They’re Magically Suspicious

Update: The image above with Loki from the Avengers film has been joined by Jack Kirby (& Dick Ayers) and John Buscema (& John Verpoorten) “Pop Art” variants, seen thumbnailed below, on my Tumblr log. My hands were really bad when I got the itch to do these and I’d love to be able to rework them but I’m probably better off devoting that energy to other stuff — unless someone wants to actually hire me to design fake cereal boxes...

Here Am I Sitting in a Tin Can, Far Above the World

Gravity was spectacular.

I saw the film two weeks ago, and whenever it’s brought to mind I’m right back in the absolute sense of wonder I experienced in the theater.



Starring the quietly magnetic Sandra Bullock as a civilian mission specialist sent up
to work on the Hubble Space Telescope and George Clooney as the veteran commander of her shuttle, Gravity demands to be seen not only on as big a screen as possible but in
3D. If you’ve heard me talk (or read me write) about 3D, you know that I seldom recommend it.

Breakfast Antipathies

I checked out @Midnight on Comedy Central and its Hashtag Wars segment looks to
be a veritable fount of springboards for Top X lists. While neither my favorite category nor my best work, for instance, since I’m kind-of rusty I riffed on the latest category to come up with…

My Top Ten Bad Cereals

10. Foot Loops

9. Loogie Charms

8. Bounced Chex

7. Raisin Brain

6. Substandard K

... Marks the Spot

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Related: X Libris • Five-Panel Draw • Grey Matters

Deft Wonk

John Oliver wasn’t the sole member of Comedy Central’s late-night team giving
us process junkies a peek behind the curtain in the past couple of weeks. Stephen Colbert was interviewed by Paul Mercurio, who does warm-up for The Colbert Report, over nearly an hour on a variety of topics — but mostly about the Daft Punk fiasco. You can listen to the podcast free.

Daft Punk, scheduled to be on Colbert’s show earlier this month, bowed out and/or
was yanked over misunderstandings and Viacom internal politics due to the mysterious French faux-robots’ upcoming special appearance at last weekend’s MTV Video Music Awards telecast.

John for Jon

Jon Stewart will return to The Daily Show next week following a sabbatical. He
was in the Middle East this summer directing a film called Rosewater. For the eight weeks out of twelve after Stewart’s departure that the show was not on hiatus, writer/correspondent John Oliver stepped in to host in his stead.

If you don’t already know that, you may not be interested in the video I’m sharing of John Oliver’s appearance on Charlie Rose from Monday, Aug. 8th, just as John-with-an-h was starting his final week as Jon-without’s substitute.

Me, I love this kind of process talk. I’ve been reading behind-the-scenes stuff about
how comics, music, film, and television are crafted (theater and prose, to a lesser extent, too) since I was a kid. It’s not really the gossip, which in on-air conversations like this one is incidental to nonexistent, so much as it is the plain old nuts-and-bolts of how creative work — and in particular collaborative creative work — is made that fascinates.