Lots going on right now. Corrections to KAGEMONO #2 have gone out, new proof should arrive before the weekend. I'm working a second draft of the cyberpunk story--response from my test audience has been better than I'd hoped and I'd like to get it out the door next week. Work for my dayjob continues unabated.  Have to get my taxes done Friday. Going to see Cog Friday night, going to a Quentiona Tarantino-themed birthday party on Saturday.

It's Yom Kippur tonight and tomorrow, so I'm not going to be around for a day or two--please be kind to small animals in my absence.

Cheers,

-- JF

I've gone on record saying that I hate television a number of times, but the truth is that recently I've been watching a lot of it.

Part of the reason for my change in attitude is that I don't watch it live; I'm watching on DVD, during meals and my lunchbreak. I can watch when it's convenient for me and without ad breaks interrupting; that's an important change. But more important, I think, is that I believe that the bar has been raised for quality TV shows.

I'm not willing to say that TV is generally better than ever; I think the opposite is true: the lowest common denominator is lower than ever, and most television programming resides at there (that reality TV hasn't died yet is more than poroof of this). But there's still more TV than ever, and the good stuff is really fucking good.

( Not-very-random discussion of actual shows )

 

KAGEMONO #2 is at the printer! The book will be launching at Armageddon in Melbourne, November 1st and 2nd 2008.

Nathan Wiedemer will have ashcans available at SPX in Bethesda, Maryland, this weekend: October 4th and 5th 2008.

KAGEMONO #2 has five more pages of story than the preceding issue for the same price! A fallen rock band discovers unguessable horror at the bottom of the barrel. A woman who takes a DIY approach to finding Mr Right. A Little Man with a tolerance for iron. A snuff movie. A starship janitor's quest for love. A handbag that eats babies. Stories by Jason Franks, J. Marc Schmidt, Yuriko Sekine, Andrew Fulton, Luke Pickett, nathansketches , Colin Wells and Tom Bonin.


Edited by Jason Franks. 32pages, B&W interior, colour cover by Bobby N.

Click over to www.blackglasspress.com for previews.

-- JF




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Is on its way to the printer. Stand by for web page updates with previews and such.

I have a new haircut. I am thinking of growing sideburns.

-- JF

It's Rosh Hashanah. Good yomtov, everybody. Happy New Year.

I've been a bit lax about keeping up with my journal--lots going on. Work, the festival, and of course, my various writing projects.

KAGEMONO #2 is about to drop and needs to go to the printer this week if it's going to be ready in time for Armageddon. I'm waiting for the last little bits--two more story pages, the ISBN barcode, a bio frm one contributor--and we're ready to rock. 5 stories, 32 pages, all killah no filla, Five more story pages than KAGEMONO #1 for the same price (I'd offer the price if I could, um, remember what it was... )

I did manage to get out to the Royal Melbourne Agricultural Show on Sunday. For you Americans out there, it's kind of like the State Fair, with less country music and more tourists. Haven't been since I was 11, so it was a bit of a trip down memory lane. First stop was the chainsaw carving competition. Some impressive work, but not as many amputations as I would have liked. Second was the Racing and Diving Pigs, Texas style. The even was so packed we couldn't get a seat; all I could see was the Diving Pig trot along his platform and then vanish with a splash.  This photo came off my phone, which I was holding above my head like a moron--I couldn't actually see the pool.



Yes, that is a cowboy hat in the foreground--we have rednecks, too. But truthfully, there were a lot more Chinese tourists than rednecks at the show.

I ate a Mexican Chilli Wrap that tasted as if it had been assembled by an Australian who's never actually had Mexican food, but who thinks it might be a bit similar to Thai.

Then on to the Big Event: Samson and his monster truck, which he has named... SAMSON.

I was hoping for two monster trucks and at least one explosion, so that was a bit disappointing... but it was cool to see the truck with all four wheels in the air coming down on a bunch of beaten up old cars. Like so:



Samson was followed up by a couple of motocross guys doing some stunts, but it did not emerge to duel with thewm, as I had hoped.

Still, chainsaws, monster trufcks, pigs, and weird food... not a bad afternoon, all in all.

Back to work. I'll post again when the book is a wrap.

--JF

It's been Kaos at Casa Franks. It's way out of Kontrol. I've been keeping up with my email, but barely... and I'm way behind on my livejournal friends. Please excuse me if I'm a bit behind the eightball.

I'm up to my eyeballs in work. Pages for KAGEMONO #2 came flooding in over the weekend and I'm now scrambling to get them lettered and ready for production. Two pages still not in and we're pretty close to the wire right now. The book is going to longer than its predecessor... 32 pages... and I'm pretty excited about it. Some great new artists, soem returning old favourites, and I really think that my writing is a couple of notches above my woirk int he preceding book.

I've abandoned the cover painting for now. Bobby N. has agreed to do the cover for me and he's come up with something kick ass.

I'll repost the painting when I finish it--I will finish it, big thank you  to everybody for their feedback--but for right now it's off the priority list. Maybe I'll use it for issue #3, or as a back cover.

Cheers,

-- JF


-- JF

KAGEMONO #2 is about to drop, just in time for Armageddon (fingers crossed). I'm trying to beat the rush this time and get the cover done before I have all the interiors in hand (the interiors are done, I'm just awaiting delivery of the files from a couple of artists).

Last time I did an acrylic painting for the cover, and I wasn't really happy with the results... but I had forgotten how much I enjoy painting. I'm a better painter than I am a draftsman, I think.

Also, I want the books to look similar, so I can't go back to plan A and reuse the lineart I developed for the first issue with some computer colouring. In the end, all I could come up with was a scene using the monstery guy from #1. came up with an idea using the monstery dude from #1.

Anyway, here we go. First, the initial concept  sketch:



Now the in-progress painting. At this point I have all of the shapes and colours blocked out, but I'm still working the textures and lighting--most of the white and black lines will be painted or washed over as I smooth it all out. Not sure exactly where the art will be cropped--originally it was going to be a couple of centimeters fromt he bottom of panel, which is why the hand is truncated. I'll probably stick to that, but the possibilty remains that I will have to add extra centimeter of art in photoshop.




The painting will be sandwiched between two black slabs, same as the prior issue. I will probably have KAGEMONO written in kanji somewhere on the bottom right of the artwork.

Any feedback?

-- JF

I'm not a superhero fan, but I do have a soft spot for supervillains. Dr Doom, the Joker, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Deadshot... I love these guys, when they're handled well. Truth is, while I've almost no interest in Batman or the X-Men, I always kind of wanted to write a comic about a team of supervillains.

Supervillain books seem to be the in thing, now.  And, while I'm not planning to pitch a supervillain book any time soon (unless, you know, an awesome spandex artist drops out of the sky and asks me to to), I have here a list of characters I've had floating around in my head for a few years.

TERMAGANT: She's big, she's fat, she's middle aged, she's strong as a team of oxen and she's utterly indestructible.

STEELMARK: He has a living metal skeleton and he can project blades otu of any part of his anatomy--problem is, they have to cut their way otu through all the soft tissue. He uses a lot of band aids. I stole his name from a mining company.

BADFIN: He's a Chtulhu fish-man. Which makes him real ugly, but he doesn't actually have any powers. He is, however, massively juiced up on steroids and martial arts.

MR BURNZ: He has fire powers, but he's not very fireproof.... so his skin is livid with burn scars.

THE (SINISTER) MINISTER: He's left handed.

CHAINSAW: He has a chainsaw.

THE SURGEON

BLOODFIEND: Blood makes him crazy--and everybody bleeds.

JENNY DREADFUL

SCALER: He climbs things

SHADOWSKIN: A sorceror with power over shadows.

SCOPE: A cyborg with a powerful targeting system instead of a head.

HOSS: Has a healing factor of 1. That's right, the ability to heal any wound--but at the same rate as an ordinary person.

GUNSEL: A little man with a whole lot of guns.

THE ARCHITECT: He has no powers. He has no special resources. He's just really really good at manipulating other people into doing what he wants. No matter how elaborate the plans he orchestrates, he always remains invisible--nobody ever realizes that he was behind it.Really, though, he wants to be the megavillain who tears the moon out of the sky.

-- JF

WALTZ  WITH BASHIR is an animated documentary about Israeli soldiers who were present during the action in Lebanon in the 1980s that lead to the massacre of  an estimated 3000 Palestianians by Phalangist rebels in the Sabra/Shatila refugee camps.

But it's not really about the massacre, or about the war or the Palestinian conflict or even about Lebanon. The documentary is about memory.

When one of Ari Polman's comrades described to him a nightmare he had about Beirut, he asked Polman why he hadn't made a film about their experiences there. When Polman thought about it, he realized that he couldn't remember very much of it--so he went looking for people he served with, people who were there, trying to find out what happened and what his part was; jow much of what he did retain was real and how much was dreamt, invented or hallucinated. 

Despite being animated, WALTZ is definitely a documentary--it's a series of interviews with veterans and psychologists as well as Polman's narration. (Two of the subjects did not want to 'appear' int he film and have had their testimonies dubbed by actors, I believe). The animated visuals are quite realistici--they're not rotoscoped, but they sometimes look it--and the effect is surreal and harrowing: A unit of soldiers confronted by a child with an RPG, a tanker swimming for his life after his platoon abandons him for dead, an officer wrestling a
machinegun from another soldier in the middle of a firefight and waltzing out into the street with it like a madman. Polman uses the animated medium to great effect, dramatizing the situations the interviewees describe for him, putting the reforming memories directly in front of your eyes... and those memories are twrrifying. A couple of sequences are choreographed to droll Israeli rock music, creating a slapstick MTV cartoon that's far too black to be funny.

WALTZ WITH BASHIR barely gives you an explanation of the politics or even the strategy of the conflict; it's about a group of middle aged men trying to recover their memories of a horrible event, and so it's more concerned with situations the individual soldiers experienced, about how information about what was occurring spread amognst them at the time and how people reacted to it then... and in later life.

A brilliant application of a different medium to documentary filmmaking. It's some pretty heavy material, but well worth checking out.

-- JF

A rare art post for me. I'll probably think the better of this and take it down or friends-lock it tomorrow.

Still:

Pencils for the first 2 pages of MCBLACK #3:


( Page 50 behind the cut )

I'm not one for posting video clips or trailers... but...

This is how you do Grindhouse:




ARMY OF DARKNESS and TETSUO: THE IRON MAN rolled into a yakuza revenge flick; bugfuck crazy and  violent as hell. Another win for Japan.

-- JF

10 SONGS #10 "Aenema" by Tool, AENIMA 1996

Well, there we have it: the last of my ten songs, another demand for the obliteration of Los Angeles.

Where to begin? Tool is one band that I definitely discovered well before they became the juggernaut they are today. Like the boy of the song  "Hooker With a Penis", I go back to their OPIATE EP--although I don't think I picked it up until 1994, once UNDERTOW was out. I picked up UNDERTOW the following year, during my first trip to the United States. 

When AENIMA dropped in 1996 Tool were vaguely popular, but I was already a big fan. My friend Pete picked up the album as soon as it came out and I heard it for the first time in his car on the way to University. It blew my mind. One listen and I knew that Tool were going to be huge.

A concert was announced and the album began its slow burn up to success. Pete and I bought tickets immediately. About 5 months later they were the hottest tickets in town and Tool were huge--they're almost a subculture of their own here in Australia. When casual aquaintences discovered that I had tickets they called me a Tool Slut. But I didn't fucking care.

Tool played the Offshore Festival at Bell's Beach in 1997, which was a week before the main gig. I went to that show, too. Maynard painted himself blue. And yea, verily, THEY WERE LIKE UNTO GODS.

"Aenema" isn't really the title track of the album: take a look, the song title is spelled differently. Funky spelling aside, the album is 'anima' and the song is 'enema'. It's this latter that I'm going to focus on, although the album itself warrants an essay.

"Aenema" is pretty much exactly that: Maynard Keenan venting his frustration at his home. He chants a litany of everything that pisses him off: gangsters, celebrities, religious cults, and junkies-- and he wishes apocalypse upon it:  eteor showers, tidal waves, earthquakes, whatever it takes.   "The only way to fix it is to flush it all away," he sings. "Learn to swim, see you down in Arizona Bay." Maynard's voice is as much an instrument it is about the lyrics: you can prominently hear him rhythmically choking back the bile throughout the song.

Eventually Maynard relents. "Try and read ebtween the lines," he demands, weariness in his voice. "I can't imagine why you wouldn't welcome any change, my friend."

Adam Jones' guitar is sinewy and brutal; his leads slash spasmodically against Justin Chancellor's sinuous bass. Danny Carey's drumming is as thunderous and complex and nuanced--nobody in this band plays like anybody else and their sound is unimistakable, and that is what I like best about them. They're utterly unique, they're visceral and complex and challenging  and obtuse and sensitive. Even when they make a misstep, it's always an interesting one.

-- Tool Slut #666

10 SONGS #9 "Limo Wreck" by Soundgarden, SUPERUNKNOWN,  1994

I really learned to love music during the Grunge era. I mean, I liked music before then, I played trumpet and guitar, but I really hadn't found anything to connect with--80's pop, new wave, and cock rock didn't do it for me, and heavy metal was a world beyond my ken. Grunge music and the 'Alternative Revolution' and Metallica finding such massive mainstream success changed all that. All these amazing, dark, whacked-out sounds were exactly what I wanted and needed after a decade of listening to frivolous rubbbish. It wad the first time contemporary music meant anything to me and I ate it up--the grunge bands, Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, Primus, Pantera, Mark of Cain, Nine Inch Nails--I didn't care where it came from as long as it was good. And there was plenty of it; even now I'm discovering new things from that era or those leading up to it.

The grunge scene is what really opened the gates for alternative music at that time and this list wouldn't be complete without a total grunge song--but which one?

Soungarden was alway smy favourite of the four heavyweights from that scene. I liked the weirdly-tuned guitars, I liked Chris Cornell's bagpipes voice, and I liked the surreal lyrics that he wrote a lot better than the teen angst the others made a staple. But choosing a song was difficult--SUPERUNKNOWN was a huge album for me, but BADMOTORFINGER is close, and DOWN ON THE UPSIDE shows a genuine and unexpected maturity. Hell, I even like LOUDER THAN LOVE, whic sounds distinctly immature in comparison.

I admit it, I almost went with "Outshined", if for no other reason than that earth-shaking chorus riff. One listen and to that and you are through puberty, boy.

But I listened to SUPERUNKNOWN end-to-end a million times over and I know it inside out; it had to be from that album. So I'm going with an outsider; a song that was never a single: "Limo Wreck".

Nihilistic even by Soundgarden's standards, "Limo Wreck" is a song that insists that not only will everything die, it will do so violently. Cornell counts the ways: it will fall, it will wash away, it will be blown to pieces. A downtempo song with droning vocals, the chorus mounts to explains that you will die in a sea of red lights, and that you deserve it, and that nobody will care. "I'm the wreck of you, I'm the death of you all," he sings, claiming responsibility--and then going on to predict a similar fate for himself.

But it's more than just those smacked-out guitars, those howling threats and that implacable drumbeat; the lyrics paint these visions of apocalypse with some very distinct images. It's not entirely clearly what all of them mean, but then I don't think it's supposed to be--prophecies of the end times are usually embellished with hallucinations and opaque symbolism. 

It also feels like this is a song about Los Angeles; with its references to towers and police lights and blinded windows;  its battle for gold and souls. This is the second song in this list of ten that wishes doom on the city of angels, and I may very cap the thing off with a third song that explicitly wishes for the same thing.

"Limo Wreck" is a song I still listen to when it feels like the whole shebang is about to come down around me; which is more and more frequently the further 1994 recedes into the past.

-- JF

What a load of cynical, self-serving, snivelling, cowardly horseshit.

Why does America even have a Republican Party any more? Don't they have laws?

-- JF

Having finished the edit of my 2008 draft of BLOODY WATERS, I've gone and friends-locked the entires that I made about it: I'm going to start pitching next week and I think it's better to keep my exegesis of the process somewhere a bit less public. I'm extremely happy with this draft, despite my inital miscalculation of the pagecount--I think it's tighter and funnier than any of the previous versions and I have raised the stakes a bit with only a few minor tweaks.

I've also changed the theme of the blog, for those of you who don't read me off your Friends Page.

If anybody out there knows an agents or and editor and you feel like introducing me, now would be a great time. ;)

I have visitors from overseas coming this week. Next week, it's pitch letters and summaries, and then probably a short story and onto the next big Unfinished Project. This is in addition to my growing comics workload.

I just want to set the world on fire,

-- JF

Can't find a link to an online article, but I just read this in print.

It seems that Roland Jabbour, the member of the Australian Arabic Council cited in the article I linked last time, has had  abit more to say in interviews with the Australian Jewish News. In the Age article, Jabbour says that Al-Manar should be allowed free speech to broadcast what it whatever it wants to. I still agree with him on that point.

Jabbour has gone on to say that he thinks that, "in the context of Israel's crimes," it's quite fair enough for for Al-Manar to claim that jews are descended from pigs and apes. He also says that the statement is directed to the State of Israel, not the Jewish people--even though the statement clearly says 'jews'.

Jabbour, it turns out, is also committee member of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.

Is it unfair of me to ask where the reciprocal Jewish and/or Israeli TV stations are, broadcasting similar slander about Arabs and Moslems? I don't think it's unfair for me to point out that Jews and Arabs are the same race--if we are descended from pigs and apes, then so are they.

Let's look at he broader context of Al-Manar. This TV station, which is run by Lebanese terrorists, is being broadcast into Indonesia, the second most populous Moslem nation in t\he world. Idonesia is a South Pacific Asian country, not an Arab country; and I find it highly doubtful their populace has ever been involved with trouble involving Jews or with Israel... but they sure seem to want some.

I wonder if Jabbour had the same 'free speech' position when extremists tried to kill that Danish newspaper editor who published cartoons depicting Mohammed?

-- JF

I've been meaning to do this for ages--write up some of the local indie comics I've been reading since I moved back here. Stuff that's not available through the direct market, although you should be able to pick up any of it off the links provided. There's a lot of stuff, so please consider this a start.

DIGESTED.01 by Bobby N (http://www.bluetoaster.com)
DIGESTED is Bobby N's new irregular anthology book. As well as serializing pieces of his uberwork, a graphic novel called OXYGEN, he runs discrete social realist/autobio stories (I hate the term 'slice of life') in the book. And it's just fucking great. Bobby's a self-publisher of the Dave Sim school; he is dedicated and rigorous and he works damn hard, and it shows on every beautifully-designed page. The art falls somewhere between Nickelodeon and Chris Ware in style, but with a bit more texture... but that comaprison does it a bit of a disservice. Bobby approaches each page as a design task, rather than a challenge to his draftsmanship, and it really shows. It's hard to tell what's going on in OXYGEN fro, this first installment, but the shorts are sardonic and understated and blackly funny; there's none of the requisite whining or sentimentality that eems to come with the territory of autobio comics. If you like DIGESTED you should also check out Bobby's prior minicomics, ISOLATION ROOM and WITHHELD. Bobby brings the goods.

THE LIST by Paul Bedford and Henry Pop (http://www.the-list.com.au/)
The List, written by Paul Bedford and illustrated by Herny Pop (inks by Tom Bonin from #2 onwards), is one of the most fucked-up books I've read in ages. Compelled by the ghost of his dead Father, the Son must complete a series of tasks enumerated on The List in order to wake an Angel. I don't know what any of that means, because thew firts issue is a bit sparse on clues, but it involves lots of blood and a collection of knives and blades and it's completely fascinating to watch the mad bastard of a protagonist try to work out how to accomplish his psychotic quest. Henry Pop's artwork is lavish, drenched with blood and black ink. There are some problems with the lettering, but this is a really unique and distinctive book and I can't wait to see where it goes. Issue #2 should be out in October, I believe.

SAWBONES by Trevor Green and Jen Breach (http://www.sawbonesonline.com)
The first trade paperback of the webomic SAWBONES is out, and it's a full colour beauty. Following the exploits of two zombie skeletons, Sheriff Sawyer and Bones O'Brien, SAWBONES goes all kinds of places that you'd never expect: a farm, Hollywood, the wild west, the opera... and every situation is funnier than the last.  SAWBONES a sort of really-really- odd-couple type of book: Sawyer is an hillbilly gunslinger and O'Brien is an aristrocratic pedant, and they are both undead brain-eating monsters who make their livign as actors in zombie flicks. The stories are laid out daily-strip style; each story arc is built out of a sequence of good-natured and elegantly choreographed gag strips. You can check out the strips online, but it's well worht getting the trade, which supplements the comics with ads, letters and publicity from the world of Bones and Sawyer.

Just the tip of the iceberg, fellas. More to come...

--JF

There's a bit of a ruckus going on right now over Hezbollah's TV station al-Manar, which is ow broadcasting into Indonesia--and, given the nature satellite communications, into Australia.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/move-to-block-hezbollahs-terror-tv-20080820-3ywi.html?page=-1

For those of you who are uncertain, Hezbollah is an active terrorist organization. It's now a political party in Lebanon, but they always have been and continue to be terror group. I won't go into the history of  the organization, there are plent yof internet resources, there's no question about what they get up to in the south of Lebanon.

Reputedly, Al-Manar regularly broadcasts all of the most vicious antisemitic material that has been dreamed up in the last four or five centuries as fact. The blood libel, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion... they air pictures of decomposing Israeli soldiers. They also air educational children's shows. This is a TV station run by religious psychopaths and cowardly murderers with all the the worst intentions in the world towards me and mine, and now they're broadcasting it into my neighbourhood.

But I don't think Al-Manar should be banned.

I live ina democratic country. Free Speech isn't constitutionally guaranteed for us, as it is int he US, but I still cherish the principle of it. In Voltaire is supposed to have said "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,"  and I am 100% down with that.

If we ban al-Manar then we can pretend it doesn't exist. We don't have to believe that groups like Hezbollah are out there, spreading this garbage as fact. Look at it this way: if we turn a deaf ear, we don't know what these motherfuckers are saying. I want to know what's going on, I Want to know what's being said about me. In this day and age, in a free country like Australia, does anybody believe that officially banning the channel will prevent people from getting access to its content?

Acknowledging those voices and allowing them to be heard gives us a chance to counter their propaganda with facts.

But maybe I'm crazy. Voltaire said a lot of things, including this beauty:

"The Hebrews have ever been vagrants, or robbers or slaves, or seditious. They are still vagabonds upon the earth, and abhorred by men, yet affirming that heaven and earth were created for them alone."

I bet that gets quoted on al-Manar, too.

-- JF

From KAGEMONO #2:

"Love Potion #999B17X"
Script: Jason Franks
Pencils: Colin Wells
Inks: Tom Bonin.

My good mate Eric Von Allan, author of THE ROAD TO GOD KNOWS... 's first graphic novel, LI'L KIDS, is now available!

You can buy it from amazon.com, amazon.ca, amazon.co.uk, amazon.com.au*, or you can can download the ebook from here, free and gratis: http://www.vonallan.com/shop.html

Do yourself a favour, go check it out!

-- JF

*Or not!  Hahahaha, suckers!