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Let’s Talk About the new Dune Movie

I’ve said some harsh things in places online regarding Denis Villeneuve’s long-awaited Dune Part One, and I think I need to, maybe, provide some concise opinions. Hopefully nothing overlong. So let’s get to it.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT DUNE-

Actually, a lot is good about this new version of Dune. The casting is excellent, except for one choice. The set design is overwhelmingly a Villeneuve take on things, but every location shown is fantastic. The prop work and vehicle design work all feel appropriate. Even my beloved Spacing Guild Members get a proper re-up with extremely high-end, elegant suits that suggest someone really liked Destiny. The visual aesthetic justifies itself very well without attempting any of the weirdness that might be expected from a Dune adaptation.

WHAT’S…NOT GOOD ABOUT DUNE-

Everything works, until Jessica selects Shadout Mapes for Housekeeper. Once this scene begins, the whole movie starts unraveling. Why? I’ll tell you why, gentle reader. Jessica is presented with a Fremen Crysknife, a Tooth of the Maker, a blade made from a tooth from a sandworm. The book is extremely clear about this scene-Jessica draws the blade to see the Crysknife, and Shadout Mapes intentionally takes it and cuts her own hand on it, because a Crysknife cannot be sheathed until it has drawn blood. This is a very important point, both in the book, and as an indication of the Fremen as a people. Crysknives are not even something outsiders would ever be presented-they’re extremely special, to the point that, yes, you do not draw one, at all, without drawing blood. Jessica did not know this, which is why the Housekeeper cut herself, in order to properly handle the relic and put it away.

In Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, Jessica looks at the blade, and it is put away. And just like that, we’re no longer watching a good adaptation of Dune, because, for, reasons that certainly boggle my mind, Villeneuve had the presence of mind on so very many points, but inexplicably chose to include the Crysknife scene but exclude the entire point of featuring the Crysknife scene. This mistake is then repeated when Stilgar spits on the table during a meeting with Duke Leto as a gift of water and a sign of respect to the Duke…and then in this version, Duke Leto spits back, and his advisors also, on the same table as gifts to…himself?

The movie has a number of baffling choices like this, were something would be better excluded completely than included incorrectly. Like, why do the Atreides no longer have a baliset but instead have a bagpipe player? Why do our Space Greeks have a bagpiper player?

THINGS I LIKED ABOUT THIS NEW DUNE THAT DESERVE SPECIFIC MENTION-

Duke Leto’s Death Scene

The Harkonnen’s Giant Tarantula Sex Puppet

The Design of the Ornithopters

Timothee Chalamet’s performance as Young Paul

The Incredible Amount of Set Design Work and Art Built For this Movie

Paul’s prescience showing not just what will happen, but also warnings of versions of future events he must prepare himself to prevent or avoid if he is to survive.

THINGS I DID NOT LIKE ABOUT THIS NEW DUNE MOVIE THAT YOU SHOULD KNOW GOING IN-

No Guild Navigator Scene

No Scene with Emperor Shaddam IV

Despite traveling from Caladan to Arrakis, we do not get to see space being folded

No Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen

No worm-riding sequence

No talk of how the Sleeper Must Awaken

Hans Zimmer’s overuse of the Ancient Lamentation Plugin for the film score

Zendaya basically does not have a speaking role in this movie, and, when she does, briefly at the end, she portrays Chani almost exactly the same way as how she portrays Mary Jane Watson in the Spider-Man movies.

The pacing of the movie after the fall of Arrakis is a script at war with itself. Things are changed, to help dictate all the things we don’t get to see that one would expect in ‘Dune Part One.’ There is a lot of bombast here, a lot of the movie walking in place and waving its arms, in a way that very likely is much more effective in a movie theater with a giant sound system and not your house pets. I find it very strange to see such a concerted effort to mainstream Dune whilst not actually including anything approaching a satisfying plot arc that a mainstream audience would be more receptive to. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to like this movie, but…they really missed the point of it all. Another failed Kwisatz Haderach.

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Although this blog has been intended as a place to document, say, the inner view of my efforts towards making comics, I feel it’s important to break the format a little to get down some life event stuff. I’d wanted to make a new sub-tumblr but for reasons unclear the app is at odds with this, so, here goes:

On this last sunday, the 17th of October, I was walking our Husky Finn when we were attacked by a Pitbull that had slipped free of its home, and, unprovoked, charged us and went for Finn’s throat. It is a minor miracle that Finn’s thick fur, a genetic mutation that is uncommon for his breed-gave him enough protection him to spare him the full brunt of the attack, mostly suffering a single puncture bite that was only even noticed due to Nicole’s characteristic diligence. In order to stop the Pitbull from attacking Finn any further, I got between them and became the focus for its aggression.

I’m writing this out to really get this somewhere, so I’m trying to make this detailed, I hope this isn’t excessive to read…

Anyway. Finn is a big friendly dog. I refer to him as a ‘World Ambassador’ because he radiates a charisma and presence of wanting to invite anyone he meets to spend time with him. He is an exceptionally good boy, and I don’t think I have ever even heard him bark for any reason. So in the unreal moment of seeing this shape cross my vision and collide with him begin shaking its head back and forth a Finn squealing, I was immediately afraid that this other dog was going to kill him.

In my head now, it makes sense that I gave him my left arm. Well, I didn’t give him my left arm, but my right hand was bound up in the leash and I think I was using my right hand, the leash hand, to move Finn behind me as intercepted with my left hand the mouth of the Pitbull, which sounds unwise but it wasn’t a moment to be wise. I had my leather jacket on, and my Apple Watch was on, as well as a sweater, and, for whatever reason, it wasn’t that hard at all to distract the aggression of the pitbull towards me, I can’t really remember how quickly it went, but, I know he bit my left wrist, and Finn was somewhere to the right/behind me, and the pitbull brought me to my knees, shredding open both knees on the sidewalk. I remember watching in an already dazed moment as the dog came upon me and bit my face. I can’t say if he must have pulled my glasses off because I remember seeing them tumble ahead of me, somewhere, while I fell backwards and the pitbull went for my right knee. I remember how much that dog was vibrating, how fast and fierce it was shaking as it collided with me and took me down. I just know I was holding Finn somewhere, as it was, I think, tearing open my pant leg rather that my leg, and I was screaming, loudly as I could, “GET IT OFF” over and over again.

I think I may have said it seven times. I was holding Finn. People came. I don’t remember what happened with the pitbull but I think I remember laying on my back and seeing it running up the same front yard it had cross before, going somewhere out of view behind the house. Maybe. My blood was everwhere. Finn was covered in my blood, I couldn’t tell if he was hurt or not. People. I felt like I was three hundred breaths behind the number of breaths I should’ve been breathing and I was trying, very fast, to get caught up on those breathes. I remember seeing the puncture wound on the back of my left wrist appearing to be spurting out dark blood in time with my breathing. I knew my face had a lot of blood on it. I thought the Pitbull had removed parts of my face, and I was preparing myself to deal with that. At least I think I was, part of me was. I’m not getting everything down, there’s too much, sentences won’t hold it, but there’s a box, the man has a box I think it’s metal and it’s full of bandaids and first aid things, and I remember the oddity of discretely cut, perforated duct tape bandaids that he starts affixing to my wrist, he cleans my face. I’m holding Finn, I can’t tell how he’s doing, but he’s not trying to go anywhere, he’s sitting with me and he’s panting. I get my phone out, I go to Nicole’s contact but the Phone Icon is grayed out for some reason, so I have to go to a Messenger app to reach her, tell her she needs to get me. After the call is done, I begin doubting I gave her the right directions. More people, I remember an older man walking some kind of larger dog across the street up the way, looking doubtfully or concerned or something…I don’t remember what he said but I think he was preparing to get involved.

But thankfully we were fine enough. Nicole took excellent care of me and Finn. I remember being in shock for an extended period of time, I remember the high-pitched sound in my ears that was there for most the of the night, and the hoarseness of my voice that took a while for me to reason was from my screaming.

Fortunately, I had Monday off, and with some consideration I took Tuesday off as well. It’s not a simple thing to measure. I’ve been somewhat out of sorts. My left hand has been, until recently, wrapped in gauze that I have replaced a few times but the wounds have finally closed and I can see the skin beginning to converge and shrink the openings. I can’t shave my upper lip right now, thanks to the cuts there, so I’m just allowing myself a beard right now, I guess. I’m taking ibuprofen for soreness in my wrist and, the day after the attack I found I also had a lot of upper body soreness as well. I’m washing the dishes one-handed. I can’t really exercise, I can’t do pull-ups because I don’t want to reopen the wounds on my wrist, and, generally the same thing for free weights. I have not walked the dogs yet sense Sunday, although neither Finn nor Amar seem especially concerned as of late.

I feel tired or weak a lot. My appetite has spike, for some reason I find myself eating much more frequently, I can’t tell why and my cursory searches online haven’t found an answer about this. I’ve been really good about putting things down and forgetting where I left them, about having incomplete tasks, about needing to take breaks between doing things. I walk around hesitantly, I’m not moving through the house with the kind of energy I normally do. I’ve had to move my Apple Watch to my right wrist to account for the gauze wrapping. I haven’t removed the hospital bracelet from my right wrist. I feel different, it’s hard to give it an accurate description. There’s a number of things I do every day that I haven’t gotten to do since Saturday night, and I should be so lucky to know I ‘ll be doing them again soon with relatively minor damage to myself or to Finn. I can’t overstate how fortunate I feel. And…although this is also hard to explain, that this whole event should never have happened and was completely preventable, I’m also treating it as a valuable experience, trying to get as much good as I can out of this terrible thing that happened. And that’s basically where I’m at now. I’m lucky. I’m fortunate. I have a lot of incomplete thoughts and feelings about all of this. I’m aware that none of this is a normal thing that should happen to anyone. And that’s about all I have right now. I don’t know if I’ll speak more on this or not. I’m just trying to get this out, right now, enough of it to explain some of it.

I hope to have a light table soon for tracing the rough drafts of some art work I have. More later.

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New Tools and Old Jobs

Have pulled the trigger on buying a light table. More of a light pad, actually, and although I have some concerns that I may not be able to use it the way I want to (will the brightness settings be enough, etc?) it’s time to try one, for 30 bucks it’s work seeing if it will do that work and if not go from there.

I keep…looking over my work, and wanting to rework the pages, so being able to trace them onto new pages would, I hope, save me a great deal of time and refocus things. I hope. I keep thinking about getting an iPad Pro, but the time is not yet now, yet, for doing that, although I do want to get a new one of those, especially for the purposes of having something nicer, better screen, better pencil tech, ostensibly better work completed…I’m just coming around to the fact that there’s a lot of incomplete work I have that I’m reluctant to finish out of some fear of ruining the original pages, and being able to remake them on a physical level would be excellent, especially if the light table can do it.

On that note…I’ve also, finally, come around to the fact that the art in a comic is there to serve the story. By which I mean that although I do want the art nice, it can’t be obsessed over at the expense of completing the work, this is about telling the story and having well made pages is good but not exactly the end result. The end result is a readable story that can be produced relatively quickly, which, yes, I know. I know. I know I work at a pace that frustrates me, and I know my goal always has been to create a work that feels consistent and completed and I haven’t reached the point I’d desire to be at by now…and yet also, with all this in mind…I must not let myself fixate on things that will not serve the story.

More will be revealed.

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Optimal Flow State Narration

I've been wanting to write more on comics/my comics process for a while now, but the challenge has been really having something to say in a way that would be substantial and worth the time it would take to write it out, which I'm trying right now.

Currently I'm processing two different comics in wildly different mediums: Megg, Mogg and Owl by Simon Hanselmann and Rain Like Hammers by Brandon Graham.

MMOG is not easy to explain, but it's very dark, humorous, and bleak, and depicts the dysfunctional misadventures of a witch, her cat familiar, a werewolf, and a humanoid owl named Owl, and their toxic codependency on each other and substance abuse, while navigating what it more or less apartment living in a mundane but also disgusting city. It's been a weird ride, and the story is ongoing, an is an examination of the long-term effects of the characters' addictions, their inability to move on in their lives, and the effects of their actions upon one another.

I got invested in this comic over the beginning of the Pandemic last year, as the creator already had a long-running series of books but began posting new storylines set in the Pandemic that were, on the whole, significantly more farcical, and considered not part of the ongoing plotline in the books. I ended up buying the most recent book, Bad Gateway, mostly in an attempt to better understand what I was seeing, and to better determine if I enjoyed it or was disgusted by it. Honestly it's a bit of both.

Since completing the Pandemic book, Hanselmann has been posting earlier stuff in his Instagram, as the collected book, titled Crisis Zone, has now won an Eisner and likely has grown his career a great deal. It's now come around to the point where I find myself reading the updates from Bad Gateway, on Instagram-the very book I've owned for over a year now that sits on my shelf. Part of the interest in this point is that the updates on Instagram are not merely shots from the book itself-they are carefully taken images from the original physical art, creating the strange effect of looking on my phone at artwork that is better than the actual physical pages of the work-you can see the texture of the paper, the use of whiteout, and so on. And yet I was doing this even before it dawned on me that the Instagram version was of the original images and not just the book online.

Hanselmann manages a 3x4 grid of squares on most of his pages in book form, which coincidentally allows the individual frames to work quite well on Instagram. There is really something to seeing such dedication and resolutely maintaining this form. The composition in each frame works, it's immediately easy to understand, easy to read, big obvious strengths. I like it, but I don't know if I could do it myself. I don't know how I would, right now, but I definitely see its advantages.

Rain Like Hammers by Brandon Graham is a far-flung future science fiction story. It was made by Graham during a time of deep depression in response to events in his career and his personal life that are hard for me to get enough of a read on to document here, but they certainly influenced this book. It is a strange book, and even though I have read it three times now, I'm still struggling with its story.

Graham's style is a lot more free-form, and has strong manga influences, often peppering his images with small notes, explanations of devices, or even tiny dialogue balloons expressing a single sidelong thought, and there's clear Moebius and Herge influences going on with his depictions of the fantastic (Moebius) in a simplified, clean art style (Herge). There's a character that clearly represents the author himself, and the story attempts to say some things about the transitional nature of identity, public ridicule, and the ways societies can normalize some behaviors while ostracizing others. It is, quite honestly, a very difficult read for me, and I have been familiar with his past works, but something else is going on here I still haven't unlocked.

I honestly want to write more on Rain Like Hammers but I'm still trying to understand it-for one, I still don't even know why it was given that title it has. It feels less like an explicit story, even if it attempts to present itself as such, and more like something...not necessarily dreamlike, but as a sketchbook that over time came to life and began asserting relationships between the separate ideas happening on each page. It floats. I can't tell if it works or not, it's just quite simply very unfamiliar feeling, in a way that makes it hard to translate its strengths. It's going to be a puzzle for a long time, I think.

Which is all to get at my own work, and my own thoughts on my work. I haven't used my iPad in a considerable amount of time now, in fact I have it turned off, as once every month or so I suddenly notice it's almost out of power and recharge it for a night and then do nothing with it, again. I'll no doubt bring it out when Procreate introduces its next major update, which appears to hint at some kind of 3D modeling aspect that is probably not quite what I am hoping for but time will tell...

A major reason I fell off the iPad was my realization on the importance of physical drawing on physical paper with a physical tool. The importance of leaving evidence, an object that can be considered and no just disappeared in another object. I also realized an odd feeling that...and this is hard to explain adequately, but...

When I draw on paper, I'm drawing on my brain. All the senses, the tactility of the page and the pencil, all of that travels up my arm and is written on my brain as I do it. With a stylus I get maybe 1% of that sensory information. Obviously I am not against digital art...but this difference is why I struggle so greatly to produce something digitally without realizing it on a page.

The other thing I want to write down here, is that...when working on comics, the drawing is the writing. I've been having a very hard time with Leonardo Da Vinci, which I won't get into here, but as an example, I knew I needed to really work out his role and presence in the story, as he's crucial and yet also...well, again, mainly it's important that I have him somewhere to serve the purposes he's meant to serve, as well as tie up some loose ends involving the armillary sphere that only he can deal with.

So I've brought him back to the barn on the castle grounds to work on that, and then I realized I wanted to bring the Penguin into the scene, so I had the Penguin climb through a window and greet Leonardo through the window. I'm still struggling with this frame, but, I had the Penguin standing in the window, holding one wing out to Leonardo pantomiming a greeting. Which leads to the next page, where Leonardo is standing up from his work bench, away from his projects...and I didn't know what to do there.

So I had Leonardo standing there, and behind him, the Penguin standing on the workbench, looking at Leonardo, both facing the reader. And I didn't know what to do. I kept circling back.

And then I realized that in the prior page the Penguin could, instead of waving to Leonardo, but holding a little scroll out to him, to add reason for his appearance, and enhance the interaction, so I added in the scroll.

Cut back to that next page, I have Leonardo unfurling the scroll to look at it, but the Penguin is still standing behind him, passively. I redo it again, and I realize the Penguin can be peering over Leonardo's shoulder to be looking at the contents of the scroll as Leonardo is reading it (for the record, the Penguin probably can't read, but he'd still be curious to know what's happening), so now we have the two figures interacting again and responding to this bit of news.

And like that I have rewritten this moment at least five times, reshaping the event forwards and backwards. To be honest, I still don't know what's in the scroll I've given the Penguin to deliver to Leonardo, and I have a lot to work out there. The biggest challenge with comics is that I find I'm usually try to think about at least five things at once:

-Story

-Composition (the interior of the frame itself and what it depicted therein)

-Character Performance/Interaction

-Set Design

-Layout (the composition of the various frames on the page and how they relate to eachother)

These five different things compete for my attention and often influence eachother. Surprisingly, the story is often the most passive participant...because so much, moment-to-moment, comes out of what is going immediately.

Anyway, I have much to do, and may day has only gotten started, and there will be groceries to take care of before work.

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The Cosmic Trap of Comics

Go Ahead, Put Anything, the page beckons to me. So here I'm again. I'm writing more, lately. Here and elsewhere. There's always something to be found in the act of writing, it's a binding exercise that also seals things in tangible places. So I do, want to write just a little bit, because...I think I need to try to explain how difficult it is for me to make regular drawings now, when I could be working on comics. I don't know if I'll be able to pull this off.

Comics...really provide an unimaginable opportunity to do things you can't do anywhere else. Even scratching the surface could leave a person with enough to do for ages. There's just a supreme beauty to sequential art, to the framing of narrative, to working out a space and working out the display of that space and working out performances within that space. The guiding of a reader's eye. The making of events, the making of living fiction. I might be oversteering with that phrase, I can't be sure. But. Since finding my way on, I've had just a very hard time working on singular images, it's just not the same. It's like the difference between drawing a barn, and building a barn, and working out who lives and dies in that barn. Standard drawing feels like a rehearsal, or something...something just not as important as working out how to demonstrate part of a story.

The other part of my fixation comes down to the telling in visuals. Just being able to give a scene, give the imagery, and...not necessarily provide any written words at all to contextualize what things are or should be, just...getting things to a place where readers will have to gauge the work and make their own judgements, and have to concede I am guiding them to places. I am making a story that would be very unlikely to be able to be told in written form. It's a bit sort of like the dissonance I've experienced when attempting to read novelizations of Hellboy. That's certainly the character's name, that he gets called by occasion, but...it's jarring to see it written out in descriptive text, multiple times on every page, of "Hellboy looked through the door and sighed," or whatever else. Hellboy is not Hellboy, if you can understand, he's not that name. He's an image, a red figure of consternation, grit, and uncomfortable heritage, with one giant hand. His image is his symbol, that red form cut into the page, showing his actions, his thoughts, his situations. It just works. Trying to demonstrate the whole thing in words just can't do it justice. Printed words can't equal the image, can't meet the red figure.

So, similarly, I can't write my story, about what the Penguin is doing, or what he's thinking, or what else he may do. I have to show. I have to show myself, I have to build it, and show how I get there, how he gets there, and somewhere along the way I have something worth showing everyone. And just knowing I have that somewhere in me that I can focus on, is indescribable. Not in mere art, or writing, but in art that replaces writing, to get at the heart of things, to the spaces before language. It's an entirely different kind of binding, and an entirely different challenge level for achieving tangibility. I just cannot leave it alone.

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Pictures of a Floating World, or Attempting a Definitive Map of the Clouds

So.

Let me tell you what I've been on about lately. For...ages now, I've been very involved in trying to better my understanding of comics, the design of them, the structures and formats, because I really want to make something of an ambitious design. I want to have a lot of the planning accomplished, so that what I create will readily work as a book, will have a consistent visual vocabulary, and will have a flexible enough framework that I can present certain ideas I have that I really want to convey that will probably be in defiance of what I appear to be doing a lot of the time. It's a big project. I've been going after all kinds of sources, and learning more, like the layout system demonstrated by Frank Santoro that can be rooted into fine art and renaissance painting, to dynamic symmetry, the inevitable Scott McCloud manuals, Paul Pope, Tony Millionaire, Brandon Graham, Moebius, Seth, and, of course, lots and lots of Mike Mignola. I've been lead up and down many hills. And then with lots of theory and dry erase board plotting under my belt and in my phone, I turn around into Fantagraphics Instagram demonstrating innumerable examples of people like Simon Hanselmann, working at an extremely high level with the humble squared grid, making each frame count and working the point of view moment to moment, and...I keep going.

Ultimately all of this boiled down into statements by Jim Woodring that absolutely rang my bell. It's hard to summarize Woodring, but he's a storyteller of immense talent who uses no dialogue. He primarily works with his character Frank, who lives in a surreal landscape of recurring characters and challenges that are very hard to put into words. Many of his ideas tower with significance, and he's the sort that is at once incredibly serious about his personal dedication to the craft of what he is making, but also incredibly averse to appearing any crazier than he has to while discussing what motivate him, while simultaneously being as matter-of-fact as he can about being informed by the concept of 'the Unifactor,' a term he uses to describe the world that Frank exists in.

Woodring is successful, largely independent, and, I would say, reasonably cantankerous. There are many cartoonists that over time seem to lose a proportional worldview, but Jim Woodring is not one of them. One of the things I listened to him opine recently on an older podcast, was the preponderance of, as he put it, 'prosthetic geniuses' in the field of comics, meaning those that rely on digital artwork to achieve their aims, such as Photoshop and the like. It should be noted that among his achievement Jim Woodring has crafted a quill pen with a fourteen-inch nib, that he dips into a flower vase filled with diluted black acrylic paint and leans against his shoulder to ink massive designs. He can apparently do it for hours, and cites this as being easier on the body than conventional drawing, although also much slower.

But to the point, he explained that, when a drawing is attempted on paper, no matter what, when you're doing, you have an object. The object is a drawing. It's there, it exists as an outcome of your efforts. Whereas with digital work, all you've created is an impermanent file. This really has gotten me thinking, as, for ages one my goals has been to be able to achieve drawing digitally with the same level of output as in physical media. And these words he said, made me forced to concede that these two would never achieve something approaching parity-my efforts in digital artwork were like mining for bitcoin, endlessly toiling on touchscreens to create something of value as real as the paper it could be printed on.

By this same marker, I've found that my...innumerable studies for my comic work had gotten extremely conceptual, so deeply around the bend to be nearly as visual algebra. And yet...simply taking a page, and working within the confines of that page, guided by the frictive information of my drafting pencil against the indifference of the paper's texture, was giving my fidelity levels of feedback that Wacom's 1024 levels of pressure or Procreate's rabbitholes of brush behavior customization could not hope to convey to me so rapidly or so effectively. I think of all the time I've spent battling drivers and system updates to just start to work on something that may not have even existed after I was done with it, artwork forgotten in a document folder that I would never even see unless I thought to look for it, that would remain non-existent and permanently out of sight short of me deciding to browse my hard drive instead of trying to make another thing scratchlessly from scratch.

Which is all to say that my focus has been finally pulled. There is no equaling the immediacy of physical art. I have spent nearly two decades in each realm now, but one is real, and the other only casts a shadow in pixels. Make no mistake, I will, still, be using Photoshop and other programs to complete the production of what I intend to do, but the work I want, is going to come from my hands and from finite materials. I've already made from very fine things, and I expect I'll have more soon. I've scarcely scratched the surface of what I want to do, and the stories I want to tell. Everything I have will help me along the way. I just have to let myself do the best work with the most appropriate tools in order to get there.