Pigs in Space, 1953 (and other stuff)

Halloween is over. We had our party (you should have been there!). It may have been a success since folks didn't leave until about midnight (yeah, I know that's early. Some had to work and one had to get sleep for a four-hour drive).

Kick Enemy Men, Sweet Enemy and I stayed up talking for another hour or more talking. KEM lives four hours away and we don't see him nearly as much as we'd like. A new friend brought a sampler of microbrews from around the country (he's a maven). Many awesome beers were tasted. Decapod Diver, my oldest friend came up from MA (he really needed a break) and brought a goose/duck/buffalo chili (he personally shot and dressed two of the animals); it was delicious. Add to that my nearly-famous lentil stew, pumpkin pie, snacks and Irish Coffee, it was a feast.

After Irish coffees, we all piled into our long, narrow living room to watch An American Werwolf in London. It's been my favorite of DD and I since we first saw it back in the eighties. This time, we got to watch it with a girl who'd a) never seen it and b) was a bit of a ingenue with horror cinema. She was affected by the effects. Even the transformation freaked her out! This was awesome. It is one of the best transformations in cinema history and it's nice to see that it can still stand up after all these years.

Whew.

The newest Obscure Tale is on hold. Well, not on hold, really. I've got six pages inked, but I'm tossing them into the woodstove and starting again. I don't like the inking style. It's boring and lacks good line variation. I think the Pentel brush pen is in order. To get practice with it, I refined and inked a sketch I had done last Thursday. It was going to be a "standard" Golden Age space-girl, but her chubbiness and the stylized pose made me think of Ms. Piggy. So, since I'd already done a BSG-style re-imagining drawing of the Swinetrek crew, I thought I'd do a Golden Age version of Ms. Piggy.

The lineart works pretty well (thanks to Sweet Enemy for making me re-work Piggy's breasts, they look much better now), but the color is only okay. I always fall back on local color shadows.





listening to while posting: "Tokyo, I'm on my way" by Puffy Ami Yumi