds a new light on something otherwise mundane. Art, after all, is a way of seeing.

It's hard to grow up surrounded by at least 7 historic cemeteries and not be a "fraidy cat". In college, I set myself the task of tackling my fears by committing to watching X Files with the guys every Sunday for a year or two. It worked -a little. At some point, I discovered H.P. Lovecraft, Charles Williams, and Hellboy, and that helped more. I turned to writing my own supernatural thrillers for a number of years until a nervous breakdown and subsequent medication derailed my writing efforts. In an attempt to get re-started, my wife bought me a copy of "Save the Cat". So began my trek into Horror films as I attempted to master the ins and outs of the genre and its subfields. I've generally tried to avoid any obvious drek and keep only to the highlights. After a couple years, here are my favorites in no particular order: Alien - I saw this re-released in the theater during college and it still made me jump. More important is the way it uses the genre to hi...

My wife and I are reading Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" in preparation for eventually watching the Netflix TV series together. This is my second time through the book, and I am seeing more of the thousand links between the sparse and controlled world of the book and the sweeping scope of the series. Even though Flanagan radically changed the book in adapting it, it is clear that he knows his source cover to cover and has a fine appreciation of even the smallest details. I would love to see an adaptation theory class discuss the book and the series. In the meantime, my own horror offering was rejected, but once things settle down a little here I will have to try again.

Here's another try at some fan art for Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House . I didn't want the labyrinth to detract from the central figure, but I'm wondering now if it's too sparse. The central drawing is pen and ink imported into ClipStudio and modified. Interestingly enough, this iconic figure from the Netflix series is only briefly alluded to in the Shirley Jackson novel. It does, however, make frequent appearances on dust jacket covers. That was really the key for the director in the Netflix adaptation: to build a television mini-series around the most iconic images from the book undergirded by a careful study of the relationships between the main characters and Hill House. It's an interesting way to do an adaptation. For my adaptation into 2D media, I chose to rework The Bent Neck Lady  in the simple color pallette and black background of Mignola and Stewart's Hellboy  series. Maybe that's because I can't draw, but the artists who create...

I paint my life in bricolage of Autumn Leaves My high school art teacher always told us: "art is with your eye, not with your hand." In other words, Art is a way of seeing the world. It draws our attention to things we don't normally take the time to see -or even know how to see until an expert shows us. Where we grow up and what our life's experiences are color how we see any given piece of art, but it works the other way as well. What pieces of art we've seen color how we see our lives. I've been watching all sorts of autumnal fare this Autumn season and it helps me narrativize my life while also being narrativized by the life experiences I bring to it. That said, I've been feeling lately that if my life could be narrativized in film it would be Over the Garden Wall , followed by Dead Poets' Society , shading into Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House . There are, of course, other ways to spin it, but that's how I feel right now. What about ...