WTF?! moment of the day: MSNBC’s Ed Schultz interrupts his own demand that we focus like a laser beam on healthcare to question the wannabe psychic neighbor of the Balloon Boy.
**UPDATE: Then his next guest sort of points that out:
WTF?! moment of the day: MSNBC’s Ed Schultz interrupts his own demand that we focus like a laser beam on healthcare to question the wannabe psychic neighbor of the Balloon Boy.
**UPDATE: Then his next guest sort of points that out:
I’m cross-posting this from the Candorville Facebook group (if you’re not already a fan, go there and become a fan already or I’ll have to give you the swine flu):
I’m a late addition to a cartoonists’ panel this Tuesday in LA’s Echo Park. It’s part of 826LA’s adult writing seminar series. I agreed to do it before I looked at the names of the other panelists, which was probably wise. I’ll explain:
I learned to write by reading comic books back in the early ’80s. Every report I would go on to turn in in school – whether it was about George Washington Carver or cell mitosis – would have a beginning, a middle and an end. A hero and a villain. A “B story.” An unexpected death (either literal or figurative) to raise the stakes at the beginning of Act Three. Enemies closing in and all seeming lost. A triumphant resurrection of either the deceased or his cause. Victory, pyrrhic or decisive. A final image that bookended and reversed the opening image. My teachers never knew why they loved my writing so much, but I always knew why I would get nothing but A’s and B’s even when I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about: Everything I turned in was structured exactly like a comic book story. Teachers are just people, and all people love stories.
To me, the masters of the craft were Chris Claremont (X-Men), Marv Wolfman (The New Teen Titans), and a couple new guys, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. I took the name of the evil multinational corporation (Trigon Corp) that’s trying to buy Lemont’s newspaper straight from Wolfman’s seminal New Teen Titans saga. Several of Candorville’s villains have been patterned at least a little on Wolfman’s Trigon.
So, who are the other cartoonists on this panel? The brilliant Lalo Alcaraz (La Cucaracha) and Jaime Hernandez (Love & Rockets), and MARV f-ing WOLFMAN! Man, when that guy speaks I’ll probably want to run around to the other side of the table, pull up a folding chair and take notes.
Tickets are still available at the 826LA website.
I’m old. I realized this about seven or eight months ago when I attempted to update Candorville.com’s design on my own. I’d been designing my own sites since 1995, back when 99% of America would’ve thought “HTML” was a typo. Back when the Media still called the Internet “the information superhighway.” Back when you didn’t have to add numbers after your name to get an email address. First I hand coded the HTML, then I used WYSIWYG editors, then Tyler Martin’s brilliant Comicpress plugin for WordPress. All the while, despite each iteration of the site being less and less dependent on my coding skills (if you could call them that), the design was all mine. But seven or eight months ago I decided to further automate the site and to make it look a certain way, but I just couldn’t figure out how to do what I wanted it to do, or how to make it look how I wanted it to look; even after studying dozens of forum threads where people spelled it out. I realized this must be how my mom felt back in 1982 when I programmed the VCR to record her soaps.
So I enlisted Tyler Martin, the designer of Comicpress, to completely overhaul the look and feel of the site, and to add a subtle bit of automation that’ll make it much easier for you to buy frame-ready prints of your favorite Candorville strips. All you have to do now is click on the yellow “buy a print” button directly below whichever strip you want to buy, and that’ll take you straight to a Paypal checkout page where that strip’s date will be automatically filled in (before, you had to remember the date of the strip, navigate to the store page, type the date into the field and hit the Paypal checkout button).
Tyler and I are still working on the rest of the pages (I have to reformat a lot of info to fit the new page dimensions) and tweaking colors & fonts. I hope you like the new site as much as I do. Tyler did an incredible job.
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