Walking the Hadrosaur Roads - The Lost Continent of Appalachia

Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Diplodocus, Maiasaura, Deinonychus, Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops.  As a dinosaur-loving child growing up in New England, I learned very quickly that all the really popular, exciting dinosaurs lived in Nowhere Near My Home.  They all lived out west, on the other side of the great inland sea.  Back east, we can claim Hadrosaurus, some tracks... and that, according to the dinosaur books of my childhood, was it.  Maybe Dryptosaurus would get a shout-out, thanks to Charles Knight's "Leaping Laelaps" painting (still one of the greatest works of paleoart ever made).  Maybe there'd be a mention of Anchisaurus because you can't not love a basal sauropod the size of a sheepdog.  But generally, eastern dinosaurs would be ignored by popular culture.

Asher Elbein's Lost Continent of Appalachia aims to fix that.  It's a quick read, gorgeously illustrated, and tells the stories of the animals that roamed the eastern parts of North America during the Cretaceous.  And I love it!  It's what child-me would have given anything within reason to read.  (In fact, I would love to see it as a nice hardcover book someday.)  Make sure you read Asher's companion post at good old Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs too.  He's promised to post more behind-the-scenes material there and I can't wait.

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Art of the Day!

Antpittas!  Look at these adorable little fuzzballs on stick legs!

Inktober Day 14 - Texture-zilla

Little portrait of the King of the Monsters, experimenting with different textures.

Glen Keane's "Duet"

I've probably mentioned before that Glen Keane is one of my art-heroes.  A few weeks ago, seemingly out of nowhere, he dropped this beautiful short on the animation community.  It's called "Duet" and good lordy is it ever gorgeous.





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Sketch of the Day!

This is why Book-Stuart Little is a way, way better character than Movie-Stuart Little.

"Jungle Eagle" Sketches

It's a new year, and over at Flickr, I started the customary yearly Sketch of the Day folder.  These are the first drawings I uploaded to that folder.  I'd wanted to watch the "Nature" episode "Jungle Eagle", about a team of biologists who go through a lot to record the life-cycle of a family of Harpies in Venezuela, for years but I always managed to miss it.  Thankfully, it and a bunch of other episodes of "Nature" have appeared on Netflix Instant.

These are all ballpoint pens on recycled Sketchbook paper.  A warning to all Tyrannosaurs I draw from now on: this is going to be my modern-day model/inspiration for you.  That crest!!!

"Fraggle Rock" Month: Season 4, Episode 9 - "Wembly's Flight"

Well, here we are already at the final set of "Fraggle Rock" DVDs.  I didn't think we'd be here so early and I'm already feeling pretty down, knowing that the end is near.  Sadly, march on towards the final episodes we must, although we need to talk about network scheduling weirdness first.

The final twenty-four episodes of "Fraggle Rock" were produced as one final season.  In America, HBO ran the first half of that last season as "Season Four", then ran the second half the next year as "Season Five".  I'm going to ignore all this and just refer to the last season as Season Four, partially out of convenience, and partially because, upon review, the first half of this season set is... I'll be very nice and call it a bumpy ride.

And I say that with full knowledge that even at it's worst, "Fraggle Rock" is still the very best children's television program ever produced.  A bad episode of "Fraggle Rock" is still a damn sight more fun to watch as an adult than a good episode of "Johnny Test" after all.  But a bad episode of "Fraggle Rock" (and Jim forgive me but there are some real stinkers in this demiseason; I won't have any regrets skipping past the especially tedious "Space-Frog Follies" and "Mirror Mirror" next time I watch this series) hurts an awful lot more because we know how excellent this show can be.  It just really feels like the writers of "Fraggle Rock" may have hit a wall at this point in the series and that's sad to see. 

I did like a couple of the episodes in this batch.  "Wonder Mountain" is a very funny episode with some imaginative stuff in it, but it feels like it'd be happier as an "Adventure Time" episode. "A Tune For Two" is pretty cute but is rightfully best known for the song "Children of Tomorrow".  "Uncle Matt's Discovery" and "Red's Blue Dragon" have some very nice -even genuinely poignant- character moments, but they also involve a very strange new plot device that is introduced in the former and then utterly ignored except for the latter, which also spoils the poignancy by turning into a tonally discordant wacky slapstick chase scene that seems to go on for freaking ever.

And then there's "Wembly's Flight".  Of the episodes in the front half of Season Four, this one gives me the most to discuss.  And even then, I appreciate this episode more for what it is trying to do than for what it actually does.

Here's why I at least appreciate the idea behind "Wembly's Flight":  It has -up until a certain point- almost exactly the same plot as "Elaroo's Wishday".  A character wonders out loud about how cool it would be to be able to fly.  That character somehow gets the opportunity to make a wish and wishes to be able to fly.

You know how this story usually goes from here, right?  Because this is not only the plot to "Elaroo's Wishday", it's the plot of the early Disney cartoon "The Flying Mouse" and the staggeringly irresponsible children's book "The Little Rabbit Who Wanted Red Wings" as well.  At one time, both were listed under TV Tropes' Warped Aesop page and here's why: what usually happens next is that the flight-enabled character is now resented or even hated and feared by their friends and family specifically because they are able to fly.  Because of this, they go back on their wish, wishing to just be normal again.  "You don't want to be different and special, kids," is the moral of the story, "I mean, you don't want to fly, kids!  Why, if you were able to fly, everyone you love would shun you for... some... reason... Well, never mind!  Point is, just trust us kids.  Those grapes are SO sour you couldn't even imagine."

"Fraggle Rock" being "Fraggle Rock", once Wembly is temporarily able to fly (as an aside, the ability is granted to him by a magical creature who looks like a mysterious old man [or a cuter version of a character from "The Dark Crystal"] but self-identifies as a beautiful Fairy Godmother, so we have our second instance of nontypical gender identity in the children's series from the early 80's to go with the awesome female characters and older characters and once again, look at how freakin' easy this is), the story goes in a very different direction.  And after it does, it falters for a bit, but towards the end it does something awesome.  Instead of the old "I'm sad cause I can fly" ending, this episode instead says, "Eff that noise!  Being able to fly would be AWESOME!  And if you're ever able to fly, don't do it for other people's reasons, just do it because it is awesome!"  And so we get a great song about how flying is terrific and the episode ends with a long sequence where Wembly flies around Fraggle Rock, having a blast.

So, really, not the most thought-provoking episode we've seen in this marathon.  But there will be plenty of those in the second half of this season.

"Fraggle Rock" Month - Season 4, Episode 1: "Sprocket's Big Adventure"

(Note: This is the twenty-third episode included on my [relatively] old season three DVDs, but I have recently learned that it was aired and produced as the first episode of season four.  We'll talk about the scheduling weirdness of HBO next week.)

So here we are in the last (or second-to-last depending on what part of the world you were in -- but again, that's something we'll talk about next week) season of "Fraggle Rock" and at this point the Fraggle world, the Doozer world, and the Gorg world have all interacted with one-another somehow.  And the Human world, our world, has interacted just a little bit with the Fraggle world.

There's the obvious fact that humans have met Uncle Traveling Matt on his adventures in "Outer Space".  And now it is tangent time, cause I can't believe I haven't talked about this yet.  "Outer Space" is the Fraggles' term for our world, and I never truly realized the brilliance of that until I considered this show as an adult.  This gives "Fraggle Rock" all the hallmarks of a xenofiction series.  We're seeing the whole world through the eyes of the Fraggles, so the unknown alien creatures living in an unknown alien world, we realize with a little shudder, are us.

Sprocket, Doc's loyal dog, is a truly horrifying alien creature to the Fraggles.  Earlier in the series, he and Gobo came to a kind of understanding after Gobo helped Sprocket when he was trapped in the tunnels leading from the workshop to Fraggle Rock.  Now, they're friends, which comes in handy when Sprocket becomes lost in the tunnels of the Rock in this episode.

Here's the crazy thing about this episode, and the reason why I love it.  At this point in the series, we are more familiar with the worlds of Fraggle Rock than we are with the human world.  And just now, we're getting to see this world from the point of view of an outsider.  I'd like to point out that most series set in a fantastical imagined world do this in the very first episode/book/whatever.  Meanwhile, "Fraggle Rock" dropped us right into the fantasy world from the start with almost no hand-holding.  It doesn't do the obligatory episode where a newly arrived character is given a lengthy tour and has all the details of how the place works explained to him until the first episode of the final season.  You guys...

Anyway, Sprocket makes his way into Fraggle Rock and, in yet another nice subversion, meets with Cotterpin and her Doozer crew before any of the Fraggles.  And Cotterpin recognizes how lost this poor beast is and shows him the way to his home -- which, she assumes, is the Gorg's garden.  So Sprocket meets Junior Gorg and Marjory the Trash Heap.  The latter turns out to be fluent in canine and helps poor Sprocket find Gobo and the way back to Doc's workshop

And so we have the table set for the major crossovers between the worlds of the final season.  That does it for the third season set.  Next week, we head into the last season of "Fraggle Rock, which includes several episodes I have never seen before.  I'm just warning you, this could get emotional...

"Fraggle Rock" Month - Season 3, Episode 18: "Bored Stiff"

Okay, let me level with you, dear reader.  This is not the most psychologically dense episode of "Fraggle Rock" ever made.  It is not the most sophisticated.  And yet...

And yet, I think of all the episodes from Season Three, this one made me the happiest.  Look at that climax again!  Look at it!  Great Wish-Granting Creature, we get to see that the Gorgs and the Fraggles are finally dancing and singing together in the spirit of harmony -perfect harmony, if you will- to one of the most delightful earworms on the song score so far!  And they're doing it to help each-other because...

I think I need to back up a little.

Okay, so Ma and Pa Gorg are feeling romantic (At this point, the Gorgs are basically a much less cynical version of Chuck Jones' Three Bears), but the spot where they first made out is infested with Fraggles.  Pa finds a nasty potion, Boredom Juice, in the shed and is determined to saturate the whole Fraggle tunnel with the stuff.  But Junior is worried because he has begun to befriend the Fraggles in earlier episodes, most notably "The Great Radish Caper".  The Rock gets sprayed, the Fraggles suffer fatal amounts of ennui, and it's up to Junior and Gobo to save everyone with a magical song-and-dance number -- and of course, they'll have to deal with their differences and work together to do so.

So at first glance, this episode is just fun.  The aforementioned song-and-dance number is truly terrific and showcases the wonderful physicality of these characters.  And I still have the "Touch your nose / then touch your toes" song in my head.

But dig a little deeper and you've got a beautiful case of character development here.  We got hints of it in earlier episodes, but now it is very clear that "Fraggle Rock" has a genuine gosh-darn myth arc going on here.  This is the episode where Junior and the Fraggles finally start coming to an understanding.  Consider this: in the first season, the Gorgs were almost straight-up antagonists!  For a Gorg to even talk to a Fraggle was unthinkable back then!

And given that Fraggles have already befriended Gorgs and Doozers, there's only one other world left to fully connect with...

"Fraggle Rock" Month - Season 2 Episode 15: "Manny's Land of Carpets"

Great Gorgs, we're here already!  We're at one of the episodes I was most excited to revisit and discuss and I'm stunned that it's already here in Season Two!  Seriously, having first seen it as part of TNT's rerun of "Fraggle Rock" sometime in the early 90's, I assumed "Manny's Land of Carpets" would have come from much later in the series; perhaps even the final season due to its go-for-broke "It's the end and we want to go out on our own terms, so look at what subjects we're tackling NOW!" mentality.  But nope, it's already here in the second season.  I'm floored.

So then, let us discuss "Manny's Land of Carpets", also known as the episode where the concept of God is accidentally introduced to the Fraggles and almost completely destroys their society.

(Obligatory "I am not looking for Dark and/or Edgy Subtext in something innocuous; that really IS the subtext" disclaimer.)

Okay.  Obviously this is an unexpected place for a kids' show with cute singing puppets to go.  It all starts innocently enough.  To save his sensitive ears, Sprocket hides a malfunctioning radio that Doc has been trying to fix deep in the tunnel leading to Fraggle Rock.  Gobo assumes this is a gift from "The Wish-Granting Creature".  See, an earlier postcard from Uncle Matt introduced Gobo to the concept of Santa Claus, as filtered through Matt's misinterpretation-prone brain.  No, this isn't a Christmas episode (in hindsight, that would have been incredible) but it is our first clue that there's something an awful lot more interesting going on here than the supposed bland "advertising/technology is bad" message some folks apparently got from this episode according to a few episode guides I've seen online (by the way, what the hell happened to all the "Fraggle Rock" fansites out there?!)

Gobo enlists the aid of Wembly and Boober to bring the strange machine to the Great Hall so the other Fraggles can enjoy it, but Boober protests.  Whatever this thing is, he says, it doesn't belong in the Rock.  Boober is outvoted, and the Fraggles bring the radio down to the Hall.  At first, it is a wondrous thing, a magical box that occasionally plays music when the signal comes through -- but sometimes they can hear the voice of the Wish-Granting Creature himself.  He tells Gobo of a wonderful place where "your happiness is guaranteed".  Another Fraggle messes with the dial and the Wish-Granting Creature promises him endless "all you can eat" food and pleasure.  Eventually, even Boober is seduced with the prospect of truly spotless laundry.

The Fraggles are thus separated into three factions with staggering speed, each group arguing with ever-increasing fervor over which of the Wish-Granting Creature's promises is the true one.  And all the Fraggles are ready to split up and leave the rock for good, wandering the unknown world in search of a better one promised by a wildly misunderstood disembodied voice.  Until, after a bit of soul-searching, Gobo finally decides that the box really doesn't belong in Fraggle Rock and, frankly, that they're all better off without this confusing Wish-Granting Creature.  So they bring the thing back to Doc's workshop (and in the surprisingly poignant epilogue, Doc wonders aloud what kind of awful impression people around the world would get from the things broadcast by his town's local radio station.  Remember, this was a pre-anyone-can-get-on-the-Internet 1984.)

Holy sh*t, guys.

This episode is f-ing fascinating.  I want to note how very different "Manny's Land of Carpets" looks and feels from any other episode of "Fraggle Rock".  It honestly looks and feels an awful lot more like a classic "Twilight Zone" episode.  There are frequent ominous cross-fades, and the climax is shot almost exactly like the end of "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street".  And there's that eerie red light on Doc's radio, reminiscent of similarly unnerving features on all the slot machines, telephones, and other devices Rod Serling loved to imbue with a malevolent intelligence.

More importantly, what struck me even harder during this episode, aside from the brilliant central concept and general "I can't believe they're actually going there" awesomeness, is seeing how much "Fraggle Rock" has matured.  The Fraggles would lose a lot of their innocence in the back half of Season 2 (this episode was soon followed by the more famous "Fraggle Wars"), and it would be the start of many more subtle and thought-provoking stories told in the Rock.

I have to counteract sad news with awesome news.

And the awesome news is that World's Beyond, the first Comicbook Artists Guild prose anthology, has had it's first print run recently. In other words, I have another piece of art published! Yay yay yay!!!

I don't know if this link will work for anyone not a CAG member but it's worth a shot. I'll have a more elaborate post about this in a week or two; I want to show the work in progress if I can find the pictures I took. :)

Edit: The book may be purchased at eCrater for $12.99.

Whew! OK, back to continuing Don Bluth Month tomorrow.

You must all read Lev Grossman's _The Magicians_. Because of Awesome.

Yes, I've read a book that was (all too briefly) on the New York Times bestseller list. Try not to freak out.
And it is very good. Scratch that, it's awesome. Grossman has basically freely admitted that he initially wrote the novel to contain all the awesome stuff he loves in fantastic fiction.
This is that rare work of fiction that, very like "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", rewards you for being a fan of the genre. And it also serves as a by turns bleakly funny satire and heartaching deconstruction of the fantasy genre.
The novel takes on two very big targets directly. The whole subgenre of wizard school novels a la Harry Potter and Earthsea is the subject of the first large section of the book. What happens when a magic student graduates anyway? And I'm not talking about a Ged or a Harry Potter or an Ender, just a no-name nerd in Ravenclaw house. What are they supposed to do after school?
A lengthy deconstruction of The Chronicles of Narnia forms the bulk of the second half of the novel, and as someone who was always subtly irked by the central conceit of a magical land populated by powerful mythical beings who for some reason require the aid of some random Earth schoolkids to save them, this made me very happy. The characters even call the Aslan-equivalent character out on waiting around for them instead of helping his people.
Really, though, read the book. It might be the greatest genre-busting novel I have read since The Time-Traveler's Wife (and, gosh, I need to rescue that review from the depths of my abandoned MySpace blog.) Do not resist the Awesome. I'd love to hear reactions from non-fantasy fans and readers new to the genre.
Oh, and here's the sketch of "The Final Charge" alluded to in the last post:

As always, click for massive. I'm not going to lie. This might be the baddest-a**ed thing I drew all summer.

Great Arceus! I almost forgot to mention that tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day!

So visit your local comic book store (I'm not sure if other bookstores are participating) and pick up a new book to read absolutely free. Some stores will also have other special events, so be sure to check their websites. The whole idea behind Free Comic Book Day is to promote literacy, encourage people to shop locally, and support artists and authors. But most importantly: it's about FREE COMIC BOOKS! Who doesn't like free stuff?

You don't like free stuff? You're weird.