Dagon (It’s Nearly Tuesday)*

Today however, is Cop-Out Monday! Nothing to report aside a craving for curry that’s verging on apocalyptic, and an evening spent reading teaching notes and H.P. Lovecraft, so in a tie-in that’s looser than Paris Hilton’s knicker elastic, here’s a cartoon I drew of fish-god Dagon and his favorite Eldritch Pillar™ from the Lovecraft story ‘Dagon’ (no really). Plus the French History of Art lecture-notes doodle that I based it off. It was a long lecture.

He looks shocked, because although they are not depicted here (due to their description-defying awfulness sending all those who gaze upon them careering into the frenzied abyss, gibbering through untold mental chasms of mad, cyclopean terror, and all that Lovecraftian hoo-hah), all the other Great Old Ones are making fun of his pillar. The sense of humour of unspeakably ancient and terrible universe-destroyers is, as one might guess, particularly mean.

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* I know, I know; I deserve to be shot for crimes against the punning community. I don’t even know if one exists, but if they do I’d appreciate it if you didn’t ever mention me to their Lovecraft chapter.

Nocturn Update

Today, I felt like I wanted to throw all subtlety to the wind and just pile a load of wild, fantastical ideas into Nocturn. That’s what comes from jumping ahead to less linear settings I suppose, as I did last week, writing a whole load from a story that leads on from the events in the Nocturn books. See, while the city and forest are – in my humble opinion of course – very rich environments in themselves, they are, by necessity in plot and theme, inwardly focussed and constricting. The story is about what happens to them – any ‘outside world’ is not explored. Which means that I’m always getting interesting, cool ideas that I can’t use because they don’t fit the setting yet.

While I feel like using them right away, I force myself to write them down in a seperate document, and put them aside. Their years will come!

The Nocturn editing’s still coming along, although it’s taking a lot longer than I thought – underestimated the amount of stuff that needed changing and polishing. The ending is still an incomprehensible mess, and I’m having difficulty decided exactly where to stop the novel; how much snuggling to do after the climax, if you will…

My aim was to have it ready to send to people to read by the beginning of August, and it’s looking less and less likely that it will happen. Not to worry though, it’s all necessary polish!

Also, I knocked up an abstract-y picture of Srin and the city that’s got a few meaningful strokes to it. What kinds of meanings? Well… that would be telling!

Times like this I wish I had a Wacom tablet for digital drawing, all I’ve got is me trusty mouse, which makes for pretty shaky pics. One day, when Nocturn has made me a wealthy man… 😉

Con Artists

My favourite artist Dan Luvisi has officially launched his Last Man Standing project, and has been at Comic-Con promoting. The website for it is wicked, mirroring the project’s retro candy-junkie videogame cool:

Last.Man.Standing Site

And sticking with that same retro-videogame theme for a bit, one of the biggest pleasant surprises from the Con seems to have been TRON 2. A massive viral experience has been getting people excited about the upcoming sequel, and they have an actual lightcycle there. Sweeet. This is the concept art:

And here’s the actual thing:

Pretty cool eh? The footage they’ve released to promote the film is also worth a watch, and you can do so here.

Slightly less interesting, but still worthy of note, is that…

Pirates of the Caribbean 4 starts filming next year, supposedly the first of a new trilogy with a plot that has been scaled right down from the ridiculousness that was the final part of the last one. And Gary Oldman has mentioned that the next Batman film will also begin filming next year, though Nolan hasn’t said that he’ll be directing it again yet, so who knows what could happen there…