Elk’s Run Nominated for SEVEN Harvey Awards!

Hey gang, Just wanted to send out a quick congrats/thank you to everybody who's helped and been a part of the Elk's Run team. For those who don't know we were nominated for SEVEN Harvey Awards (Best Writer, Best Artist, Best Limited Series, Best Letterer, Best Cover Artist, Best New Talent, Best Single Issue).

It's a real privliedge and an honor to be nominated, and each and every one of you have been key to keeping the word alive about this book. Your advice, well wishes, kind words, and generosity have made what's been a very strange and bumpy ride one that's filled with reward and pleasure, and for that I'll be forever grateful.

So, without further ado, you can see the complete list here, courtesy of TheBeat..

Thank you all again, we couldn't ask for a better bunch of friends.

Costume Design Seperated at Birth

Planet of the Vampires (1965)

X-Men 3 (2006)

Poorly Drawn Animals on YouTube

I've started uploading the Poorly Drawn Animals cartoons over on YouTube. Here's The First One

Before and After

Before and After

Before and After

Originally uploaded by Joshua Hale Fialkov.

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052306_12451.jpg
Originally uploaded by Joshua Hale Fialkov.

Oh

And the trip was good. Got a bit of a sinus infection thanks to all that fresh air and pollen, found out my stomach ulcer wasn't quite at the ulcer stage yet, and picked up some kickass movies.  Plus I got to spend time with my folks, brother and sister in law, and my niece and nephews. And I got a bunch of work done.  You really can't ask for anything more.

I Gotsa PSP

So I sold about 10 years worth of Gameboy stuff and managed to get a fully paid for (but gently used) Playstation Portable. I bought it, more or less, for one game.  Lumines.  I played it on my buddy Gilbert's PSP at last year's E3, and was instantly in love.  Honestly, if the PSP did nothing but access the internet, play music and videos, and Lumines, I'd say the thing is worth the price of admission.

I also got the Megaman Redux thing, and the Capcom Remix, worth it just for the inclusion of 1941.

Now, I just need more games and more memory.

Backyard

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Originally uploaded by Joshua Hale Fialkov.

Vacation Week Viewing

Create your own Movie List @ HotFreeLayouts!

Profound Statement from a review of DaVinci Code

Da Vinci Code, The (2006): ReviewsAction and ideas -- they get in each other's way, pal. And director Ron Howard didn't want to choose between 'em. Good impulse, not such a good result.

I don't actually know what I think about that.  I tend to get tripped up when I use both simultaneously, which accounts for the bi-polar nature of my writing.  Half of what I do is action packed pun fueled action-comedies, and then there's the Elk's Run stuff.  I've yet to find a way to balance the two disparate tones...

But, I'm working on it.

Time

Time
Originally uploaded by Joshua Hale Fialkov.

Creepy Things My Parents Own

Creepy Things My Parents Own
Originally uploaded by Joshua Hale Fialkov.

I’m Off

I'm going on a bit of a personal retreat for the next 9 days or so.  So, I'm doing my best to stay offline.  I'll be in Des Moines, Iowa, visiting my folks, and trying to bang out these last few scripts that've been hanging on longer than they should. So, play nice, and I'll be back soon.

Cryptomundo.com

Cryptomundo.com for Bigfoot, Loch Ness, and More Blog for things that go non-existant bump in the night.

Me and Keating Talk About Elk’s Run

So, Keating and I talk almost constantly while he colors Elk's Run. It's a very... interesting process to me. Anyways, I just had my first chance to see 95% of the book colored (And that's nearly 200 pages of comics, people) and I got a chance to see just how much of a genius Keating is. So, we talked, I copy and pasted, and here's what's hopefully not a boring ramble about the creative process behind Elk's Run. This contains some spoilers if you haven't read the book at all, so, be warned. SPOILERS FOR ELK'S RUN 1-4 BELOW!

josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: what's nice is that the colors that we've used through out are now just totally opressive. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: like they've come to a boil. Keating: okay Keating: so here's the thing Keating: This was my plan for the coloring of this thing. Right from the start. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: heheh. Keating: The colours have a bunch of purposes. Different lighting situations, etc. Times periods. All with different qualities. Keating: But as it gets going, what happens is that the colours start coming together. Little bits in different 'sets'. As the more and more things start happening to the town/citizens, the color spreads to them. But not the family. So, if you look at the townsfolk in the 7th issue. They're colored as a group. They've become a single entity. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: you've officially put more thought into the book than I have. Keating: And during the SPOILER DELETED, the family, especially john jr and sr become totally seperated from the background. Everything else just bcomes 'the town' Keating: So, the other characters take on more of the background color. So everything is focused on the family. Because, in the end, it's really only about them. Keating: And that's it :) haha josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: Right. Keating: And the last thing is that the colors the characters wear tie into their place in the story. Keating: So, john and john start out both wearing blue. His mother has a slightly greenish blue. Keating: As john becomes seperated from his family, he loses he jacket and takes on a grey shirt, since he doesn't belong anywhere. Keating: In the end, only the father is wearing the blue. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: yep, 10x as much thought as I have. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: the jacket thing was intentional, actually. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: it's my little Ibsen nod. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: Ibsen was obsessed with when people took off and put on clothes. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: it was a symbol of vulnerability. Keating: It's awesome. I was really happy as I read it, since I saw so much opportunity as the colorist to sort of back up what was happening in the narrative. Keating: rather than just color things as the color they are. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: i love page 10 josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: makes it that much sadder. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: which is the thing. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: it's not just sad for Jr. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: it's sad for Sr. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: He's a man out of time. Keating: Yeah. Keating: And it plays against the 'drop out' coloring that we do. Which is normally when the character seperates himself from his surroundings. But this is the town's people seperating themselves from him. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: and ultimately from the town. Keating: Yup. Keating: It's good stuff ;) josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: I've been in creative meetings all day, and have been sort of bickering about plot and semantics and things like that. It's nice to get to talk about the actual fucking craft of the book. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: and, the thing about this book, and why it works so great as a comic is that it's more than the sum total of it's parts.  I think there's magic between the three of us. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: and as we try and disect the plot and break it down into set pieces and elements, you start to realize that what makes it fly is the subtlety and the pacing. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: Honestly, that's Noel's strong point. He controls the pacing so well. josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: Despite giving you 10,000,000 extra panels to color. Keating: The pacing and he reigns in the drama, I think. Some of the scenes could be drawn very heroic and romantic. But instead he mostly draws at an even sort of level. Which, when the town starts to burn, really works. It's like a slow build. Which adds to the tension, because we expect 'big' moments but they never quite get there. Until the last pages of issue 7 josh@hoarseandbuggy.com: and you sort of realize how Jr. is really rising above the whole thing. because they have this lackluster miserablely mundane existance, and he finally steps up and does something remarkable. Keating: yeah Keating: And this is coming from a guy who absolutely hates colouring this book :) haha

The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance

I love westerns, obviously. I mean, I committed a good year of my life to Western Tales of Terror, and have been hammering away at a couple other western projects this year as well. There's something so earnest and heartfelt about even the cheesiest of western that's missing in modern cinema. The Cowboy movie is an art form unto itself. That being said, I'm not really a John Wayne kind of guy. I think he's... well... just a bad actor. That being said, there's a couple of John Wayne movies I love. True Grit is one, El Dorado another, and, then, there's The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance. It's certainly one of the most traditional movies John Ford ever directed, and the performances of Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne serve to turn a story of revenge and politics into one of the most compelling coming of age stories about adults ever made. John Wayne plays the more experienced, more cynical, and for the most part drunk and abuse cowhand. Jimmy Stewart becomes his ward, of a sort. The political back drop of the territory fighting towards statehood is this great counter point to the idea of the West being tamed. It's delicate and smart, and outright compelling.   The twist, along with the bitter-sweet ending, are also some real cinematic highlights.  Just for seeing how a character can be both the winner and the loser simultaneously. So, if you want a classic black and white western, this is where to go. Well, this and High Noon, obviously.

On a side note, they must say the name Liberty Vallance several hundred times through the course of the movie. It's... very strange.

Hard Candy

David Slade is a genius.  I can't remember the last young director to so amazingly execute a film.  The shots, the editing, the acting, are all pitch perfect.  It's really a masterpiece.  The only strike against it is the subject matter, which is a turn off for a lot of people.  But, that being said, it's so expertly done, so well-crafted, that it doesn't matter what it's about.  It's a movie about 2 people who are pathological liars embroiled in a battle of wits, the equal to which we haven't seen in a LONG time.  This is classic cinema, and we're going to see a lot more of Slade in the future, if there's any justice in the world.

Mission Impossible 3

So, well... It's hard to come up with something to say that hasn't been said before about the movie. It's good, not great. It's like a higher budget episode of Alias, which in the long run, turns out to be more satisfying than most of Alias because there's an actual ending and y'know, the set pieces are brilliantly done. Tom Cruise... is distracting at best, but is nicely balanced by a lot of smaller bit roles by Billy Crudup, Laurence Fishburne, John Rhys-Myers, and Simon Pegg. The thing that most makes the movie work though, is the performance of Phillip Seymour Hoffman. He's spectacular.

So, look, it's not Die Hard, but nothing is anymore.

So, the big life changing stuff

I've been wrestling with how to say this stuff all week. So I figured short and sweet.

For five years, I've been dating Dina. On Tuesday night, completely out of the blue, she walked out on me. There was no real warning (although she claims that there was) and it really, really hurt me quite a bit.

For the first few days, it was a feeling of shock and abandonment, because right now, things are really tough, money's tight, and the two of us have been fighting through the rocky waters of life for so long, it just seemed impossible.

But, now that the first week of it has wrapped up, I honestly think I'm better off. I loved Dina a lot, but, she'd become a big obstacle in my life. I mean, look, within a week of her leaving, I'm already back to putting together my music which I more or less abandoned when we started dating cause it irritated her.  This has given me a laser-point focus on what's really important in life.

Plus being able to come home when I like, watch what I like, not have to race around the city to take her hither and thou... It's kind of nice. I still miss having someone warm next to me in bed, and there's pangs whenever I walk out of a movie or finish watching a tv show that we both loved and all I want to do is talk to her about it.

But, it's not to be. And, well, I'm actually okay with that.

Back in the Days of Old

Back before I was a criminally ignored comic book writer, I was a criminally ignored musician. I had a couple of moderately successful bands all the way back to high school, but, as I grew up, I chose other things over music, and honestly, I've regretted it ever since. Music was a huge part of my life from the time I was a kid. Hell, even the bulk of my writing is inspired by music. So, part of those big life changes I mentioned earlier are I'm going back to it. I'm going to start slow, and the whole idea for me, anyways, is to do something purely for love. There's not enough of that in this world. I'm goin to set up a page here on the blog for my musical history etc. In the meantime tho, I set up a myspace page with some tracks from my last recording. So, go here: www.myspace.com/joshuahalefialkov and listen away.