Origami Unicorn

Up and Coming

There's this kid, who gets picked on by a bully, so he goes out and picks on ants. This being a fantasy, that's a mistake. The ants have a magic potion which shrinks him down to size. Their size.

Now my first thought would be of T. H. White's episode where the Wart, who will become King Arthur, visits the ants as part of his education, but I would bet from the visuals and build-up that Warner Brothers has Toy Story in mind. In fact, I'm almost certain that they hope the potential audience think of that, too, because Toy Story was an exceedingly profitable film that offended very few of the people that matter, the consumers.

Be sure and check out "Auditions" under Video, in the entertainly noisy left button display. That's entertainingly noisy if you are about—six? In any case, don't miss the auditions, which contain a number of inside jokes, like the bit based on the desperate actor played by Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, and someone who sounds an awful lot like the Governor of California in one or several of his better-known roles...

And don't forget this is a movie where the hero is named "Lucas." "Nickle," not "Skywalker." Still.

The WB is still putting up the website, but The Ant Bully boasts some expensive talent in the voice actors, like Julia Roberts as the glamorous ant nurse, Merryl Streep as the serene ant queen, and Ricardo Montalban as the head of the ant council. All of whom and more—Nicholas Cage, anyone?—you can hear in the various trailers and scenes already up. The motto of this one seems to be: Be kind to ants, for they may get even and then become your best friends.

Opens nationwide July twenty-eighth.

4: The Translator

Kit's starting college a semester late, her parents relieved that she is "back on track again," her Dad letting her have a sip of his Martini at their last meal together. Then they go off, leaving her alone again, in the room that has no roomate yet. She wakes during the night to the whisper of snow.

In the morining, Kit makes her way through dirty slush to the fieldhouse where she stands in line to register for her classes. At the cashier's, she finds that she's lost the envelope of money she was to pay with. She writes a check on an account that has no funds to cover it and goes back, panicky at first and them methodically, searching for what she does not expect to find.

What she does find is the poet, Falin, with whom she has a brief exchange, which he walks away from, not rude, but not interested in an awkward girl who cannot recite one of her own poems. She has found, at his feet, half-hidden in the sodden sawdust spread to protect the floor, her envelope. Money safe in hand, Kit still feels she has lost something important, for she has implusively asked to take Falin's class and he has left her standing after finding out how young she is.

And with that the story leaps forward to the much older Kit, in Russia, and the longed-for ordeal of meeting the people she feels responsible and apologetic toward: The people who could read Falin's poems as they were written, not as she translated them. Listening to what she has chosen to tell him about that day, Gavriil Viktorovish says, "He was a strange and wonderful man," and proceeds to tell her what he means.

(to be continued)

Drew Weing

I suspect you have to have tried to make a living as an artist before Drew Weing's Journal Comic achieves full impact, but you will recognize some of the situations if you've ever had a job where you worked hard at odd hours. Weing has a number of comics and uses a variety of styles, so he'll probably reappear here someday: Meanwhile, some days in the life of an aspiring artist.

Online Comics

A short, short, in comics terms, with an abrupt ending that might have benefited from an extra frame or two, but fine drawings: "Kara, Kali, and the Wind," by Michael Cohen. Scroll down, since the header forces the drawings below the first screen.

4: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

They become a household, rubbing along together well enough. The Master moody, but not cruel; Margarethe willing enough to seem servile when it serves her purposes, and having a safe place and house to keep serves her purposes very well indeed. The girls are, if not happy, at least comfortable, and Iris is awakening to curiousity about the real world around her.

Then comes the day when Iris, more aware than her mother that much of the Master's interest in their family lies in drawing her, plain though she is, has been sent to fetch Ruth from the meadow where they went the first day they met the Master. Once there, a fancy seizes her, to become a monstrousity of sorts to startle, and perhaps amuse, the painter.

So, with a rack of branches, some sacking, and a stolen-in-passing fingerful of dun paint for Ruth's face, the two become a mythic creature, The Girl-Stag of the Meadows. Ruth lowing like a cow, the two caper in under the startled eyes of not one but two men, one of them a stranger, leaving both girls deeply embarassed in their different ways. "I was expecting the brilliant daughters of my housekeeper," says the Master. "Instead, let me introduce some beast of the forest."

But he cannot keept up the dry tone, and, rebuking them for worrying their mother, who has gone to look for them, he directs them in to their supper. Not without, however, introducing his assistant, Caspar, newly return from the Hague. Caspar's reaction to the Girl-Stag is, "What fun to have a companion here!" The Master may be able to keep a straight face, but it plain he glad to see his apprentice.

When Caspar teases Iris as she leaves for the kitchen, "Girl or Stag?" she is pleased rather than offended, although she scarely knows why. She does not answer, although she cannot help a chortle. Already Iris knows that, plain though she is, light-hearted Caspar intends a joke, not an insult.

(to be continued)

The detail is from the painting, "The Chess Players," by Cornelius de Man.

A Visit to...

Seussville, would probably have delighted Dr. Seuss, who who really wasn't a doctor, but an advertising man who had already parlied his sense of humor into a decent career when he wrote his first children's book.  Born of German immigrant  parents, Theodore Seuss Gisell—the name he was to make famous was his mother's maiden name and his middle name—attended Dartmouth and then Oxford, where he distinguished himself primarily in doodling and humor.  His first book, And To Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street, only achieved publication because he was well-connected, but, published, rocketed to the top lists of librarians and children.  However, it was the much later, much simpler, Cat in the Hat, that sealed his fate as the creator of the first reader for millions of American children.  This year sees the first  Geisel Award, administered by the ALA, that recognizes those that follow in the footsteps of the man who, both a writer and an illustrator, spoke to children with his wonderful sense of color, line, rhyme, and whimsy.

31: In a Hole in the Ground...

And the words the carle sang begin:

"Were many men
In the feast-hall then
And the worst on bench
Ne'er thought to blench
When the storm arose
In the war-god's close...."

Concluding,

"And hushed for mere wonder
Were great men and small
As my voice in rhyme-thunder
Went over the hall."

The King said what he knew to be true, that the singer had been a mighty lord and that his companion was his mate, and that being so he invited them to sit beside him on the high-seat. The two appeared pleased and the man sang again:

"Spring came of old
In the days of gold
In thousandth year
Of the thousands dear,
When we twain met
And the mead was wet..."

Concluding this time,

"Come thou, Lord the right-wise,
Come Host-lord no more
To they Hall-fellows fight-wise
The Folk of the Door!"

The was a mighty noise, as of armed men, and horses, and the clash of weapons, the folk gathered there were filled with joy. It was then the doors of the hall were thrown open.

(to be continued)

San Diego Comics-Con

New York may have had a good go at it this year, but the biggest event of the comics world was, is, and will be again this year San Diego Comics-Con.

Continuing a long term trend, manga-ka, or manga artists, will be a large presence. In Japan these artists have a status only accorded to rock and movie stars here and in Europe. Of course, in Europe, comics artists and scripters have the exalted status accorded writers. In the US they have to settle for a large and devoted fandom, plus mere riches, if they are lucky. Very lucky.

As is usual, the freebes and give-away special printings will more than equal the cost of membership, and the crush on the floor—more than a hundred thousand people are expected to attend—will be incredible. Fans come to the lure of meeting the writers and artists one on one, and often tell them what they like and don't like, and also what they hope to see.

For artists, writers, publishers, and dealers it is the one must go to event of the year, where new comics ideas are marketed, new publishers work to establish a presence, and dealers look over what's up and coming for what they will chose to stock.

It's not just small companies that feel obliged to come: Disney will have an entire museum plus a major presence for its Pirates of the Caribbean series; DC will be working to get out the news about Stan Lee's Sci-Fi Channel series, in which people compete to become a character in an upcoming book.

Preview night for pre-registered members is July 19th, with the main convention running through the following Saturday night.

3: The Translator

The story jumps forward in time to a much older Christa, aboard a plane coming in to land at St. Petersburg, reflecting on how, as child, she had thought of Russia as dark and unknowable.  She disembarks and moves out into the airport, looking for someone, and sees a thin, old man holding a piece of torn cardboard with her name on it.  His hand shakes, and he eagerly greets her in English and in Russian.

"I'm sorry," she says, and asks if he could speak English, at least at first, for it has been thirty years since she last spoke Russian.

He courteously replies, Yes, of course, and apologetically lists the languages he is fluent in, which do not included English, although in fact his English, if stiff, is good.  Indeed, it is as posh a reception as the group she is visiting can arrange, complete with the car and driver of a government official engaged in a bit of private enterprise.  She is taken to a good, but not lavish, hotel close to the apartment of her guide.

When they find her room is not yet ready, she and Gavriil Viktorovich settle to tea, and Christa—Kit, now—tells him how she met the poet for the first time.  "I met him at university I went to," she says.  She was nineteen, entering a year late, although she does not say that, only, "He taught there."

"And you were a poet then?"

Kit says that she'd won a prize and was supposed to have a bent.

Gavriil Viktorovich listens, attentive, hearing, perhaps, how many things she has come to say but has not yet said.

"I'll tell you it all," she says.

(to be continued)

Captain Jack Sparrow Returns!

The header says it all, for despite a cast that includes Orlando Bloom (Legolas, LOTR), Keria Knightley (Lara, Doctor Zhivago), and Bill Nighy (Billy Mack, Love Actually), it is Johnny Depp's film.   Continuing to channel classic rock star Little Richard, Depp's morally-challenged character charms and alarms, with the principle disappointment of the film being that it ends on a cliffhanger.  Not to worry, Disney knows how to follow the scent of money: Movie number three is on the way.  For one in-depth review go to Coming Soon, which has a minor error, in that there were cannibals in the Caribbean; see a photograph of Depp in full regalia, courtesy of the Washington Post online; and view the trailer at Apple.com or at the Disney site.  Best taken with popcorn and a grain of salt.