Review – House of Darkness

Justin Long seems to have a particular talent for taking uncomfortably awkward social situations and making them infinitely worse, a gift that gets free rein in this relentless tale of a date gone horrifically wrong. Except for a pause in the middle and a brief moment of actual action at the end, the whole production is like reading texts from a douchebro trying to get laid. So In the Company of Men with vampires, a combination nobody asked for. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Blood and Snow

This is what John Carpenter’s The Thing would have been if everyone involved had been terrible at their jobs. Though there’s plenty of blame to go around, the leading culprit is the script. Other than brief monster moments here and there, the vast majority of the running time is given over to pointless bickering, much of which is difficult to follow let alone care about. The only thing I found even vaguely intriguing about this experience was speculation about what sort of abandoned building it was filmed in. Shopping mall? Hospital? It’s a mystery on par with how anyone managed to scrape together a budget for something this awful. Wish I’d skipped it

Book Review – Breaking Cat News

Breaking Cat News: Cats Reporting on the News that Matters to Cats by Georgia Dunn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This review covers not only this book but also the rest of the series up through It’s Showtime, Sophie. Georgia Dunn brings clever illustrations and an excellent sense of humor to the tales of three cats (and their many friends) running a broadcast news operation that covers their daily apartment-dwelling lives. The storytelling is at its best when narratives run for a single page or maybe three or four pages. The longer arcs that crop up in later volumes often involve cats in peril, and those are hard to enjoy even when they have happy endings. But when the focus is on cats being cats with a twist of journalism, the series is highly entertaining.

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Book Review – Painting from Photographs

Painting From Photographs by Patrick Seslar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m an awkward fit for this book. Many of the watercolor techniques used by the author and his wife are well beyond me, though I hope to get there someday. On the other hand, I found a lot of the photography advice too basic (not to mention badly outdated). As the artists tend to use photos in combination and often modify them considerably, initial photo quality wasn’t all that big an issue. Indeed, in some places I found myself wondering why they bothered with photos at all rather than just painting from memory or imagination. However, the practical examples did a good job of moving from “photo sketching” through interim steps to end result.

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Book Review – The Empire Strikes Back

The Empire Strikes Back by Donald F. Glut
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Back in the early 1980s, KC’s Fine Arts Theater was in the same strip mall with Rainy Day Books. Finding myself with nothing to do between pictures in a James Bond double feature, I strayed down to the bookstore and bought a copy of this book. Which I subsequently forgot and left behind at the end of the second movie. So finding a copy more than 40 years later is probably a personal record for length of time taken to finish reading a book. The text itself is standard fare for a quick novel based on a pre-production copy of the script, but it turns into a fun “spot the difference” between book and movie (for starters, in this version Yoda is blue). The illustrations are Ralph McQuarrie’s concept sketches, so they’re good without being purpose-made for the print edition. Fans of the movie may get a kick out of this, but fans of literature most likely won’t.

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Book Review – Watercolor Techniques for Artists and Illustrators

Watercolor Techniques for Artists and Illustrators: Learn How to Paint Landscapes, People, Still Lifes, and More. by D.K. Publishing
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Well written and copiously illustrated, this text covers a range of watercolor-painting-related topics from beginning elements to advanced techniques. This might work better as a reference kept at hand while one pursues the art. Thus I somewhat regret reading it cover to cover without stopping to actually do any of the lessons. But it was a library borrow and had to be returned.

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Book Review – Making Nonfiction Comics

Making Nonfiction Comics: A Guide for Graphic Narrative by Shay Sarah Mirk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Overall this is a good book about the title topic. But be warned: the first half treats “nonfiction” and “journalism” as synonyms. So if your interests lie elsewhere, start reading with the chapter on memoirs. Even if you do want to explore 20th century news styles, you’ll probably need something more in depth than this, especially if you’re new to interviewing. However, when it gets good it really is good. The advice tends to be helpful, and there’s enough variety in the approaches to make it likely that you’ll find something that fits what you want to do and how you want to do it. A lot of the interviewees (and both the authors) are veterans of The Nib, so if you were a fan then this will feel like a reunion.

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