New Artwork & "Enter The Dark" by Todd Miro

Two new panels from The Human Hourglass from page 18. Nothing crazy here, but I like these two in sequence.

Enter The Dark. Scary film. 18 minutes long, already going to be making it's premier at the Chicago Horror Fest and then showing at Thriller! Chiller! film fest in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Its funny and scary and messed up, as all good horror films are.

My good friend Todd Miro wrote and directed and its pretty cool. I'm one of the two lead actors and while I cringe every time that i open my mouth on screen, for exactly the same reason that we all hate hearing our own voices on answering machines, I don't think that we do a half bad job.

Some reviews:

- Brutal as Hell review:

… a fun little fright flick that effectively showcases Miro’s filmmaking and editing abilities.

- HorrorNews.net review:
Enter the Dark is a clever, scary, fun piece that delivers with a punch and a cool ending.

- All Things Horror review:

… Enter the Dark proves once again a good ghost story simply needs to put emphasis on the story and not flashy effects or big budgets in order to provide some fun and scares.

Todd and I will be attending the Chicago premier so if you're not doing anything on the 26th, come by and check out the film. We're playing right before the feature presentation at 9:15 or so, which may be like having your band open for Van Halen once. We'll see.

Check out the bad ass trailer here. Enjoy.

The Unvarnished Horror of "Spook Hunt"

A shout out to local filmmaker and good friend Todd Miro who is, over at his blog, detailing the process of shooting and producing and putting all the pieces together for his movie short Spook Hunt. Go over and take a look. He's got a great idea and and a great script and if any of the execution doesn't come up to snuff its only because he's got a amateur in front of the camera.

Yeah, I'm in the movie. sheepish grin.

This acting thing is hard. I can hear the inflection in my head that i'd like to use, but the voice, like any instrument, is only as good as the musician playing it, and as a bit of a novice I can't always get the instrument to do EXACTLY what I want it to.

As much time as I spend thinking about layouts and storytelling and variations of shots and all the different ways to present information on the comic book page, its fascinating to have someone else direct and edit and be the sole arbiter of how to tell the story. I'm a prop. I'm trying to be a damn good prop, but i'm still a prop nonetheless.

Todd is spending a great deal time documenting both the technical means that he's using to shoot the piece, as well as the aesthetic choices in picking shots, angles, takes. Its a great way, other than director's commentary tracks and deleted scenes, to see how a film comes together.

So pop on over to see some of the early scenes as we shoot them and he starts to assemble the footage into something resembling a real film!

Avatar and Into The Abyss

My short review of Avatar: I never thought that i would see Michael Whelan's fantasy covers brought to life. Not like that. Cameron is the only director that has a solid 2 hour and 40 minute formula that doesn't feel padded, and he's done it on Terminator 2, Aliens 2, Titantic and Avatar.

Floating mountains. Right. Straight out of Metal Hurlant.

Longer review later. Still processing.

Indy filmmaker and Horror aficionado Todd Miro is blogging over at Into The Abyss. Very few people are as good at ripping apart a film to see why it works or why it doesn't work as he is. The man also sports some cool Hendrix Sienkiewicz artwork in the studio. Go do a little reading.

Reviews to come: Marian Churchland's Beast!

Bits of the Past: The Comics that Neverwuz

Went searching for the damn Good guys origiinals in the closet and ran across other interesting stuff, pieces that I'd not seen in a long time.

Perhaps its the good red wine hitting me, but as I found myself looking over pieces that I had done 15 years ago or more, I found that I could remember a lot putting them together, perhaps more that I could remember about the times and places that surrounded the artwork themselves. I remember placing those blacks in just such a way on the page, or doing a trick to ghost in a hand that I couldn't quite pencil correctly. Holiday cards that bespoke of myself in college, living in some oddball apartment, surrounding myself with the oxygen that keeps a 20 year old alive: music, comics, scraps of paper with phone numbers, old grocery receipts heavy on Ramen, old running shoes under the bed.

And I stared at the lump of papyrus in my lap thinking, this is the most accurate way that I've measured my life: in lines on paper, in fantasies brought stillborn on the tip of a pen or brush. And its somewhat sad, in one way, since its filled with far more failed experiments that ones that work, but in another way I think: at least I have some way to measure; at least there is some path here.

lately I've been missing, again, youthful arrogance, in all its wonderful glory. Because, just as I can see the obvious lumps and bruises in Guy Davis' Baker Street, hear the frantic glory in the Jam's first album, I love these things that they were too stupid to know that the couldn't do. I love the bad posturing in Jim Starlin's early Captain Marvels, I love all the crazy little lines in Jamie Hernandez's early Locas stories that he would soon edit out, I love that someone believed enough in them to give them the opportunity to go and do.

As you can read in my earlier post about Defiant's Good Guys, it took years of going to conventions with my inks and having different editors say, "Well, that looks good." It finally took David Lapham looking me in the eye and saying, "This is really good stuff. Why aren't you working professionally yet?" and I looked him right back and could truthfully say, "I don't know. No one will give me a chance." and I knew that I wasn't hiding a single weakness in my game, I knew that I was ready. I had been ready. Perhaps thats why when Neil Pozner died, and practically everyone, it seemed, had a great note about what a wonderful guy he was, there was a contingent among us who knew that he was simply the gatekeeper to keep us out of DC, out of getting our work under the eyes of someone who could actually have given us work. I was jealous of the guys who had someone who would look at their work and say, "You know what, its not all there, but I'll give you a chance to get there. Here's the assignment."

At the top of this post is an early work, copyright myself and Todd Miro, that I still love. Just give it a click to see the larger version. I'll be raising my Led Zeppelin shot glass to toast all those who have helped someone along the way.