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My comic book recommendation of the week: Night Music by P.Craig Russell. Man, this stuff is good. Russell is one of my favorite artists. He's really got an amazing way with both pencils and inks. His pencils have a lush, Art Nouveau-tinged quality to the work; there's a degree of precise but delicate draftsmanship that he's been able to maintain for over thirty years now. Just astounding. His inking is much more common than you'd think. He's inked a wide variety of guys, including Mike Mignola, Rick Leonardi, Kelley Jones and Michael Golden.
Night Music is a small number of issues (eight? nine? ten? I forget...) published by Eclipse in the eighties. It's an assemblage of small one-off stories and some larger multi-issue works. There's a lot of stuff to like in it; it's a treat to see an artist this good cut loose and do a varied selection of genres, styles and lengths.
It's highly recommended. Go get it!
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I mentioned on Friday that I've started a goal of tackling a different comic page every week. I'll be posting this first one (from Neil Gaiman's Sandman) on Friday.
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The recent earthquake, tsunami and nuclear catastrophes in Japan have been incredibly awful, surreal and beyond my scope of imagination. I really recommend, if you haven't, donating to the Red Cross. Every bit will help.
I've also found Rachel Maddow's recent segment on the nuclear reactors (and their possible meltdown) very smart and informative. With stuff this big and potentially destructive I find it helps me to listen to people that really know what they're talking about. Maddow explains everything that she can clearly and concisely, and the stuff that she can't she has other smart people on to talk about.
I'm a big fan of television that doesn't dumb itself down. Bravo Rachel Maddow Show.
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Your non-comic book recommendation of the week: Harold Bloom's "The Book of J". This fairly easy read (not always a given with the erudite Bloom) is an intriguing look at the the possible writer of the first 'version' of the Old Testament, and a commendable attempt to recreate that original first document as well.
These stories (if you'll forgive my referring to text sacred to millions of people as such) are so culturally embedded and almost unconscious remembered that it can be hard to look at them with a fresh, and in this instance literary, eye. Bloom has made a very strong case for the early works found in the Torah/ Old Testament as a beautiful piece of literature, and has taken them out of a moral context, something I would never have thought possible with the Bible.
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Time to get a'crackin' on the day. Your art today comes from my comic page mentioned above. It's another rough, subject to change before I get to the finish line. I gotta say, I love the way the the colored pencil takes to the page. It's a nice, albeit temporary, change from the normal monochromatic palette the penciler (or inker) works in.
Enjoy!
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