We’ve talked about visual art, and while I could go on at length about making or seeing or interacting with visual art, I’m going to move on. Inspired by my time trying to figure out hand-pulled noodles, I’m going to talk about art geared towards the stomach.
The Gastrointestinal
Most of the time I am eating just so I can keep going. I don’t think this is ideal, but if I’m running home and need to make sure I don’t flip out in a low blood sugar rage during band practice, then it almost doesn’t matter what I eat so long as I eat. Still, some of the best creative experiences I’ve had center around food.
Granted, my buddy Starving is far better than me at turning a plate of food into an art piece. He has a better eye to actual layout on the plate. I have much more of an eye for smells, combinations of colors, and fulfilling flavors. I find food to be such an interesting art topic because when done well (for me) it is best shared.
I have also gotten there from eating out. I love going out for food with friends and eating a good meal. I don’t always consider my dinner artistry, but there are definitely some examples of note I can think of. As a beer person I love hitting up Cambridge Common to sample their many taps because I am often able to find something seasonal or new to me, often from breweries I love. The food experience there is more of a general food experience, but the beer experience definitely sits more like an appreciation of art. I’ve often sat at Cambridge Brewing Company and crossed those lines, where the beer can introduce the sublime and subtle and artistic, and some of the dishes do as well. It’s humbling and fun and exploratory as an audience, and the audience gets to play the game of figuring out pairings, ways to make the beer and food play off of each other. Your mouth and stomach become and experimental playground for the ultimate match. Occasionally these places have “beer dinners” which I cannot recommend enough as a deeper exploration of food and beer and pairing and a way in which two artists (the brewer and chef) come up with ideas to play off each other.
Restaurants can also become an artistic exchange on multiple levels, if you bring in a good community, and sharing of ideas on top of the gastronomic experience. I have had this both at restaurants, and at home. Coming up with a dinner plan and executing for a table of people is a whole other challenge and expression. Sharing a dish, something crafted in the kitchen, is deeply personal and creative. It could be for 2 people, or for 20. A pot luck also has the ability to provide such an experience. Personally I find that it works better with a theme or a challenge of sorts, be it a cuisine or an ingredient so that there is something to tie the whole event together.
What better than to have some beautiful interesting pungent piece of art than to put it in your mouth and have it become a piece of you?
The holidays have passed haven’t they? Not if you’re me. We’re coming up on the Lunar New Year January 23rd, which means I’m thinking about making a whole mess of food to bring in the dragon. We’re moving from a rabbit year on into a dragon year (a black water dragon if you want to be specific). When I lived in China, Chinese New Year was like many holidays rolled into a two week cyclone of food and events. It’s something like New Years, plus Thanksgiving, plus Christmas, plus Hanukkah rolled together.
Since I moved back to the US in 2004 I have tried to do something special to remember the holiday. This year I’m taking on the tradition of eating noodles for the new year, which is all about promising longevity. Long unbroken noodles are supposed to signify a long life. My favorite noodle dish in China was 兰州拉面 (“Lanzhou” a city in Gansu province “la” or pulled “mian” or noodles). I used to have a favorite 拉面 noodle place in Shanghai that had a “hundred year” soup stock… the place was open 24 hours a day, and the soup was always going, they just added to it all the time. Noodles were prepped fresh and cooked in a separate pot, and then the outstanding broth and meat were added, and the whole thing was garnished with fresh cilantro. While I used to douse most 拉面with tons of hot sauce, this place had soup so flavorful that it was almost a crime to alter it.
Sometimes the soup stock has a little bit of a curry flavor to it, which i believe has a lot to do with a tiny bit of tumeric, and a larger amount of cumin. I’m going to try for a vegetarian and a beef soup, and I’ll have to spend some time thinking of what can strengthen the soup in contrast to some delicious beef.
Soup stock is the least of my challenge though. The pulled noodles of China inspire ramen and other non-egg noodles around Asia. The art of the pull-knead followed by pulling the dough into noodles is probably one of the better physical feats of cooking that doesn’t involve wrestling an animal carcass. Dough elasticity is crucial in the pulling because you don’t want your noodles falling apart, but you also don’t want the noodles springing back and getting shorter. I have been looking at some videos to help me on my journey that are absolutely worth sharing.
This CCTV video is by far the most instructional, though you need to underestand Chinese to make sense of it. Here’s the basic ingredient list: beef, flour, scallions, daikon raddish, cilantro, salt, msg (or “essence of flavor”), black pepper, and alkali. Wait, alkali? I can’t tell if this is supposed to be a baking soda or lye, but you need a base to facilitate the proper gluten development. In Japanese stores they sell kansui or “lye water” if they don’t have kansui powder. It’s usually in the soy sauce/oil area.
I’m not going to translate the whole instruction, but you can get a good idea from what’s going on in the video.
What you see there is the first motion, with all the twirling of the dough into a rope… that’s the equivalent of kneading. It’s not about developing the dough there, it’s about developing the gluten. That’s why the surfaces aren’t floured at that point. It’s also quite the workout, on par with working straps in a gym…. so make noodles for your friends and work those upper body muscles!
While i love the instruction, what i really wanted was just to watch someone in action, not taking the time to talk about what they were doing. I found that here in this video.
Then, finally, for some English language flare (and the advice that it takes 10 years of training to actually get good at this) here’s Gordon Ramsay learning to make pulled noodles.
I’m definitely going to try a run of making my own noodles over the weekend. A trial run, so to speak. I’ll be sure to take some pictures and see if I can’t make sense of what i’m doing.
I almost always have a drive to create or experience things. Things might be better defined here as “art” only I don’t usually use such lofty terms in my head. It’s not just the joy of making something, it’s more feeling like nothing is happening and I’m wasting time unless something creative is happening in my near vicinity, and I don’t really care if that’s wrought by my own imagination. I’m perfectly happy to ride on the coattails of someone else imaginative. The only caveat here is if that involves too much time in front of the tv, because after a long chunk of time it feels like I’ve had my essence sucked out my eyes… if you’ve ever seen the Dark Crystal you know what I mean.
There is a lot of creativity in my world, and it all seems second nature to me. It’s immersive and something I highly recommend to everyone. Some folks claim a lack of creativity, which I think is a load of bull-pucky. There is a risk to being overly passive in life, for sure, but there is no lack of art experience in life. Maybe a turn of phrase or examining things from my point of view might make art more obvious.
My hope here is that people might think about how to have this more prevalent in their own lives. Art, creativity, fun… these are all things that everyone needs. I think it’s a part of being a sane, whole, happy and healthy human being. Creative ventures are some of the best ways to remember that we don’t need to take everything so serious all the time. I exert my own creative energies through drawing and music most frequently, but to a lesser degree I play with sewing, embroidering, knitting, “crafting” and gaming.
The Visual
Drawing is very empowering. I personally have a very hard time sitting and drawing a still life. That’s not my forte. Granted, because of that I make myself go out to Dr. Sketchy’s drawing sessions now and again where I can draw models and drink beer.
I feel much happier coming up with an idea, and trying to make that come to life visually. If it’s not something you “do,” drawing can seem pretty intimidating. Doodling might seem more approachable. I am good at drawing because I do it all the time. I always have. If you stopped drawing back in grade school when you drew skyscraper godzilla battles in 5th grade, then your skills have atrophied. Drawing is a skill, meaning that if you invest enough time and effort then you will turn out something good.
Even if you don’t want to invest the time into actively drawing yourself, or painting, then there’s a lot to be gained to going and checking things out. A lot of times it’s seeing other work, other ideas, that might trigger the desire to make something myself, or figure something out. Earlier this year a friend took me to the opening of the new wing at the MFA. Aside from the outstanding cheese and food available beforehand, I was really excited to tear through the exhibits and see some beautiful stuff. There was a lot to visually digest, from the stained glass (if you don’t know anything about stained glass, try to go with someone who can tell you something about it, it’ll be twenty times more rewarding), to beautiful landscapes, to a painting so big that the existence of this wing is the first time this painting’s been hung in ages.
It was so many months ago that I am having a hard time with my recall on all the things that struck me so deeply about the pieces in the new wing. For me, since I predominantly do work in my sketchbooks, I love when samples of an artist’s background material is on display. Their own meticulous notes and plans for a painting, or their incoherent scribbles that turn into something really pretty. I work hard at what I make, and sometimes I feel like my inability to produce on queue and the first time through pushes me to think I’m incompetent. Seeing an artist’s sketches or notes is a hint at the tomes of work that they did to produce something. It’s empowering for me to see that, but it also gives me a deeper appreciation of a painting or sculpture to see some of the work into making it.
I had a similar experience a few weeks ago at the Guggenheim in New York where a Kandinsky painting is deconstructed through an exhibit that shows the sketches, notes, preparatory paintings and explorations that the artist went through in order to create that painting. Even something as simple as a photo of Kandinsky brought to mind, for me, the time period he was working in, snapping into focus the idea that he was really venturing out into something weird and different and new at the time, something I don’t appreciate nearly as much just looking at an abstract painting on a wall with a 4 sentence caption alongside.
Art isn’t always in museums. Sometimes you need to hit up galleries as well. Galleries can seem intimidating when you know you don’t plan to buy anything, but really it’s just another space to check out art when it comes down to it. There’s an exhibit of Froud material at the Animazing gallery in New York that both stunned and enlightened me. First off there was work from multiple Frouds, secondly there were figures and sketches from some of my favorite movies (Labyrinth, the Dark Crystal), and there were a lot of works on paper. As an artist and illustrator I sometimes feel that my medium of choice is second-rate because you rarely see paper in a museum. Given that I have to be able to store all my work in a tiny amount of space and need to be able to put it away, that isn’t going to change any time soon. It was awesome to see the originals of the pressed fairies up close and personal, checking out the pencil lines and the splay of watercolor. It was both visually pleasing, and a learning experience.
Visual art doesn’t always have to be “fine.” Personally I want art to be attainable by everyone, to put wherever they want. Some of it should be touched, played with, and used. Some of it should be observed. My favorite exhibit this year was at the Guggenheim, a installation called “Maurizio Cattelan: All.” A hefty sampling of the artist’s works were hung in a very jumbled fashion from the atrium of the museum, and as you walk up the corkscrew ramp of the museum the audience can gander at more and more of the artist’s pieces. This was an absolute visual playground and guessing game where some things were unclear or indistinct until you got further up to the top. The art was transformed in some ways by my own perspective depending on where I was standing. Some pieces made absolutely no sense until I was closer or above or below the piece. The jumble of pieces overall is a sort of irreverence that I really love. It helps that I built an installation that let people hang art in it however they wanted this past July and it had a similar playfulness to it. Seeing the installation was both awe inspiring, invigorating, and validating of something i’d done through a very different perspective. Not only that, but the whole thing was so irreverent that I was just giggling and awestruck the whole time.
I think it’s possible to play with the visual in any number of ways. Making your own drawings, doodling on the pictures of models in a catalog, adding your own editorial bent to a coloring book, or making a crazy collage. The process itself can be invigorating, and sharing it (even if it’s shared by hanging in the bathroom) is another part of the fun. It does not need to be limited to names of famous people from set designs, or video game character designs or children’s books, or painters in a museum. If for no other reason, playing with art that you make enhances an appreciation and understanding of seeing and experiencing art made by someone else.
Sickness is no excuse for stopping. I managed to get some sketching in this week and figure I’d show off some works in progress.
First off is a piece that’s currently in pencil… not sure where I want to go with it in terms of media, but I’m liking it so far. Working title is Blind Warrior.
Then I’ve also got an ink piece i worked on while I was sick. I love the skull, and I hate the other elements. I know what I want, and it didn’t quite work out. I’m going to revisit this and do-over, but here’s a good example of when a good idea fails (for me).
Just not feeling how that came out. Initially i was happy to move on to “color!”… but now I just think it sucks. Totally fine.
The last thing I have for you is from practice on Wednesday for Reign of Revelry, which is going to be an awesome circus performance. ENSMB showed up for a music run through with the cast, and during our downtime i sketched one of the aerialists.
So there you go. A glimpse into my week, artistically. I have a new Wacom Bamboo tablet that I’m excited to take a crack at during my spare time this weekend. I’ll keep you posted.
I survived somerville open studios, and managed to put up remaining prints on etsy. I still have another batch to list, but I’m taking my time today as I am recuperating. It’s hard to know how to go about a sort of mental vomit of a post, and my life has been resplendent in busy and awesome.
My month started with setting up for open studios with Jen Munch and having a bunch of people come to my house and check stuff out. I’ve been reclaiming cardboard for handmade simple frames, and it makes hanging art pretty easy. I had a good mix of familiar faces and new people, which was great. I also got to sit around a bit and read some comics, which is my favorite secondary activity at open studios, and thanks to Oz I had the opportunity to play a little Zombie Dice. If you ever need a short run fun game to play, it’s a keeper. I managed to serve up a keg of Bultrug, a belgian pale ale I brewed with Danimal back in September. I was especially happy to learn that a plastic primary fermenter can hold enough ice to chill a pony keg.
The following weekend I played with ENSMB at Waltham’s International Steam City. Our set in the museum was a ton of fun. If you’ve never been to the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation, I cannot recommend it enough. On Sunday we managed to avoid the rain and parade to the closing ceremonies where we had the opportunity to jam with Frenchy and the Punk. If you are anywhere they are playing, I highly recommend checking them out.
On the 14th I got together with the folks from Bring a Cup for a brew day. We managed to brew 7 beers over the course of the day and get them set up in fermenters in the basement. We had an excellent work team this year, and a systematic work flow that made it possible for everyone to take part. It was a good amount of crazy and productivity in one day.
Factory Seconds had 2 gigs on the 15th. First we played for the Somerville Save our Homes walk. I definitely give props to the folks who came out to walk and raise money in the rain. I hope the music for opening ceremonies brightened up their day a little. This was our first time performing for folks with our 3 newest band members, and everyone did pretty awesome. Our second gig was the Outside the Lines BBQ, where i had some great food and got to listen to some bluegrass as well.
Design wise, in between all this, I finished up some new album art for ENSMB (see?). I also finished and submitted a Firefly ticket design, but I never post those until after the event, so you’ll just have to wait. I am pretty damn excited about this one and look forward to hanging a print of it on my own walls.
This past weekend I travelled down to Somerset NJ with ENSMB to play at the Steampunk World’s Fair. I didn’t have much time to make it to anything other than the sets we played. I started getting sick, which sucked, but I made it anyhow. Thanks to the power of ibuprofen i was able to power through and keep the throat swelling down enough to sing. Saturday night was particularly notable because three of us got puked on (from behind) while playing with What Time Is It Mr. Fox. It was an amazing projectile affair that didn’t harm my accordion, but my corset, skirt, and dress were pretty well drenched. I now have some kindred puke buddies, and as Justin said “That sort of bond is thicker than blood. And chunkier too.” I managed to run back to the room and change into another outfit in time for our set, so I’ll say that’s a win.
Again, we played the carport into the wee hours, and we managed to get shut down by the police. It was magical. Sunday was also fun, but being sick really got hard on the ride home, along with the general frustration of being stuck in traffic. I made it though, and made it to the doctor’s office today, and am trying to have a recouperating start to this week. I’m booked solid for the next 4 weekends, and have another art project to get started on, so we’ll see where I end up. Definitely challenging, and i need to eke out a little time for rest and recouperation.
I’ve gotten so much done in the last few days that I can’t really believe it. My new hypothesis is i’m somehow sucking out other people’s productiveness and conquering. If only i could patent whatever this is…
Regardless, I would really like a nap. Instead I will continue with the dayjob and take my lunchbreak to try and recount the awesomeness.
I have mentioned Somerville Open Studios a few times now. Yesterday my prints came in, so I brought them to my house after work, and cut 5 frames before running off to Cambridge Brewing Company for Meet and Greet. I found out that I’m a grant recipient for an installation for Firefly, so I get to start work on that puppy. I met up with someone to collect camp dues from last year, and while waiting I talked to a nice guy from out of town about the local beer scene and gave some pointers.
While sitting there I found out that I won a bid on a new (to me) accordion. Yes, I have my wondrous awesome beautiful Crucianelli. The issue is that I need something a little less precious to me for Firefly and Burningman, so I’ve been in the market for another accordion. While I don’t have them both in hand, I have made an image dedicated to my accordions. They deserve adoration.
I headed back to my house after that to cut another 4 frames before calling it a night, which means I’ve made 10 custom cardboard frames that just need a little ornamentation. I have another 14 or so to cut. Then I went and passed out.
I woke up not too far passed 6 and finished reading Jonathan Lehrer’s How We Decide. I even wrote a review:
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I think this is an excellent example filled overview of a swatch of brain related sciences put together in an exceedingly digestible way. I had fun reading this book, looked forward to getting back to it when set aside, and had fun talking about what I was learning and bantering with other folks over ideas and concepts laid out here. That alone makes it something I’d recommend to others. As with other books, if this were my field I might be frustrated, but as a key down the rabbit hole for science related to thought and decision-making, this book was great.
After that i got dressed and started compiling a mass order for brewing ingredients (for 20 beers). I almost finished that up, but then it was time to walk to work. I’ve had a good day thus far churning through outstanding taxonomy problems.
I am starting to feel a bit sleepy, but I’ve been awake a good amount of hours. The plan is to head home after work and finish up my frames, and start taking stuff down from the walls in the common spaces. Throw in food and sleeping in the middle there. Tomorrow is a lot of errands and chauffering until an ENSMB and Bury Me Standing show at the Lizard Lounge. I’m even loaning out my Crucianelli, so it’ll get more action than me!
So far I have cleaned up a few ink pieces I plan to show next week for open studios, and have made a ton of progress on an album cover, and placed an order for a whopping 20 prints, and 17 of those are new pieces made this year.
Meanwhile I’m trying to pick up the pace on that gray marching band piece, but I haven’t *quite* had the time to play with it yet.
I need to remember to request some time off for next week so I can help with a hospital visit AND set up my house.
I feel like I am just hanging on to a little rock flying at 1,000 miles per hour hurtling through space… oh wait, that’s not that far from the truth.
It makes me think of those little “hang in there” posters with the little kitten on a branch, except swap this out for something far more dire looking.
The amt of busy I’m dealing with is jeopardizing my zine plans for this week, and is possibly going to kill my easter illustration, which i have been dreaming about making… but there’s just too much other outstanding things to get checked off the list. We’ll see.
There’s been a lot going on for me of late. I apologize for lack of updates. I went on a trip to San Francisco and Austin. There have been several band gigs, with more to come, and a lot of art preparation.
I am taking part in Somerville Open Studios again this year. If you have a map, I will be #52. My friend Jen Munch will be showing with me again, and I’m pretty pumped over the whole thing. I also recommend toddling down the street to #69 to check out Seth Seligman and Casey G. Since I’ve been off to so many things, I have a few new pieces to show. I feel like I’ve gotten somewhere in the last year. I get to show off work I had at Arisia, plus things I’ve worked on since then.
I just posted a bunch of pieces I worked on over the weekend in my gallery. This week I’ll select pieces for prints.
I also still have that marching band cuttlefish in progress, though I finished the smaller Ace of Disks. I have another color piece in progress. This one thoroughly frustrated me when I tried to paint in acrylic on wood, but I went back to the drawing board and threw it down on paper. Much easier.
I still want to bring in some penwork on the piece, but I’m just about done.
The big external projects have been characters for Boston Circus Guild’s Reign of Revelry show poster. That is going to be a blast in June, and folks should try to get out for that. My other big project is a new album design. That should hopefully be finished soon.
I still have 2 tattoo commission pieces to work on, an outstanding comic project, and 2 zines. I think I’ll have 1 if not 2 zines by the end of the month, and I should have Oz’s tattoo design done by open studios (I’m only a year behind on that).
In terms of large scale artwork, I have a couple of installations I am trying to get going for Firefly, and I’m really excited to make a few tryptics inspired by dubstep tunes that I’ve really been digging.
Apparently all i want to do is work in ink and pencil lately. I tried starting up a piece in acrylic/color and it just fell flat on its face when i got to the focal point of the piece. I’m still really mad about it (and at it) so I had to set it aside.
I did some rough sketches for a book i want to make, and i’m excited about it, but then i switched to a new sketchbook and for some reason i have it in my head that none of my ideas are good enough. Sometimes you sit at the sketchbook and nothing HAPPENS. No doodling, nothing. It’s infuriating. I need to start carrying around some crappy scrap paper to see if that helps. I can always glue things in later.
It may sound crazy, but sometimes working on material that is disposable means lower stakes and then ideas just flow freely. I don’t really care so long as *something* manifests. Doesn’t really matter if it’s on a wrapper if I’m just going to take it as a springboard to make something else. I find that when I sit with “nice” art matierials I have this stupid tendency to clam up and get intimidated.
I always come back to pens and pencils as a home base. I feel comfortable and work just generally happens in a laid back kind of way. A good recent example is the gentleman’s pleasure… super rewarding, materials I’m comfortable with, and really quick. Combinging pencils with inks (new for me) helps make more darks, which is helpful. Pencils can be dreadfully light, and my style is anal and specific, so I spend a lot of time with mechanical pencils.
Over the long weekend I got a piece started (and mostly done) that is really exciting. I have rough sketches for some marching band cephalopods. When I finish them, I want to try auctioning them off to help raise money for some of the creative endeavors I’m undertaking this year (even though I can’t afford them).
This is essentially a stylized cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis, to be exact) playing a clarinet and carrying a banner. I’m pretty happy with him, but the banner needs some work before I’m ready to go in with some water and ink.
Last night i was feeling in a funk and wasn’t in a good place to work on the cuttlefish, but I needed to work on something to recover my mood. Like I said, I’ve been lacking ideas and will to work on outstanding projects, so I did a random card draw and went with that…
This one was roughs in pencil, then art markets for a grey gradiant. I still need to go back in with pens to define the pieces, and I want to go back and give the gear more detail. It’s fuzzy and unclear because there’s no real line definition yet, but I figure a preview was worthwhile anyhow.
I’m still not decided whether i want to digitally add color on these guys or what. Aside from “finishing” the pieces as they stand, i don’t really have a full plan for them at the moment. I’m enjoying being along for the ride to see where I end up.
I love reading comics. Between my housemates and me we have a nice little library going, mostly of trades. Sometimes friends hang out and we just drink some beers and read some comics. While visiting my buddy Starving down in DC this past weekend we dropped by Big Planet Comics in Bethesda. I enjoyed taking a stroll around the store, and picked up a couple trades. One that I’ve been looking forward to for a while (Daytripper, because I really liked Gabriel Ba’s work on Umbrella Academy), and another that I’ve contemplated reading (first trade of Runaways).
The superhero comics are awesome, and are the foundation of what got me started as a kid. My brother’s bedroom held shelves upon shelves of wonder when I was a kid. Thor was a pretty awesome read, as was Uncanny X-Men. I read as much as I could of those. I didn’t get into Silver Surfer the way my brother did… but I had a favorite above all others: Dr. Strange.
Dr. Strange was real fun, and totally blew my mind. Imagine someone kinda like Dr. Morpheus, but less hokey (if you watch Venture Brothers). I re-read those issues dozens of times, more than anything else my brother had. I definitely know that leads to my appreciation for some of the Hellblazer storylines. I occasionally come back to Original Sins, Rare Cuts, and Dangerous Habits.
In the last year I checked out Lucifer because I’m a Sandman fan, and it’s nice to take a character and explore. That and my buddy Oz lent it to me. I definitely found the Divine Comedy to be a highlight in that run Yes, i still have 3 books to go. I posit that I may change my mind.
So in case you can’t tell, my tastes aim towards dark weirder stories, but I do like to check out other work from artists and writers I like. Since Lucifer was a lot of fun, I picked up My Faith in Frankie, which is pretty adorable and something I’d never read if I didn’t really like the writer. Mike Carey also led me to The Unwritten, which is an awesome crazy trip through literature. If you’re into literature and like suspense it is well worth it.
That’s pretty much all I have for “lighter” fare, because while I’m into crime solving and hijinks of that sort I’m going to say that the first volume of The Vinyl Underground caught my attention enough that I’ll go back for more. Papparazi fleeing main character with an interesting crew of people great at figuring out mysteries, but they’re all kinda tragically damaged? Yes please. I need to pick up the second book.
If you need more gore with your crime and supernatural characters, try Criminal Macabre. I have not gotten into any other Cal McDonald stories because I am sidetracked as a complete and utter Ben Templesmith fangirl. If Criminal Macabre tickles your need for the dark and messed up, but you miss the bitterness of Constantine, but still… with a little bit more humor than all that? You need Wormwood, Gentleman Corpse. Seriously… the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse as badass skull headed dudes in leather jackets that ride segways? Yes please. Oh, and they delay ending the world because of a worm living in an animated corpse? You think I’m giving away awesome plot? Nah.
The Exterminators also did an awesome job of running with the grotesque and bizarre. Since I’ve had my moments of contemplating how the world will end with a hostile takeover by cockroaches, it only seems fair that I’d like this comic.
It dawns on me that maybe this love follows my silly addiction to somewhat ridiculous crime shows like Bones, Fringe, and Lie to Me. My most recent ringing endorsement is on the same path: read Chew. If you like comics, and you think that craziness in the food industry is hysterical, if you’ve ever made up a character for D&D that had some freaky weird power just because it would make for great storytelling… you will understand why I adore this comic. Heroes who loathe their superpower make for fantastic storytelling in my book.
It amazes me that this is the stuff that makes me happy when I sit to read, but both of the stories I am writing myself are so much more… well… clean. Maybe that is part of why I’m having such a hard time making headway. Still, I’ll take any recommended distractions.
