Derik Badman's Journal

On my walk down to the bakery I passed two small dead snakes within 10 feet of each other on the sidewalk.

I dreamed last night I had viney plants growing on my body, it was like I had been ignoring them or not noticed them and suddenly they were all over my arm and running down my leg. I had to pull them off, like ripping vines off the side of a wall, and there was a worm that was trying to borrow into my arm that I grabbed onto and pulled off. Not a pleasant dream to say the least.

We watched the Veronica Mars movie last night. As I recalled, it was a lot of fanservice, and not great as a standalone movie. The high school reunion premise gave them a reason to bring back as many characters as they could, and was a decent enough excuse for the related mystery, but a lot of it seemed wasted on cameo appearances, and not much getting a sense of any of the mystery's important characters (beyond Veronica herself and Logan). That show always suffered from not knowing what to do with a lot of its cast and that continued into the movie. Even the b plot involving the new sheriff and Veronica's dad seemed out of place, as if it were a set-up for the next episode or an ongoing mystery rather than part of a single story.

On one of my book buying whims awhile back I picked up a cheap copy of The Freebooters by Barry Windsor-Smith. After reading some of his old Conan stories, I was curious about his rare, more recent work in comics (though even this is from awhile ago now). It's a beautifully illustrated sword and sorcery story about a has-been hero (Conan stand-in, clearly) and company in a pseudo-arabian setting. The setting gives BWS an excuse for a certain type of decorative visuals (lots of fabrics and colors) that would be absent in a more European medieval type setting. It's a decent enough story, but nothing that isn't mostly shopworn, and the only female characters in the whole thing are all these half-naked serving girls at the tavern the hero owns, who act as a kind of twittering background noise in various scenes. Only one of them really differentiates themselves, and that for being mute and interested in the young man who shows up with a prophecy of doom for the hero.

The uncredited long text about the story, BWS, and it's original failed serialization that threads throughout the book is truly a marvel of ego stroking and fanboy praise. It makes BWS and the story into some kind of revolutionary pinnacle of comics. Strange, coming from a book from Fantagraphics, as the perspective seems very much stuck in relation to conventional superhero comics.