It turned out that we didn't have the necessary lemons for the tomato sorbet, so we made olive oil sorbet with pickled olives instead. Sounds gross right? Well, it was. Strike one, fancy ice cream recipe book.
I just posted an update on recent projects by Eleanor and myself on the Little House news site, so click on over if you're interested.
I just finished reading The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman the other evening; every night for months and months I've been reading a couple chapters to Eleanor when she goes to bed. So we're in the weird situation where I've read the entire book and she's read half of every 3rd or 4th chapter or so. Anyway, that's a very funny and charming book once you've gotten down with the 18th century vocabulary. The first chapter threw us off so bad I think it took a couple weeks to come back to it. We got the Penguin edition with the Reynolds painting on the cover, it's got plentiful endnotes.
Tonight we're going to make tomato sherbet, wish us luck.
I finally got the Little House Comics shop back online, only a year (and a month... and a couple weeks) late. I completely redesigned it, to try and make it a lot simpler and easier to maintain. But even the simplest website design takes three times longer to do than you think it will, especially when you're such an html dilettante as I am. Anyway, if your life has been bereft of opportunities to spend your money, go and check it out. Remember the 33 Beasties minicomic that I had for this year's HeroesCon?
Yeah, that's up, and a couple of beautiful new silkscreen prints by Eleanor, and tons of original art. We've also got a news page where I'll be posting updates about our projects, new books, conventions, all that stuff. I set up Livejournal, Facebook, and RSS feeds for Little House as well, if you don't want to check back every couple days.
A closeup of the album cover that's been sucking up all my time recently.
Some interesting posts over at the Comic Comics blog on the dissolving ties between superhero and literary comics, both in the marketplace and in shared influence. Also good discussion happening in the comment section. Frank Santoro points out David Mazzuchelli as an artist who has deliberately and systematically cut his mainstream stylistic "roots," for better or worse. It's a subject I'm interested in, since like I've said before, some of my earliest formative comics influences were some truly shitty early-90s Image books. It's pretty hard to un-learn, and I cringe every time I see my high school self peeking out between the lines. There's a rich history of painting, children's illustration, graphic design to draw from, and it's not all thin-thick-thin pen/brush lines, well-spotted blacks; good anatomy; midshot, closeup, establishing shot. Anyway, even our finest representatives of mainstream comics art come from this weird offshoot of slick pop art. So hard to work outside of those self-imposed limitations... I've got my own set of uptight problems, though. Santoro again:
Think of it this way: As "straight-forward" or "realistic" Clowes' style in Ghost World is to a schooled comics reader, it looks baroque and affected to a non-comics reader.
I love Clowes, but I suspect this is true. I think Ghost World benefited from this in a lot of ways - "it's like a comic book, but kicky!" But that only works so many times. Is the "comics style" intrinsically better or worse than any other style of representative art? I guess not, but any road becomes a dead end if it doesn't go anywhere.
