I have a very special post I'm saving for Friday about something specific at the Museum of Science, so this post will be an overview of other random cool/weird/ect. things I saw during my last visit there. First off, I am so very happy to see that they still do this:
The Museum underwent a major refurbishment maybe ten years ago. While I have a lot of nostalgia for the place in the 80's, I'll admit it has never looked better. The crown jewel of the new MOS is the first-floor exhibit, Natural Mysteries:
When I was a teen, MOS had an awesome temporary exhibit called, "What's in Our Attic?" They brought down a bunch of weird things they'd collected over the years, but which weren't on display. Natural Mysteries has nearly all of the items from "Attic" on permanent display. There is an overwhelming amount of cool stuff to look through in displays, in drawers, and even hanging from the ceiling. On top of that, the focus of the exhibit is on the scientific method, classification, and curiosity. In other words, the kids visiting are invited to be scientists.
The Museum appeared to have gone through a refurbishment since the last time I visited about a year ago. This Icthyosaur has always been on the wall, but the plaque and paint is brand new. There are still a few remnants of 70's-ness to be found, however:
I have no idea how old this display is. Still really cool.
The Museum of Science is also an accredited zoo, and live animals are having more and more of a presence. I didn't visit the excellent Butterfly Garden this time, but I did attend a live animal presentation. Opossums! Fluffy little owls!
I'm going to arbitrarily end with this amusing sign, from another special exhibit that was running at the time (Edit - yes, it makes sense in context.):
I know next to nothing about early mammals. There, I was honest. I can lecture you into oblivion when it comes to the natural history of birds (thank you, Gregory S. Paul and your beautifully illustrated doorstopper), but when it comes to our furry little titty-sucking (record-scratch sound effect)
Concerned Parent: "OH MY GOD SHE DIDN'T JUST SAY THAT CHILDREN COVER YOUR EYES WAAAARRRGAAAARBLLLLZ!!!!!"
Yes I did just say that. Because we are going to be talking about mammals. And I know this is going to blow your mind if you are the kind of person who thinks the split-second sight of a breast is going to corrupt your children (even after they spent the better portion of their babyhood attached to one), but the one defining characteristic of mammals, the one thing that separates us from all other animals, it isn't the hair, it isn't the live-bearing of our young, it is the mammary glands. Deal with it.
Aaaaa-nyway, when it comes to our furry, titty-sucking forebears, I am totally clueless. This is not entirely for lack of trying: There are hardly any good books at all about "proto-mammals" (which I know is an old term, but a lot of people grew up with seeing it when this subject was ever brought up, so I'm only using it so more people will know WTF I'm talking about). Most people have only ever heard of Dimetrodon and the majority of them think that thing is a dinosaur anyway, because if your skeleton is on display at Harvard Museum of Natural History, you're a dinosaur, right? (No, really. I have overheard as much.)
Enter our old friend John C. McLoughlin, he of the unique and often very nice pen and ink illustrations and, err, equally unique ideas about the anatomy and behavior of prehistoric creatures. Published in 1980 by Viking, in the wake of the far, far better-known The Archosauria, The Synapsida is an attempt to tell the complete story of mammals. Turns out it's a very interesting story, though unfortunately I am unable to call B.S. or not on some of McLoughlin's claims (though it turns out that the "Walking With Whatever" writers weren't the first to come up with venomous synapsids).
But what we're really here for are the illustrations. And McLoughlin's draftsmanship is phenomenal, even when the animals he is drawing aren't the prettiest things:
Venyucovia here might give us a hint as to why you don't see scads of kid's books, stuffed animals, big Hollywood movies, and cartoons of questionable educational content about Synapsids. By now, we know how to make dinosaurs "cute", what the heck do you do with this thing?
Undaunted, McLoughlin introduces us to all the strange creatures at the base of our family tree. I mean it when I say ALL of them. His history of mammals starts with early Chordates and doesn't stop until we hit humans. And humans, by the way, are bastards.
Really, that's the strangest thing in the book. McLoughlin wears his politics right on his sleeve, and seems almost ashamed that the majestic beasts he chronicles in the book gave rise to us. Here's an example of how jarring this can get:
Subtlety is not one of McLoughlin's strong suites. There's another odd moment where he describes the fascinating story of the Pelycosaur, Cotylorhynchus, the world's first very large herbivorous four-legged animal. It was able to survive in a colder climate than any of the animals that could have preyed on it. The animal in question is a big, monstrously fat critter with a disproportionately tiny head and nothing at all to worry about. McLoughlin invites America to look at the horrors of our inevitably morbidly obese future when viewing his illustration of the unsuspecting beast.
Um... so, Dimetrodon!
Aww, look how ugly-cute he is! Here with Edaphosaurus who, it turns out, isn't a close relative at all (though they are both Pelycosaurs)! See, I never knew that because my childhood books couldn't be bothered to spend more than two pages on these guys.
Speaking of ugly-cute, here is a confusingly-named Dromosaur (not to be confused with those more famous guys with the fluffy feathers and the large talons). McLoughlin informs us that this little fellow has been discovered preserved in a sleeping position with his tail wrapped around his body. Given that McLoughlin was one of the first paleoartists to illustrate theropods with feathers, I'm honestly surprised he didn't give this guy a coat of fur.
Fact is, fur doesn't appear at all until late in the book. Even then, all we get are a few whiskers at first:
Again, I don't know very much about these animals. I have no idea if there have been any skin impressions found from them. I can't begin to guess where hair would have first appeared on mammal-like creatures in the fossil record. It seems this Thrinaxodon would be a good candidate for being furry, so it's very strange to see McLoughlin restore him naked.
Or... maybe that's just how McLoughlin renders fur; through stippling? Take a look at this... animal... we'll call him Generic Cenozoic Critter:
Yeah.
All in all, The Synapsida is not the strange ride that is The Archosauria, but it is definitely a worthwhile read. You will, at the very least, learn about some very fascinating animals you may have otherwise never heard of.
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Feederwatch Friday! I forgot to do this last week, but I've been sick:
Rock Pigeon 1
Black-capped Chickadee 3
Tufted Titmouse 2
Red-breasted Nuthatch 1
White-breasted Nuthatch 2
Northern Cardinal 2
House Sparrow 25
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Festive Thing of the Day!
I sat down at the computer after setting up the TREE, covered in sap and bruises and scratches, when what to my wandering eye should appear but a Bad Santa Gallery! Numbers 7, 24, and 25 are my favorites. (Some NSFW ads.)
30 Photos Of Children Terrified Of Santa
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Sketch of the Day!
Here are doodles I drew while watching the Quincy Christmas Parade. And being violently sick (my sinuses are still painfully dry, but I am otherwise feeling much better).
I was pretty sick this weekend, and my back still hurt a little, but I managed to have one heck of a Halloween. This post will mostly be me struggling to remember what happened.
We went to a party in Salem Saturday night. There are no words for how crazy-awesome this experience was. Going to Salem around Halloween by itself is memorable; going to this event while on cold medicine is mind-blowing.
I don't know if I'd approach the general Salem/Peabody area around this time of year ever again. That said, I am happy and thankful for the opportunity this year, because I can now say that I've experienced a Salem Halloween, despite my fear of crowds and being an utter horror sissypants. Every New England person should do this once.
Saw some pretty amazing costumes. Our favorites included a running Forrest Gump, a couple of Waldoes, Wesley from "The Princess Bride", Darkness from "Legend", some awesome dragons, a startlingly accurate Michael Jackson, the witches from "Hocus Pocus", and a refreshing shortage of Snookies. There were a couple of Neytiris whose costumes were better than the official costumes, a bunch of very good looking pirates and princesses, some terrific takes on Disney characters -- you know, it might be easier at this point to say that the friends of our friends who hosted the party are mostly theater people. I learned this year that theater people are good to know on Halloween.
I also learned some things regarding costumes (like Jack Skellington, I have a wealth of plans for *next* Halloween, a year early):
1) If you learn that you are attending a party in Salem, you must assume you will be parading through town. So if you learn this exactly seven hours before you will be attending said party and parading around the town, show your creativity the door and spring for a store-bought costume. Trust me when I say, it may be expensive but it's worth it. Go for something unusual if you must, but go store-bought.
2) If you ignore this advice, you will experience the joys and wonders of having to explain to everyone what you are, after spending those seven hours recycling an old sweatsuit into, say, a Robot Unicorn Attack costume.
So I think, in order to prepare for such a situation next year, I will try to hit up the sales today. I've noticed -and this is something that has been happening to me since college at least- the more effort I get to put into a costume, the (a) less likely I will get to show it off and/or (b) the more people will have no idea who/what I am AND/or (c) the more likely it is that I will be the only person who spent more than five minutes of effort on their costume. Now, thankfully, this didn't happen this year. Instead, I had the opposite problem that I also often suffer: great party, crappy and/or incomprehensible costume. (To be fair, the one time in college where I thought it would be genius to show up in the shabby, shedding, grass-stained retired version of my high school's mascot costume still wins.)
Yes, this is rambling. I don't call these posts holiday/convention hangovers for nothing.
So continuing the Halloween things I learned this year:
3) Couples costumes can backfire. Badly. This is directly proportionate to how easy it is to understand your costume if your mate isn't around. See the first Halloween episode of "South Park" for a demonstration.
4) Pandora (the customizable online radio thingie) can be a crapshoot. Add "Thriller" and she'll assume you want a Michael Jackson marathon. Add "Halloween" by the Misfits and you'll be assumed to want a punk mix. Add "Monster Mash" and... you know what, don't add "Monster Mash". Otherwise you will learn about all the lovely "Monster Mash" cash-ins. There is a reason why you didn't know about them.
5) You can just buy pumpkin seeds. I know. My mind is blown too.
6) Avoid glitter. Also, from an unrelated craft project that I worked on earlier, avoid feathers and doll hair. And any project that combines the two.
7) Having done a mini-marathon via Netflix instant watch, I need to do a retrospective "Invader Zim" appreciation post. Given my track record, you should expect it, say, around Easter.
8) Cats enjoy playing with unicorn tails.
I hope everyone had a safe and happy Halloween. Now, I think it's time to get behind my moody sewing machine...
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Sketch of the Day! Sketchy memories!
First off, something silly that me and Michele Witchipoo and George Burnett drew together. It came out of us making fun of romance comics from the fifties at the CAG table during a slow point in the convention. I love when different styles collide.
Mind you, I don't let other people draw in my Sketchbook lightly. Comicons are where I make the exception, especially when it turns out that your next-table neighbor inks Dr. McNinja.
OMG Kent Archer is drawing Yoshi in my Sketchbook!!!
I'm usually a little nervous about asking people to sign my Sketchbook, even though most artists are totally cool about it. It's more because I am afraid of acting like a crazy fangirl.
Anyway, Kent was very nice. If you are unfamiliar with Dr. McNinja, I highly recommend it. If you for some reason do not want to read about the adventures of the only physician in a long line of legendary Irish Ninjas whose office is in the middle of a haunted forest and whose secretary is a gorilla AND who -in just one such adventure- stumbled upon a conspiracy involving Ronald McDonald, MySpace, and a man whose incredible abdominal muscles have somehow transformed into a built-in jetpack, than what in the world DO you want?!?
Now, as I mentioned in part one, I didn't get to walk around and meet people until almost the last minute. The line to meet Tim Sale was almost out the door by then (which is probably for the best as I wouldn't have been able to not say anything about the "Heroes" writers' inability to resolve plot points), and I somehow missed Geof Darrow twice. And apparently Walt Simonson visited the CAG after-party minutes after I had to leave.
However, I did get to meet Tak Toyoshima, who not only writes "Secret Asian Man" but is also the art director for The Weekly Dig. And I had another "wait, I swear we met each other at UMass years ago" conversation with Craig Rousseau.
But what really blew me away was the fact that people wanted me to draw in THEIR Sketchbooks, to which my initial reaction was, 😳. But then...
Well, why not? New fans are new fans, right? Anyway, if I'd said, "no", that'd kill what little reputation I have.
Now, there fortunately weren't that many crazy things that happened at this convention, but one thing struck me as very strange: There were at least as many babies at the con as there were people dressed as Boba Fett. They ranged in age from just-able-to-walk to what can only be described as JUST-recently-arrived-in-this-world. As with Disney World or R-rated movies, I guess I can understand bringing a baby to Comicon IF and only if this is the ONE and ONLY TIME EVER FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE you'll be able to go and EVERY BABYSITTER IN THE CITY was busy.
I just set myself up for some very angry comments from parents. Oh well. Let me show you my swag!
Here's a small fraction of the most interesting free stuff I picked up. "After Watchmen" is a little strange, but it did give me a good list of books to look for (I am very happy to see that my local library has expanded it's graphic novel collection quite a bit; see below). The Spring edition of BCC will be in a larger building by the waterfront, and I can't wait. The Boston Comics Roundtable is way over in Harvard Square, but I may have to give them a visit some time as they sound like fun. I had donated three prints to the Sci-Fi Saturday Night show and it's likely they'll be the reward for one of their upcoming trivia contests. The Harry Potter exhibit at the Museum of Science... man, I don't know. I missed the "Star Wars" and Lord of the Rings exhibits, and... yeah.
Now, sadly, I did not purchase a single older comic book at the Convention. I did, however, support lesser-known artists. At left are some of the books put out by the Boston Comics Roundtable. Aya Rothwell's work is lovely. I obviously had to get a hard copy of Dr. McNinja. In the lower-left are the books produced by my CAG table-mates Mark Anderson and Michele Witchipoo. And in the upper-left is a recycled autumny Sketchbook that was too cute to leave.
I picked these up at the library. So even though I am currently exhausted and have a splitting headache and *still* have stuff to sort through and need to replenish my supply of promotional cards, I had a wonderful wonderful time. Oh, why can't every day be like Boston Comicon?
Tricia's Common Sense pipes up and answers, "Because although that sounds really wonderful and a lot of fun in theory, it would probably work out just as well as Christmas every day in all those stories where kids wish that it could be Christmas every day."
Ah. Good point. And at this age, I honestly think it would be nicer if every other Thursday was Arbor Day.
Now that I'm totally off-topic, how about some Comicon drawings? As always, click to see the originals and more of these:
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At the Realm of Madness, I am starting a series of Movies the (James Cameron) "Avatar" Trailer Reminded People Of, starting with "Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within".
Ugh, I forgot how much I dislike coming off Daylight Savings Time. As far as Halloween, Princesses were by far the most popular with a surprising number of Power Rangers and an uptick in the number of generic vampires. Which was awesome for me; I used my own Crazy Twilight Fan idea.
Now, finally, Comicon stories!
This was the third time ever I had attended the Boston Comic Book Convention, the second time I'd participated at a booth, and the first time I'd been there all weekend. It was a very long and exhausting weekend in general (it took a couple of days to sleep off the "Convention Lag"), but I had a lot of fun.
I met a lot of really awesome people and exchanged lots of postcards with other illustrators. illustration isn't a very social career choice, and artists are not particularly outgoing animals anyway. It's a big deal when the opportunity to get out and meet others of our kind comes up. Such opportunities are rare so anytime large numbers of artists get to talk face-to-face is fantastic.
I didn't get much of a chance to walk around and talk to people until the second day as I was busy promoting the Comicbook Artists Guild. I've run my own table at a convention once and the stress was almost not worth it. Being a CAG member means I can volunteer at their convention table with other members, which means that I can promote myself and get up and stretch my legs (something I took way too little advantage of as my knees are all too happy to remind me that I am no longer a very young person) and have plenty of people around to talk to instead of going stir-crazy. This is a pretty big deal.
Since most CAG New England meetings happen in Connecticut, I don't get to meet other members in person that often. It was great to finally meet face to face and make some new friends. I don't know any other artists in The World Outside the Internet, so it was downright refreshing to actually talk about the stupidity of the big comic publishers, the aggravating fact that you should be able to say "Hi, I'm a Furry artist" without normal people immediately assuming... that*, the awesome that is Bruce Campbell, movies that were potentially awesome until the executives got involved, and why "Space Jam" may be the single most evil thing ever done by a major studio. And, uh, art.
* - I love Watership Down and "The Secret of N.I.M.H." My art centers around animals and all of my characters are animals. I am NOT into the weird stuff.
A lot of people visited our table, even though we were in kind of a weird space (right between the men's room and the cafeteria). We gave applications to lots of potential new members, some of whom took good advantage of the "come as your favorite character and get in free" offer. Here's a gallery of some of my favorites:
Mario and Princess Daisy. We got into a long, long conversation about scary Twilight fangirls. Fortunately, Twilight fans seemed to be largely absent from this con.
I love it when more people remember that there were several Robins, and a few of them were female. I didn't even notice her awesome rings until she posed for us. The guy in the horrifying Scooby Doo costume just happened to be lurking in the background.
Black Cat, Elektra, and Wolverine were at the convention both days and while this was the only time they stopped to talk, we saw them quite a lot.
This guy's Marv costume was amazing. He talked to us about CAG for a good long time too.
And inevitably, there were lots and lots of Boba Fetts, though I saw a lot of Rorschach masks as well. I like how the kid implies that Boba got into his dad's business early.
There's more -much more- to say about BCC, but it'll have to wait until the next post. I actually ran out of promotional postcards about an hour before I left -- but that's definitely a good thing.
(Modified from a post originally posted at the old Realm of Mad-Ness on 7/16/02.)
Note: I'm not associated with any bands, musicians, or anything else mentioned here that I didn't invent myself, and the following isn't meant to be an endorsement or the opposite.
You're about to see some of the earliest graphic design work I have ever done. These advertisements originally ran on the front page of RadioBoston.com, a local online radio station from those wild early days of distributing free music over the internet.
I was in charge of creating banner ads to promote several different shows and bands. I never kept track of how many ads I made in all, but I know that this is just a small sample of the ads I liked best. In 2002.
You see, I basically had to rescue these from the RadioBoston servers in a hurry. I didn't really want to get into this (because, frankly, it depresses the hell out of me), but I won't forget the day we all learned that the radio station was being shut down. Those of you who went "oh no..." when I mentioned "those wild early days of distributing free music over the internet" can probably guess what happened. Long story short, our scrappy little online radio station was caught in the crossfire during the spectacular Napster debacle. More information can be found at the RadioBoston website itself, on a webpage that still makes me want to cry.
Ahem...
So here are all of the banner ads I was able to rescue. Remember, this was the first graphic design I had ever done, I was still getting used to Photoshop, and I was experimenting with animated gif files. All of these ads are gif files, and time tends not to be kind to gifs. I'm not going to post them in any particular order.
Comments are open, so if you were a fan of RadioBoston.com -- or one of the bands we played or a former "E.J." -- please share your memories.
In happier news, it looks like we finally can have nice things! (I am guardedly happy about this. I won't be leaping for joy until I actually have it in my hands.) Also, Disney has seen fit to release one of my favorite featurettes on DVD: "Donald in Mathmagic Land". This had previously been put on DVD as part of a limited edition collection, and it is a little pricey, but if you're either a fifth grade math teacher or a Disney Channel Brat who remembers having their mind blown by this short, it is definately worth a look. (Also, hilariously off-model cover art. It looks like poor Donald's head has become a perfect sphere and his right eye is about to collapse into a singularity.)
As of now, I have rescued everything worth rescuing from the old Geocities sites. Some of it will show up here; others are currently readable or scheduled at the New!Realm of Madness. Better yet, new reviews will be arriving at the Realm starting next week (and hopefully every other week at least until the end of the year.)
I may rescue some stuff from my old MySpace blog, but I'm definitely sticking with the Tuesday/Thursday schedule for the rest of the summer. If anyone told me I'd be nostalgic for the unseasonably cold rains back in June...
