Black Snow Comics

I’ll start with a couple of personal shout outs.  Hope you all had a good memorial day and paid your respect to the deceased.  I decided not to do any work, in their honor of course.  Congratulations to my sister, who graduated from college last Friday!  I’m glad you’re enjoying London.  My son turned one on the 17th, and I’d like to thank everyone who turned out for the party and made it such a success.  I’d say he has enough toys now!

Let me address Something Awful’s horrendous review of Black Snow on their Awful Link of the day on the 20th.  Kids and easily offended folk should skip to the next paragraph to avoid my colorful language.  FUCK YOU Andrew “Garbage Day” Miller!!!  I’ve never heard of you or your misspelled website before, but I can see it takes no talent.  I can imagine the creation of this site: “Hey, lets make a website where we unsolicitedly bash other people’s hard work while doing nothing of importance ourselves!”  Yeah, that’s real cool.  No effort was put into this shit review, and I’m pretty sure the guy didn’t even take the time to read beyond Issue 1.  I know our work isn’t perfect, but I think we’re always improving and don’t deserve such harsh comments about our ”shittiness.”  I was pretty upset when I read this guy’s unwarranted attack on Alex and myself, but I’ve taken some solace in the fact that we got a lot of traffic to our site from this link.  No such thing as bad publicity they say.  Still, it’s fairly disheartening and added to my resistance to continue drawing lately.

That’s the type of thing you leave yourself open to when you share your work with the public, I suppose.  Couple that review in with a rejection letter the same day from Top Shelf Comics and I think you’ll understand why I’ve been a bit down.  I did in fact resume drawing Issue 6 last night and I’m very happy with my work.  Page 12 may be up by nightfall.  I think my drawing is at a good place now, and I’m coming up with some interesting ideas for the future. 

I recently finished reading The Haunted Mansion: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies and really enjoyed learning about the history one of my favorite rides.  Oh, and the movie sucked thanks to the obnoxious Eddie Murphy and a mediocre family friendly plot.  It contained a lot of beautiful concept art revolving around the creation of characters and locations, which I found pretty inspirational.  It reminded me of my original love for drawing as a child, which was heavily focused on haunted houses and monsters.  Hopefully I be able to work this into the comic more, as I’ve done in the past with things like the carpet zombie, Kannibal Karl’s voodoo, the fight in the Gothic church and the graveyard.

One result of that Something Awful review was that it brought to the forefront a problem Alex and I have been trying to figure out how to solve: namely, Issue 1 isn’t very good.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s terrible and has it’s good moments, but it’s obviously leaps and bounds behind the rest.  It was our first effort and we didn’t know what we were doing.  Like most beginnings, ours is pretty rough, which isn’t a good thing when you are trying to attached a new audience.

We’ve talked about the unattractive idea of redoing it, but Alex looks at it as established canon that the rest is built on, and really I suppose he’s right.  Then the idea hit us, lets make an Issue 0!  So Issue 7 may have to wait awhile while we work on 0.  I’m actually very excited about this.  Issue 6 was originally slated to be the origin story, then it was going to be the current story mixed with flash backs, but none of this seemed to work and hurt the overall story arch flow.  Issue 0 is the perfect chance to tell the story of the beginning.  It makes so much sense!  It will serve to answer some questions for our existing audience while simultaneously working as a great introduction to newbies. 

I can honestly not wait to start on this.  I wouldn’t mind pausing work on 6 to do so, but I don’t think that will happen.  I’ll let you in on a secret.  Another reason for my multiple weeks of not drawing was that this next scene is about the cops, and I’ve never liked working on those scenes.  They aren’t filler by any means, but they just been the formation, building towards something greater.  Well, the scene I’ve just started is indeed what they’ve been building towards, and now that I’ve taken a little time to figure out how to approach it I’m pretty excited.  If you’ve felt that the cop scenes were boring or didn’t make much sense I think you will be happy with the pay off coming your way.  Don’t even bother to ask me when you’ll get your Van Buren pay off.  You’ll have to wait and see on that one.

If you’ve been following the Black Snow Twitter updates you’ve noticed that we’ve been shopping around for a publisher.  As much as I enjoy giving it away for free online, I’d also like to make some money and reach a larger audience!  It would be nice to get a little return for the time and money I’ve sunk into this over the years.  I’m also considering selling some merchandise, like T-shirts, on the website in the near future. 

If you’re a publishing reading this, then we’d like to hear from you!  If you are a big fan with some extra cash you’d like to invest in starting your own publishing company you can also contact us.  Interested parties can e-mail michael@blacksnowcomic.com

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not all about money, or anything like that.  If I was about the cash then I wouldn’t be investing my time and effort into a medium that many people claim is dying.  I also wouldn’t put it all on the net for free!  What I’m really about is a passion for art and a need to tell stories.  That’s what drives me to constantly move forward and work to improve. 

Whether we end up ever getting published or not I plan to continue working on Black Snow with Alex until we are finished telling our story and achieve our goals.  Without giving anything away, I’ll just let you know that story wise we have only just begun, and you can expect to see more from us for many years to come!

Bride Wars

0.0 out of 10

Being married, I’m often subjected to chick flicks or female targeted programing on TV like 90210 or The Secret Life of the American Teenager.  I hate these shows and movies.  I try to find at least 1 thing interesting about them since I’m forced to watch them, and occasionally they can be a bit entertaining, even if it’s just to mock them.  I find myself often questioning my wife and asking “You really like this?” and “What do you enjoy about this?”  The mysteries of women.

So this Mother’s Day I did my duty and watched the atrocity known as Bride Wars.  I wish this one had died in action!  I probably deserve a purple heart for my mental injuries suffered.  OK, no more stupid plays on word about war.  You’re lucky, I was about to make some holocaust references. 

This movie was so poorly done and just plain stupid it blows my mind.  I know this was just supposed to be something cute and funny, but it didn’t even succeed at that!  The premise is 2 life long friends, Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson, want to be have extravagant weddings at the same location.  They are obsessed with this idea since early childhood.  Guess what, they end up engaged at the same time and accidentally book their weddings on the same day!  It gets dumber from there.  They become enemies and try to sabotage each other through childish pranks.

The plot, if you can even classify this trash as having a plot, is ridiculous and full of holes.  I’ve never seen a movie fall about so badly at the end either.  Nothing really makes sense or is properly motivated.  It’s all garbage.  The only thing even remotely interesting were the bizarre sequences where still pictures with slightly shifting focuses and varying fields of distance with hand written notes are used to depict things like planning the weddings.

I don’t expect much from these movies, I know what I’m getting into when I see one.  I do expect them to be competent, and this certainly was not.  I’ve already spent more time focused on this crap then I should, so I’ll end now.  I would not recommend this to anyone, beyond easily entertained women who are excited about upcoming weddings.

Have a happy Mother’s Day everyone!  Here at the Balistreri household we are celebrating our first  Mother’s Day, as my son was born a week too late last year.  If my memory is correct he was acutally due on Mother’s Day, but came a week late.

7.5 out of 10

So I finally got around to watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and I was somewhat surprised.  As much as I always want to write Brad Pitt off as an over-hyped pretty boy he pulls out these great performances that remind me he can actually act.  I really had no interest in this movie when I saw the preview, and I was fairly surprised when it was nominated for so many awards.  I’d say I was even annoyed when it won 3 Oscars, as the whole movie seemed gimmicky and one dimensional.

Well, I sat done and watched it and found it quite touching.  I can see why it would be up for so many awards, though whether it deserved to win is still up to some debate.  The story is pretty much what you’d expect and offers very little in the way of surprises.  In case you don’t know, the premise is Benjamin is born an old man and physically grows younger as he ages.  Although the plot is pretty predictable it’s still very interesting to see and told well.  You really feel like you’ve seen a man’s full lifetime by the end.  I’m not sure what the running time was, but it felt like this movie lasted forever!  There are definitely a few parts that could have been cut out to help the pace, but nothing too bad. 

The visuals and tone of the movie did a great job in creating a fairy tale like atmosphere that fit the story well.  Though it’s set in the real world and some of the story’s timeline and character aging struck me as questionable, you really should just suspend your disbelief and try to enjoy the movie to get the most out of it.  I have a naturally analytical mind and have been formally trained to really dissect all of a films elements, but sometimes it can just be nice to sit back and be swept up by the plot instead.

If you’re a sensitive person like me then you’ll find this movie to be a real tear-jerker.  As you might imagine it’s quite sad when Benjamin has to see the people around him age and die.  The ending, which you can probably guess, is incredibly sad.  I felt pretty emotionally drained by the time the credits rolled.  The fantastic acting of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett really drew me in.  If you are the type of person who likes to cry at movies go ahead and add another point to my score, as I’m sure you’ll enjoy this film.  There are some funny moments, but they are few and far between.

This falls into the rare category of a movie that I’d have no problem recommending to anyone, but will probably never watch again.  Not that I didn’t like it, but it’s the type of movie you have to really sit down and invest yourself in to get anything out of it.