Chris Dee: poser

Monday, May 10, 2010

This week in... Screw it, a love letter to Remidar

Don’t let anyone get away with saying comics aren’t an art form – and that includes the faux intellectuals who will sometimes allow that the stuff in that museum in Brussels is art, but not the lowly American stuff and certainly not anything pertaining to *sniff* superheroes.

The art of the comic is in the created colloid of words and visuals to create a new thing that is more than the sum of its parts. I got my first taste when Thundering Monkey began using Poser to illustrate his favorite Cat-Tales moments. Then Dorothy Rose got me into the hard stuff when she took the first paragraphs of A Girl’s Gotta Protect Her Reputation to create a graphic novel-style prologue for the CT series. That brings us to last week’s addition to the fan art gallery. This breathtaking jewel from Remidar:

That, my friends, is the work of a true artist. See, for me, the art begins before pencil is touched to paper. It begins with the sensibility that chooses that precise psychological moment. “Just me, down here, with the bats.” That’s just… damn.

And that’s why this week, rather than make a big todo about the reception of Chapter 5 (which Joker is trying to take all the credit for, btw, despite the fact that it’s the messages on Selina’s voicemail generating all the buzz), I’d like us all to take a moment and drink a virtual toast to our favorite artists.

Words and pictures, guys. Words and pictures.

Chris Dee
www.catwoman-cattales.com
cattales.yuku.com
cattales.wikispaces.com

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Monday, January 11, 2010

This Week in Cat-Tales

So far, the new year is off to a good start for the catverse. Despite a full court press from RL in the last half of the week, I got the new chapter out, at last. Up to the last minute, I still hadn’t decided whether to present the Do No Harm conclusion as one chapter or two. It is long, which is harder to get away with online than it is on paper. You can bookmark a physical page. If you’re anal (and don’t mind crinkling the paper), you can even slide a paperclip on the exact line you left off on. Scrolling a webpage doesn’t work that way, and not everybody wants to read 20 pages in one sitting. Those were the reasons to slice the chapter in two. But the fact is, it is one chapter whether I published it that way or not. So I opted for honesty in presentation, and I’ll just have to make it up to readers some other time. (I did make an effort to get the pdf and Kindle awz files out asap. Those, at least, can be bookmarked.)

Scheduled the chat for a weekend afternoon this time around. The weekday evenings made for an interesting experiment, but the mailbag has spoken: mid-day EST accommodates the most timezones.

The week also saw another round of fan art updates. Thundering Monkey began a Batman calendar. Behold Mr. Freeze looking more like a Norman Rockwell figure than anyone who’s stared at the business end of a freeze ray would have thought possible…

And Honor Among Cats demonstrating once and for all that costuming is a form of artistic expression as much as drawing, singing, or dancing…

Also, while the new work has nothing to do with Cat-Tales, one of our own has released a new work: Random Equinox (of the latest CT fan tale WoZ) has just begun Accidental Hero of the Galaxy, set in the Mass Effect universe. I highly recommend. Even if you haven’t played Mass Effect, it’s a good read for any scifi or action buff.