Go Get the New Edition of _After Man_ (SPOILER Review)

Or ask Santa for it, of course, since it's nearly Christmas already?!?  Good lord, that snuck up on me.  I apologize in advance for not doing anything crazy this holiday season; I'm still rather burned out after Inktober.  Head here for Christmas things.

But anyway, yes.  Get the new edition of After Man.  I pretty much had to get it anyway because, as you can see from the above photo, my old edition is pretty much loved to within an inch of it's life.  How much?

I'm holding it together with duct tape, staples, and prayers.  The new version is a sturdy hardcover with tough, glossy pages and it is very very nice.  Like, have it as your official coffee table book for the delight and confusion of your holiday guests nice.  It's THAT nice.

It is also *slightly* altered from the original 1981 edition.  I'm happy to report that this isn't an outright George Lucasing, the original text and illustrations are left basically alone.  There are a few edits to the introduction, but the biggest one helpfully cleans up the circa-1980's "protomammals" mess and the others are treated more as footnotes of the "Look at the cool things we've learned about this since then" kind.  Two creatures have been redesigned, however, and so here come the Spoilers.  First,

Art of the Week:
Speaking of fictional creature redesigns, here's my silly attempt to give Detective Pikachu less... *jarring*... anatomy:



But also...

I wonder how many of the people who don’t care what the dinosaurs in Jurassic World look like and told us to chill out cause it’s just a movie are suddenly very, very concerned about Pokémon integument? 🤔

— Christmas Treesh (@Babbletrish) November 13, 2018

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Okay, here are the new After Man illustration spoilers.  Note that both the original and revised illustrations are credited to Diz Wallace:

So the new Reedstilt is fine.  Weirder than the old design, which was already deeply strange to start with.  I don't like it as much; the old version is a lot more graceful.

Okay hang on to your butts, here comes the new Nightstalker:

Okay, it's redder.  And more... sinewy...  I'm not a fan, but I admire the stones it takes to redesign one of the very few creatures in After Man who can truly be called iconic. 

Let's Read _Recreating an Age of Reptiles_

Mark Witton's Recreating an Age of Reptiles (or "Rec-A-Rep" to its friends) is first and foremost an art book.  If you want to learn about dinosaurs or art techniques, you'll have to look elsewhere.  That said, it is the kind of art book I savor: gorgeous art, introduced and explained by the artist.

It seems like a simple, obvious thing, but I really don't have many art books in my collection like this (the magnificent 1995 volume The Alien Life of Wayne Barlowe has a very similar format and oh, what would I give for an updated version).  Here, Witton gives us the grand circle tour of his paleoart, all along telling us what is speculation and what is based on solid evidence.  Pterosaurs are the stars, of course, but we get a lovely tour of the Triassic, unusual depictions of sauropods and ceratopsians, and even us lousy synapsids get our own little chapter.  This really is a beautiful book and an essential addition to your paleoart library.

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Art of the Day!

A Merry Moleskein Marshtomp.  (Don't ruin his mood and tell him Janphibianuary was kind of a flop.)

Let's Read _Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved_

What a fantastic book Naish and Barrett's Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved is!  It is a fine introduction to these fantastic animals that I love so much.  If I could afford it, I'd buy copies for every family I know.  Most of the information in the book will be new and mind-blowing for them.

Most of the information wasn't new to me, so the selling point for me was those incredible illustrations.  The book is packed with art.  I can't express how happy I am to see the work of artists I first encountered online in a big beautiful glossy book.

Best of all, we have here a book about dinosaurs where birds are included like it ain't no thing and therefore, this is a book about dinosaurs that does not end at the K/T extinction.  Goodness, this is the dinosaur book I've wished for since childhood.

Oof, that cover though... >_<

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Art of the Day!

A tiny frog with a big, big voice to round out Janphibianuary.

Thoughts on Recently Experienced Media

It feels like it's been a while...

Movies

"Ink" - Interesting, sometimes very clever independent dark fantasy film.  I found a lot to like in it except for the twist at the end, which prompted less of a "woah" and more of a "what?"

"Mirrormask" - Somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight, there is a collaboration between Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean, and the Jim Henson Workshop.  And it is, sadly, not as awesome as that combination promises.  It is worth a look since the film does at least have a very unusual look and the story is almost a test-run for ideas that would be refined and far better implemented in "Coraline".  (Let's see here, girl who has some issues with her family finds her way into an alternate universe ruled over by a scary doppelganger of her mom and everything is kind of whimsical but also weird and off-putting?  Yeah.)

"Madagascar 3" - The first and certainly less mortifying of two "Why the hell was this in my queue; somebody out there in Internet-land must have convinced me it was worth watching" movies I'll be reviewing today.  I thought it was pretty bad, and there were even a few moments that were downright disturbing.  On top of that, whoever came up with the seal character hates me.  They don't even know me, yet they hate me.  ME, personally.  Ye gods...

"Sucker Punch" - The second of my two "Why the hell was this in my queue; somebody out there in Internet-land must have convinced me it was worth watching" movies and hooooooooly sh*t.  This movie.  It sure was a movie.  Still images were projected at a rate that gave the illusion of movement, and there was a soundtrack.
Seriously, though.  When "Sucker Punch" wasn't looking exactly like an adaptation of Kate Beaton's "Strong Female Characters" made by somebody who didn't get the joke at all, it reminded me uncomfortably of "Cool World" of all things, probably because it's another awkward glimpse into the creator's subconscious.  You can very definitely count me on Team "If you honestly think that this film is somehow 'empowering for women', please, just, STFU."

"Upstream Color" - Then again, neither "Sucker Punch" nor "Madagascar 3" made me literally scream and swear at the TV.  Your mileage, as they say, may vary, but you may count me on Team "This wasn't so much 'confusing' as it was 'straight-up antagonistic towards the audience'".

"A Monster in Paris" - Underrated CGI feature made in France by a former Dreamworks director.  It's slight, but very nice.  I only wish the DVD wasn't so bare-bones.  The voices picked for the dub are fine enough but shouldn't this at least have a French soundtrack?

"Peter and the Wolf" (1996) - I wanted to check this out because it's a gap in my Chuck Jones education(?), and I'm sad to report that it's entirely skippable.  You need to sit through nearly ten minutes of live-action footage of a grandpa trying to impress his very 90's grandson with the titular tale to get to the animation.  When you finally do, you learn that it's not Chuck Jones' animation at all.  It's his very Jonesy late-period character designs animated by a different team of animators who were, there is no polite way to put this, not skilled enough to handle them.  The result just looks wrong and kind of depressing.

Books

Island of the Blue Dolphins, Scott O'Dell - So... I recently acquired a Kindle Paperwhite and I have been consuming books like crazy.  One of the first places I descended upon was my local library's E-Library, where I found this gem from my assigned reading in high school.  I'm happy to say it still holds up.


Ready Player One, Earnest Cline - Hey, do you remember this thing that happened in the 80's?  Cause that sure was a thing that happened back in the 80's!
Okay to be perfectly fair, this book is pretty good when, you know, it's not doing that.  But the thing is, it does that a lot.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot - Haunting is the word for this true story of bizarre biology, class and racial politics, and a family's heartbreaking quest to know the truth. If you only follow one of my recommendations in this post, make it this one.

3500, Ron Miles -  The deeply strange, utterly fascinating, and ultimately incredibly heartwarming story of Ron Miles and his son, Ben is now available in its entirety in book form and is well worth a read.  You'll want to hug your children afterwards, but you'll also feel a little better about humanity.

My Beloved Brontosaurus, Brian Switek -  I would guess that anyone reading my websites already owns a copy of this book (or perhaps even two: one for yourself and one to pass around to friends so they can finally be on the same page as us when it comes to dinosaurs), so you already know how awesome it is and that it's well worth purchasing the hardcover edition for the terrific artwork.

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Sketch of the Day! Man, Pokefusion is way too much fun to play with.

Reasons why you need Katrina Van Grouw's _The Unfeathered Bird_

It Fills a Massive, Obvious Gap in Your Animal Anatomy Library - Remember way, way back in 2009 when I reviewed Eliot Goldfinger's massive tome Animal Anatomy for Artists?  And how I was so stunned and disappointed that, for all the gorgeous and rigorously accurate studies of a wide variety of mammals, he only illustrated the internal structure of one bird?  And it was a domestic chicken?  If you were just as put off by that, The Unfeathered Bird is for you.

It Makes That One Chicken Look Embarrassing - Really embarrassing.  Van Grouw has rendered staggeringly beautiful studies of at least one species of every major clade of extant theropod you can imagine and a not-insignificant number of clades you can't, plus a couple of extinct species.  She even goes so far as to illustrate the often insane extremes of domestic ducks, chickens, and pigeons.

It's a Comparative Anatomy Book in the Truest Sense - Van Grouw has grouped different unrelated clades of birds via a long-antiquated system that rather arbitrarily bunched similar-looking birds (ie, all long-legged, long-necked birds) together regardless of actual relationships.  The arrangement of the book, I will admit, confused me at first, but it facilitates comparison between species adapted to similar lifestyles.  She does clarify, as much as she can, who is actually related to who in the body text. 

Man, You Think You Know Birds... - There are some crazy reveals in this book.  Whooping Cranes have a windpipe that loops around inside the keel of their breastbone, creating essentially a live French horn.  Screamers posses vicious, claw-like spikes on their wrists.  Toucan nostrils face backwards.  Swifts have xygodactyl feet, quite contrary to every other illustration.  And, of course, necks lie.

It's Just Gorgeous - Seriously.  I can't imagine the work involved in preparing a book of this scope.  The fact that it's a fabulous work of art is icing on the cake.


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Sketch of the Day! Had some visitors earlier this month.

Thoughts on Recently Experienced Media

Other than the Disney Sequels, obviously.

The Animator's Survival Kit, by Richard Williams - I was looking forward to reading this massive tome by the great Richard Williams.  It's very informative, filled with excellent artwork, and a good reference -- if you do not already have one that covers the same subjects.  Because unfortunately, for me, this book didn't really contain any information that was new to me (my copies of Preston Blair's instructional books for Walter Foster have long ago been loved to death.  Don't worry, I have the very nice omnibus edition as well.)  Williams also does not talk much about his experiences in the animation world, and because he has had one of the most interesting careers imaginable as an animation artist, it was a huge letdown to find the book nearly half-filled with walk-cycles instead.

Color and Light, by James Gurney - Some time ago, on his excellent blog, James Gurney wrote a long and extensive series of posts about color theory, lighting effects, and different painting media and their lightfastness and whether "Cadmium Red", for example, will be exactly the same no matter what paint brand you buy.  All of that information, ALL of it and plenty more, is collected in this book.  It is definitely worth a read for all artists, but is probably especially useful for painters.  For the rest of us, at least it is a very nice compilation of Gurney's beautiful art.

Chanticleer and the Fox, illustrated by Marc Davis - Speaking of beautiful art, this picture book is illustrated with the wonderful concept art Marc Davis created for the shelved Disney film based off the tales of Reynard the Fox and Chanticleer the Rooster.  The character designs are wonderful, even if the story is a little mediocre.  As it happens, this little book is more informative and interesting than some of the longer collections of never-produced Disney animation.  Speaking of...

Disney Lost and Found, by Charles Solomon - Full disclosure: I read this a while ago and I don't even remember if I reviewed it here.  It has, as you might expect, a lot of art in it.  It also has very little explanation as to what you are looking at.  Like, one of the particularly strange paintings in the first third of the book will simply have subtext that says, "This was going to be a scene in 'Rescuers Down Under'."  The two chapters that contain art from two features that were never made have *just* a bit more information.  "My Peoples" probably would have been charming, but "Wild Life" would have been fascinating.  Funny thing is, there's more information about one of the lost films in this incredible, and very sad, blog post then there is in the book.

"The Butterfly Ball" -  Three years ago(!?!) I wrote a post about a strange animated music video that turned out to be part of a larger concert film.  That film quickly went into my Netflix "saved" queue and now it's finally here and I have watched it. 
Welp. 
Turns out "Love is All" may be the ultimate case of "Context will not help you in any way at all, sorry."  That animated video is actually the least strange part of the show.  I'm at a loss to describe the concert film, but there's a part of me who wants to rent it again next time I have a party and have it running in the background, just to see how long it takes for guests to wonder WTF they are looking at.

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Sketch of the Day!

Hey, finally a current sketch! Here is my incredibly appropriate contribution to a stunningly significant recent historical event:

In Which Trish Reads _Vegemorphs_ So Adam And Ifi Don't Have To

So, here is a thing that exists:

This thing that exists is the creatively named parody, Vegemorphs, written by Leif E. Green (son of a...) and published in 1998 by Troll Communications. And it is assuredly and objectively the SECOND-strangest book I have read that attempted to cash-in on the Animorphs series.

Right off the bat we get a pretty dead-on parody of the famous Animorphs opening, "I can't tell you my first name - or my last name either. And I can't tell you where I live. But I might be lying in your refrigerator's vegetable bin or in the produce section of your local supermarket right now." This is Kale Kyle the leader guy. Rounding out the rest of the cast are Carrot Cary the wacky smart guy, Olive Olivia the... however you'd categorize Cassie I guess, Tomato Tommy and Radish Randi the other two (literally, they're here so that there can be five humans in the cast), and the evil Jerkks. It's that kind of parody.

By the way, it's 1998 and Kale and company "like to wear funky clothes, listen to alternative music, and do crazy things." They also hang out with old ladies in a Bingo parlor. Yup.

It's on the way home from playing Bingo that the gang runs into a giant flying mushroom that is covering a farmer's field with fungal spores. Shortly afterwards, they meet Prince Brassica, the talking broccoli and the wise and brave ruler of the Vegetable Kingdom. The Prince informs the kids that certain otherwise ordinary plants are as intelligent as humans but are unable to speak to normal humans. They are extremely rare because they live most of their lives underground and the few who venture to the surface risk getting eaten. They are also at war with the Jerkks, evil fungi who want to infect everything alive on every planet they land upon, and they are losing badly.

But Prince Brassica has a new plan. He will use his magical salad dressing to give his new human friends the ability to transform into giant talking vegetable-people who will better be able to fight the space-fungi.

I promise you, I am stone-cold sober right now. (At the time of writing, I mean.)The kids agree to all this because I guess being a talking vegetable is at least more exciting than playing Bingo. It's worth quoting Kyle's description of Newman's Own Escafil: "I felt tart and tangy, crisp and cool, hot and spicy, crunchy and mellow - all at once... It was like I had been all mixed up - and now everything was mixed right. I had been tossed."

Kyle's salad... has been tossed...

AAAAaaaaanyway. So for those of you wondering if turning into a talking vegetable is the worst kind of Blessed With Suck, it... well, it isn't the WORST kind, but it's close. You can smell a vegetable and then transform into a vegetable-person, but you can also make your clothing invisible, turn into a normal vegetable, shoot a magic beam of vitamins and minerals at people, and transform other people into talking vegetables because...??? If you are wondering, we're not told why you can turn into a tomato or an eggplant if the magic supposedly only works on vegetables. Oh, and of course there is a time limit. Stay a vegetable past the "recommended cooking time" and you're stuck like that. Wee. (For the record, a character does ask whether that means "steamed, stir-fried, boiled, or microwaved" before getting his question shot down.)

Enter the villain: his name is Fun Gus. Of course it is. And he is a Rubrum fungus that can turn into a giant vegetable. And he dresses like Urkle. And he drinks celery juice made from his enemies. And he holds evil secret meetings called the Snorings, where people go to eat mushroom soup and be infected by fungi in their sleep. And he stinks. In fact, he and his followers' favorite battle tactic is to swarm all over their opponents and make them sick.

The kids escape the battle and run home. And in the morning Kyle wakes up to find that Cary has somehow entered his room and has turned into a carrot-person. Cary then turns into a normal carrot and talks about how awesome being a carrot is and how he actually wouldn't mind being a carrot forever and could Kyle hop downstairs and get some salad dressing and pour it all over Cary's carrot body and oh God what? WHAT? WHAT?!?

Thankfully Kyle's mean older brother arrives before things get wicked awkward and since he is wearing tacky clothes and is suddenly obsessed with animation (something I have to point out because I am me) he has obviously been infected by the (sigh) Jerkks. Specifically, the dreaded Streptococcus or Strep Throat bacteria. One of (*sigh*) Fun Gus' other favorite tactics is to turn fungi and bacteria which are normally harmless, like Trichophyton, evil and super-virulent. I was previously unaware that the fungus that causes Athlete's Foot is more often than not mostly harmless. This is a hell of a context in which to learn that.

So the gang gets together and practices turning into vegetables and turning other people into vegetables and endive right into stalking bad guys to get right to the root of why they can't leaf the Vegetable Kingdom alone peas kohlrabi nasturtium and - sweet mother of Gregor Mendel there are so many vegetable puns. Like, an entire Xanth novel's worth of awful puns in a little over a hundred pages.

Anyway the gang causes some chaos in the local salad bar where they meet with Prince Brassica again and he explains their new plan. They will invade the next Snoring as vegetables with anti-fungal cream smeared all over themselves, hijack a delivery truck full of anti-fungal cream, and then zap everyone with their vitamin and mineral beams.

I just wrote that, right? I just actually wrote that.

Well, the battle goes surprisingly smoothly, and is even helped along via Deus ex Machina, a big thunderstorm that washes away all the evil fungus. Fun Gus goes underground, presumably shaking his fist like an 80's cartoon villain, and the Vegetable Kingdom warriors are at the ready whenever he returns in the sequel that will never happen. The downside is that Cary is now a carrot permanently, but he's now living among the Vegetable Kingdom warriors and is happier than he has ever been.

Repeat: CARY IS HAPPIER ABOUT BEING A F***ING CARROT THAN TOBIAS EVER WAS BEING A HAWK WHICH, just as a reminder, IS NOT THE GODDAMN ROOT OF A GODDAMN PLANT AND CAN F***ING FLY!!! Wow.

So there you have it, I guess. For the curious, a version of the book with a different, spooky cover and credits is available at Amazon. It's worth visiting the page for the comments alone.

Now, since I think I am spent, who wants to tackle these things or these things?
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Sketch of the Day

Here is a squirrel:

Thoughts on Recently Experienced Media!

Brief Reviews of Random Stuff!

Strathmore Windpower Watercolor Pad - Fantastic little Sketchbook. It's very short (only fifteen pages), but the small size is perfect for travel, and at just under three dollars at Dick Blick's, it can't be beat. Plays well with watercolors, pencils, and inks.

"9" - So this guy, animator Shane Acker, makes a really awesome short film that gets the attention of Tim Burton, who takes Shane under his sketchy, striped wing fresh out of art school to make his first feature-length film. So this film has a pretty awesome story behind it. The short film in question is fantastic and it is worth renting the DVD just to watch it. The sad thing is, the feature adaptation of the short is not remotely as interesting. The world and the creatures that inhabit it is cool, but the story is incredibly dull, confusing, and obvious and populated with bland, interchangeable characters. On top of that, and this is the mildest of spoilers, you may well rename the film, "Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: the Movie!"
Speaking of Tim Burton...

"Alice in Wonderland" - Um... it didn't suck as much as I thought it would, I guess.I wish there was more I could say here. I really do. I can't recommend this film, but I can't hate on it too hard either. Tell you what, it's better than "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". But if I'm going to watch a "takeoff of a beloved fantasy children's book where the hero returns to the magical land and saves it from a new evil" movie, I'm going for "Return to OZ". At least that one's weird as hell.

"Voyage of the Unicorn" - Ever run into an adaptation of a book you liked as a kid that's SO different from what you liked in the book, yet gets so much stuff right, that it just ends up being frustrating? Yeah. (And yes, this is apparently based off Voyage of the Basset; I guess unicorns are a bigger draw than historical puns.)

"127 Hours" - Stop being such a sissy and watch it already.
OK, seriously, this movie is very good and is currently running neck-and-neck with "Scott Pilgrim" as my favorite of the past year. (No, I'm not sure exactly why these films either.) My gore-disliking aunt and mom are both crazy about it. You will believe a half-finished bottle of orange-flavored Gatorade that has been sitting in the back of a car in the Utah heat and cold for days and days will look appealing.

"Black Swan" - I told you feathered dinosaurs were scary! But you didn't believe me! WHY didn't you believe me?!?
(OK, seriously. Not among my favorite movies this year, but very good.)

"Tales From Earthsea" - I know a little bit about the rather sad story behind this particular Studio Ghibli film although the special features skip over it entirely. The film itself is... decent. It isn't fantastic, but that's only because Goro's father has set the bar so damn high. Also, the Earthsea books (which I have a rather odd relationship with; maybe I'll tell that story later) are turned into a rather ordinary stereotypical fantasy/Anime plot. There are some neat moments towards the end, like an effectively monstrous bad guy. 

The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs, copyright 2010 written and illustrated by Gregory S. Paul and published by Princeton University Press - It is, I will state again, very sad to see a favorite artist of mine who influenced me so greatly suddenly turn into such a... yeah, I'm sticking with douche. (At least a douche is clean; younger readers, it means "shower" in French.) But let's ignore the deluge of controversy Greg Paul has stirred up in the past few months, because I am also sticking with my initial Clint Mansel-scored animated-in-a-rush-past-Midnight reaction. You need this book in your library. For an animal anatomy reference (yeah, I went there), it is indispensable.
And it is also... not quite as good as Predatory Dinosaur of the World. It doesn't have as many anatomical studies, has far, far fewer life restorations, and seems to have fewer skeletal studies (which is especially odd, as this book supposedly covers more species). And, yes, Paul gets... eh... just a little lump-happy. (In that people who misunderstand the Triceratops/Torosaurus thing would bleed out of their eyes reading this book.) That said, I read the whole shebang, cover-to-cover. There aren't many giant textbooks I can say that about.

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Art Of the Day!

I got a little hooked on watching this.

"This One's for the Weird Kids / the Weird Kids of the World" - Thoughts on "Where the Wild Things Are"

I really liked it. Hell, I wanted to give everyone in the movie a hug.

Mind you, I did part of my thesis on Maurice Sendak, so I kind of "get" him. And in saying that, I can see why some people wouldn't like this. It IS weird. It looks -and, more importantly, it feels- absolutely like a Maurice Sendak illustration in motion. More to the point, and this might be what turned so many people off this movie, it doesn't play by the unspoken rules of what a kid's movie is "supposed" to be these days.

The characters really get hurt and angry and sad. The little boy acts like an actual little boy and throws tantrums when his sister ignores him, bawls openly when his face is accidentally planted in the snow (there are few things worse), and plays under his mom's desk and tells her strange kid-logic stories off the top of his head. He does not act like a snarky miniature adult. He grows and changes but there's no inevitable "and then we all learned a lesson" moment.

It puts a lot of naked emotion on the screen and lets you deal with it on your own. There's no hand-holding and no babysitting. "Where the Wild Things Are" actually reminds me less of any current movie made for children and more of the time, not too long ago, when children's entertainment could be really weird and offbeat, and could haunt you with questions and ideas and images you suspected, as a child, that even mom and dad couldn't answer or explain for you.

Kids need more movies like this. I watched "Don't You Forget About Me", the documentary about John Hughes and his films, shortly after I watched this and the thing that hit me was something that kept coming up with all the teenagers interviewed for the film: they could not relate in any way at all to what modern-day Hollywood thinks young people are like. The only characters that reminded them of themselves were the ones in Hughes' twenty-something year old movies. Hughes had a knack for writing young people who thought and felt the way adults usually like to pretend they don't really act and feel. That's a rare gift, but I'd say Spike Jones inherits it here.

And, yes, it is a children's film. One that had my entire family enthralled. I say do what our parents did in the '80s: sit your kids in front of it and leave them be. We made out okay, right?

It is freakin' miraculous that this movie exists in the form it does. I haven't even mentioned that it's also absolutely gorgeous and is the one movie out of the many many films I've seen recently that really stuck with me (well, except for the two I'll review over the rest of this week). I could go on, but a lot of my feelings are echoed here.

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Sketch of the Day!

Here's a Gryphon:

Iguanodons like KISS. A lot. Let's read _Dinosaurs Disovered!_

(NOTE: I apologize for the crappy photos throughout this post. I would have used my scanner but this book is very old.)

As mentioned in an earlier post, I found something for four dollars at Amazon.com that I had to buy immediately:



John Gilbert's Dinosaurs Discovered, with illustrations by Guy Michel, was the only nonfiction dinosaur book I owned as a child growing up. It was published in America (translated from the French) in 1979. I have no idea why or how I acquired this book, and I never even read any of the text (hell, this was the first time I ever read it at all). But the illustrations in this book are lodged deeply in my subconscious... even though science has marched on and left this artwork in the dust.
 
Hey, I may have gotten some strange comments (but also a Crowning Moment of Awesome) on this drawing, but wait until you see some of the old depictions of dinosaurs in this book. Heck, just look at the cover scene above. No wonder Greg Paul rocked my world when I found his art.
So, let's take a look at our cast of characters:



Hoo boy. Dig that Velociraptor in the upper-left. And get used to seeing Iguanodon with a giant scary tongue, you'll be seeing it a lot:



Iguanodon figures prominently in this book because the focus is not about the lives of dinosaurs as it is about the history of paleontology. That may go a ways to explaining why some of the information about the dinosaurs themselves tends to be... strange. Apparently, there was a theory -now faded into obscurity- that Iguanodons had long prehensile tongues like giraffes. There's a handwave given that one particular paleontologist looked at the lower jaw bone and decided that they indicated a long tongue. The text says that this has since been debunked... yet every Iguanodon in the book is doing their Gene Simmons impression. Huh. You tend to see text-to-illustration discrepancies a lot in older dinosaur books, and it's most often because so many of them relied on illustrations recycled from other texts.
Anyway, here's a montage of animals dying in horrifying ways:



The famous Bernissart Iguanodons fall to their doom and into history.



No offense to that Hadrosaur, but for my money this is the unintentionally funniest painting in the book. It's the wonky anatomy (what are his arms doing?) and the "Aw, damn" look in his eye. Also, the hilarity of an animal who is depicted as an aquatic creature (we'll get to that) wandering onto land... to get eaten by an aquatic animal.
It's also pretty graphic and horrifying, so who knows why my parents let me read this as a six-year-old.



Actually, this one's pretty hilarious in it's own right. This is as good a time to point out that the Real is Brown trope affected paleoart like nothing else ever.
It's hard to see here, but the Tyrannosaur's face is just a mass of warts for some damn reason. It may have been an attempt to illustrate what we now know as Tyrannosaurs' facial crests. It's one of the strangest interpretations of a dinosaurs' appearance in the book.
But here's the weirdest:



When was the last time you ever saw a stegosaurus drawn like this? Weirdly, there are more conventional looking stegosaurs in the book too. It's like they were hedging their bets that at least one of the spikey-thingy configurations would be accurate. It confused the heck out of me as a little kid, though, especially since there was no explanation for the two different interpretations.
So about those aquatic hadrosaurs:



This was the default illustration for any and all hadrosaurs for the better part of my childhood. And as far as anyone knows the reason -the one and only reason- why hadrosaurs were depicted as aquatic creatures is all in the beak. It looks like a duckbill, so they *must* have swam around in the water all day like ducks... right?
Speaking of swimming...



I don't even know what I could add to this. This might just be the single strangest image in the whole book.

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Sketch of the day!
I glossed over how the book treats theropods, so here's my take on a Ceratosaurus who appears in the book. D'awwwww...



EDIT: By a happy coincidence, the wonderful Tetrapod Zoology blog has referenced Dinosaurs Discovered as well. Darren points out a particularly weird non-dinosaur reconstruction in the book I never even noticed (as you've seen, there's a ton of trippy stuff in the book).

Books About The Disney Movies that Could Have Been

Well, first of all, holy mythology episode, Batman!

As we all know, it takes a very, very long time to make an animated feature film. With that in mind, it isn't all that surprising that many of the films in the Disney Animated Canon were significantly different during the various stages of their production. Other Disney movies never even saw the light of day. Recently, I read (but did not remember to take pictures of) two very different books about this very subject. Both of them were interesting reads, but varied a great deal in content.

Mouse Under Glass by David Koenig, 1997 - Billed as the hidden stories behind Disney movies and theme parks, this is a very quick read. I polished most of it off while waiting in this line:

I don't think I mentioned this before, but there was a very impressive line for Boston Comicon. That's new...
There are no Disney illustrations in this book; the few illustrations are from the literary source materials for the movies. Each chapter covers a different movie in the Canon. A lot of the stories are fairly well-known (and you can find many of them here). There are some cool stories about the controversies over certain Disney movies, but nothing particularly shocking (and you've already read about most of them at Snopes or the aforementioned TV Tropes.) What's most puzzling about this book are it's omissions. "The Black Cauldron" gets a lot of mentions - but, of all movies, it's one of the few features that doesn't get it's own chapter! It's a very strange oversight among several. Also, I think I'm going to be taking some of the trivia in this book with a grain of salt the size of my head, thanks to things like this. Spot the surprisingly common mistake, kids:



The Disney That Never Was by Charles Solomon, 1995 - Actually, I read this book before I read Mouse Under Glass, which turned out to be a mistake as this book put the other one to shame. There are TONS of artwork, salvaged from the Disney Vault and shown to us unwashed fans for the first time. Most of the never-finished films are actually shorts, and altogether not all that interesting. However, there is also a great deal of information about unfinished full-length films like "Chanticleer", "Gremlins", the original "The Little Mermaid" and the "Hans Christian Anderson" anthology film, and all the stalled "Fantasia" sequels.
It should be noted that both of these books made me appreciate "Fantasia" much more. Walt Disney was essentially the James Cameron of his day, making a movie with technology that he had to invent as he went along. Some of his plans for the first "Fantasia" were almost insane. "Odorama" (scents -including real gunpowder- filtered into the theater during key scenes) before there was a word for it. Three screens stitched together for a sort-of Cinerama effect (you can sort of get what Disney was going for by watching the very nice "Impressions De France" film in EPCOT.) And a sort of primitive version of the infamous (and failed) "hologram" skeleton idea kicked around during the production of "Black Cauldron", where the magic brooms in "Sorcerer's Apprentice" would march along the walls of the theater. The whole point of "Fantasia", even as it is today without any of the aforementioned effects, was essentially Disney and his animators getting to say, "Look at what we can do!" Therefore, the many planned periodic "Fantasia" movies (of which we got... one) would have been the animators saying, "Look at what we can do NOW!"
The lack of periodic "Fantasias" may be the single most haunting Disney could-have-beens of all. Think about it. They could have altered the history of American animation!
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Phylo (the game formally known as Phylomon) got a mention on GeekDad last week! My little House Sparrow was picked as one of the accompanying illustrations! More exposure, yaaaaaay!!!

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Dammit, Blue Sky, I thought you were different! :(

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Sketch of the Day!
I have to counter the Worst Thing I Have Drawn Recently (see the previous post) with the BEST Thing I Have Drawn Recently. As always, click to see the big version:

Highlights from the Bo-Com-Con Pile

I have just read everything in this pile:



Let's just dive right in and I'll share my thoughts. Click the picture to access the large size, as usual. Starting in the lower-left corner and spiraling clockwise...

Sara Richard's stickers and Sketchbook. The fishing kitty now proudly resides on the protective case thingie on my MacBook. I never really mastered ink and brush, so I am in awe of Sara's beautiful line art. That, and the sheer amount of art she's produced.

A Schedule of Upcoming Guests/Topics on Sci-Fi Saturday Night. Someday, I will do a post about all the podcasts that have helped me keep sane while Photoshopping. "SFSN" is a semi-local 'cast and I have nothing at all bad to say about them because they love my rabbit illustrations.

Inbound 4: A Comic Book History of Boston. An anthology created by the Boston Comics Roundtable, and a fascinating read to boot. The old Mug-and-Muffin coffee shop has been immortalized for all time.The Tick Comicon Extravaganza. I am not going to get too crazy here. It is a comic about comic book conventions, and it stars Quincy's own superhero.

Fat Cat Funnies' Distracula. Speaking of Quincy, it turns out Fat Cat Funnies is based here. A local publisher! A wikkid local publisher, if you will! Awesome.

(Barely visible) Mouse Under Glass by David Koenig. Actually, this is the book I brought with me to read on the T. It's pretty interesting and I will review it and another "secrets of Disney" book I finished earlier soon.

"After Watchmen, What's Next? Brad Meltzer's Identity Crisis!" That's how I'm reading the title anyway. There were similar abridged comics like this at the autumn Boston Comicon. The best of them had excerpts from all of DC's comics that could remotely be considered dark and/or edgy. At least with this one, I got to learn for myself what everyone else already knew about the Identity Crisis storyline.
Spoilers: Imagine sitting down to watch "The Thin Man", and suddenly in the first act, the film jump-cuts to the ending of "Seven". The actual "not so much sad as tear-out-your-heart-and-stomp-on-it" ending to "Seven". I'd like to be exaggerating right now.

"Penny Arcade" the books! "Trish why in the world would you buy collections of a comic you can read for free online?" Well, because there's something about a book. I always liked comic strip compilations (I will admit I was never really all that into "Calvin and Hobbes" until I found the first collection.) Mainly, it's because the sheer size of the "PA" archive intimidates me. Plus, the writer's comments on the strips are often hilarious. Glad to know I'm not the only person who looks through their old art and sometimes goes, "Oh dear Lord... tell me I didn't really draw THAT..."
(Cue the kind of music you hear in movies when Foreshadowing happens...)

The Boston Independent Film Festival schedule. While searching for their website, I learned that Boston suddenly has (at least) two film fests! As someone who enjoys nice things, I should try going to both. This festival starts next week, and some of the films sound fascinating. Wish me luck in convincing other people to go.

Various random business cards! I got to trade a lot of cards with people. Urchin Punch had a lot of neat stuff at their table, but sadly there does not seem to be much at their website yet. "Silver Circle" is an independent CGI animated science fiction film with kind of a cool origin story. I may have to dedicate an entire post to it later. The Angry Penguin is a little strange, but how could I resist that sticker? And it should surprise nobody that New England has it's own branch of the Ghostbusters and a Storm Trooper Garrison.

Donald Duck Free Comic Book Day abridged comic. I was intrigued by this for two reasons: 1) Free Comic Book day is in May. 2) This is a Halloween-themed story. It was too weird to leave.

And finally, my Pokewalker, which (it's hard to see) racked up about 51,000 steps... and I still don't have a gimmicky Surfing or Flying Pikachu! This makes me feel angry!

Ah, anyway. Overall, a great haul and a great time.

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At the Realm, there is a review of a strange thing I got at Disney World. If you stop and think about it, the Harry Potter series, much like "Star Wars" and "Avatar" (already!), has a lot to answer for.

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Sketch of the Day!
How about a completely random page?


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Post #200! Yay!!!

Quick book review: Eric Goldberg's _Character Animation Crash Course_

Well, this certainly wasn't what I was expecting but it was still a pretty interesting read.
I'm not sure if the "Crash Course" in the title is accurate though. Goldberg assumes you have *quite* a lot of prior knowledge. You know who Chuck Jones is, right? Well good because if you didn't I'd have to banish you from my sight. But do you know who Ken Harris and Gerry Chiniquy are? Because the author kinda assumes you do. You also better know how an exposure sheet works, otherwise this book is going to be very technical-looking for you.
And the book overall is technical almost to a fault. There's very little art in the book itself, although the art that is included is very good. I still have a hard time recommending this over, say, Preston Blair's classic Animation books.
"But Trish," you're thinking, "doesn't Goldberg's book come with a CD-ROM? What did you think of that?"
I have mixed feelings about books that include CD-ROMs. One of them is usually, "get with the times, dudes and dudettes; last time CD-ROMs were cool was that one facepalm-worthy line in 'Jurassic Park'." What I mean is that including a CD-ROM in with your book often feels too gimmicky; why isn't it in the book itself if it's worthy information?
But Goldberg's CD-ROM broke down my barrier here, because he uses it to demonstrate something important about the art in his book: it has to be seen in motion. Many pieces of animation from the book are made into Flash files which you can either watch at normal speed or frame by frame. It almost makes me wish he had produced an instructional DVD instead of a book. If anything, it would have given him the opportunity to give the reader/viewer more information, more film clips, and the whole thing would have been a lot less expensive (I feel a little buyer's remorse-by-proxy as this was a Christmas present.)
My verdict: borrow this from the library as it is an interesting read for sure.
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Sketchatheday! I have made more ACEOs for you!

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Bonus/Addendum: My already-"Jossed" crazy theory! Let me show you it!