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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
qwelogian's LiveJournal:
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| Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 | | 11:36 pm |
| | Monday, June 8th, 2009 | | 6:37 pm |
How To Stuff A Metal Bikini!
Evidence presented herein clearly indicates that the Hyborian Age might be more accurately called the "Silicone Age". Here are sketches from last Thursday's "Frazetta Girl" session at the Drawing Club. For the baffled, Frank Frazetta is the artist whose work defined the mythic world of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian, and the demi-monde of barbarian women in general.  The stunning (and somewhat startling) Marla Trudine aptly portrayed a certain raven-tressed Hyrkanian She-Devil With A Sword (Did Frazetta every actually paint Red Sonja? I don't think so). Some days its good to live in Hollywood. Deferring to those of you employment-impaired, click behind the cut to see more of her. ( Read more )Check out http://www.thedrawingclub.com/blog for work by the many other fine artists who were at the session. © 2009 Jim Wheelock. All Rights Reserved. | | Monday, May 25th, 2009 | | 9:02 pm |
| | Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 | | 4:30 pm |
| | Monday, March 30th, 2009 | | 8:21 pm |
| | Saturday, March 7th, 2009 | | 10:25 pm |
Tomb Raiding...
In an effort to accomplish something today, here's a post with drawings from another recent session at The Drawing Club. Lara Croft was the theme. Girls with guns, guys with swords. Is there some kind of a pattern? More art by me and others at http://www.thedrawingclub.com/blog.   © 2009 Jim Wheelock. All Rights Reserved. | | Monday, February 23rd, 2009 | | 5:19 pm |
Do You Like Gladiator Movies?
The theme at The Drawing Club was the movie 300. I'm really please with some of my results.     It was a crowded session, and there was a lot of great drawing done. Take a look at what the other folks did (and see a few more of mine) at http://www.thedrawingclub.com/blog. I should point out that Bob Kato, who runs the thing, does a great job photographing the work at the end of the night. I nick his pics to use here because they look better than my scans. © 2009 Jim Wheelock. All Rights Reserved. | | Friday, February 20th, 2009 | | 11:55 pm |
London Snow Again...
A couple more shots from my snowy night in Russell Square a couple of weeks ago.  In retrospect it was one of the highlights of my trip. Maybe I've just been in southern California too long.  I guess another © notice would be redundant. | | Thursday, February 5th, 2009 | | 6:05 pm |
Snow This Is England...
I got off the Chunnel train coming from Angoulême Sunday night, and found London more of a Charles Dickens theme park than usual... very DOCTOR WHO period episode-ish.  I had a lot of fun taking pictures in the storm. In a couple days, I've gone from relatively warm, sunny Angoulême to blizzardly London to currently soggy, rain-swamped Los Angeles. More pics and words from London and the Angoulême comics festival to come when I finish licking my travel wounds. ©2009 Jim Wheelock. All Rights Reserved. | | Sunday, January 18th, 2009 | | 9:56 pm |
The Pulp Detective!
More drawings from a recent session at The Drawing Club. This time the model was my neighbor Andy Flaster, who's usually somewhat less menacing looking when I run into him at the Mayfair Market. Check out the other artists'fine work at http://www.thedrawingclub.com/blog.      I found Andy's poses suggested a sequential narrative structure a lot more that some models' do, although I cheated and a couple of these are not shown in the actual real-life time sequence. ©2008 Jim Wheelock. All Rights Reserved. | | Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 | | 4:00 pm |
Arts and Leisurliness...
Wrapping up the year, here are some life drawings that I've been meaning to post. First a triptych from a Late Nite Workshop I attended earlier in the month. I got there late and wound up in an awkward drawing position, but I'm happy with the results.  For those of you who worry about such things, I'm putting a sketch from an earlier Late Nite session underneath the cut. Don't get too excited, it's just artzy nudityness underneath... ( Read more ) Cheers for the New Year! © 2008 Jim Wheelock. All Rights Reserved. | | Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 | | 1:38 pm |
26 Dogs of War -- WALTZ WITH BASHIR and the Dreams of Soldiers
 I saw Ari Folman’s WALTZ WITH BASHIR in Santa Monica on Christmas night, days before the Israeli bombs began dropping on Gaza again. The rush of history adds an edge to the already brilliant film about a soldier’s complicity in what his army does -- or doesn’t -- do. WALTZ WITH BASHIR is an animated documentary in Hebrew (with subtitles), which places it simultaneously in all three of the Academy Awards’ top ghettos. It opened in LA and New York on the 25th for an Oscar bid. It appears to have been knocked out of the documentary category by a rule that requires its entries to have had theatrical runs in the U.S. much earlier in the year, so if BASHIR makes it to the Academy show, it will most likely be in the Best Foreign Language Film section. BASHIR opens with the dream of a former soldier haunted by exactly 26 dogs that pursue him every night in his sleep, and goes on to examine the dreams of other veterans of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The director Folman, himself, is searching for the meaning of his own recurring dream -- and the answer to why he can’t remember anything from his own time in the war. It’s a classic Freudian Odyssey made up of interviews with fellow ex-soldiers, newscasters and psychiatrists. The combat dreams and fantasies are often both beautiful and terrifying at the same time. The film only breaks out of animation once -- a move I consider to be a mistake, but not a fatal one for the film.  BASHIR’s style of animation is very much in the tradition of modern alternative comics and graphic novels, with the animation adding levels of observation and perception that wouldn’t be there in a conventional filmed documentary. The artwork has the look of what I think of as the modern “international” style of comic art, a kind of thick brush-stroked variation on the classic Franco-Belgian “ligne claire” style. BASHIR is much more of a “comic book movie” in a positive sense than, say, THE SPIRIT. It reminds me some of Emmanuel Guilbert’s W.W. II memoir, ALAN’S WAR, as well as David B.’s highly personal dream imagery. Two artists, Asaf and Tomer Hanuka, seem to have developed much of the film’s look. Check out some of their work on it at: http://tropicaltoxic.blogspot.com/2008/05/waltz-with-bashir-animated-documentry.htmlThe official website is: http://waltzwithbashir.comAnd here’s the trailer: In short, go see it -- in a theatre if you can. It probably will be getting a wider release in the U.S. in the next few months. Track it down. WALTZ WITH BASHIR is distributed in the U.S. by Sony Pictures Classics. The Match Factory appears to be the copyright holder. © 2008 Jim Wheelock. All Rights Reserved. | | Sunday, December 21st, 2008 | | 11:01 pm |
A Very Cthulhu Christmas!!
 Some year's you've just got to draw a monster -- and boy, has this been one of those years! My effort here is (very) loosely based on the works of classic horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, because, well, what says the Holiday Season more than H.P.L.? Hopefully you'll enjoy it even if you don't get the references. For those of you just coming in, my one concession to the holiday season is creating a "card" which I send out by e-mail, except for one or two printed copies. If I know you personally, you should have gotten this by now. If you didn't, I probably have an old e-mail address, or one you don't look at much, so please update me. The only people intentionally dropped from the list were several producers who screwed me over this year. I've been doing political cards the last few years, and I tried to find an idea for one this year, I didn't really feel like kicking the Lame Duck again, as much as he deserves it, while the Obama administration hasn't actually started yet. Both the wonderful shoe-throwing incident in Iraq and the Clinton/Kennedy families' conflict over the New York Senate seat happened after I'd completed this card, or they might have been decent cartoon fodder. The best idea I came up with depicted Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer arming the Alaskan Caribou with chopper-killer missiles (CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR-style) in time for Sarah Palin's Helicopter Caribou Hunting Season, but happily she'd already faded from the limelight. It probably would have worked, but, like I say, it's been a Cthulhu kind of year. This idea was also kind of inspired by the Scientologists' annual co-opting of old St. Nick in Hollywood. © 2008 Jim Wheelock. All Rights Reserved. | | Friday, December 5th, 2008 | | 9:10 pm |
4SJ Ackerman -- The Late, Great Creature
I've been looking for some reason to blog for a while. Unfortunately, this is it. Forrest J. Ackerman (Forry, 4SJ, Dr. Acula) has left the auditorium, having just achieved his 92nd birthday. He started about a million of us on our very strange life journeys. I wrote this letter to him when Ain't It Cool News first published that he was going into his final descent from orbit.
November 3, 2008
Dear Forry,
This is a note of thanks and appreciation to your for all the influence you’ve had on my life. The SPACEMEN magazine I bought when I was ten years old started me on my path of wonderful ruination. Your tutelage in those pages and in FAMOUS MONSTERS led me on my lifelong journey to see all the rare films you wrote about: HIGH TREASON, FLOATING PLATFORM #1 DOES NOT REPLY come to mind, and, of course, METROPOLIS, which remains one of my favorite films of all time. Thanks to you, I tracked those films down and saw them, along with so many more. I became a writer, artist and filmmaker in the process and that is why I owe you so much thanks.
I count myself fortunate to have met you on several occasions: once by accident in a hotel in New York, a few times at conventions, and the time I toured the wonderful Ackermansion a decade ago.
You changed my life, as you did so many others, and you’ll always be a hero of mine.
Thanks for everything, Forry. You’re in my thoughts.
With love,
Jim Wheelock
Horrorwood, Karloffornia
AICN has an excellent piece at: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/39346. It includes a letter Forry wrote a while back contemplating his end that is a heartbreaker.
Wally Wood did this cover for the 1965 and only SPACEMEN ANNUAL. Probably © Warren Publishing.
© 2008 Jim Wheelock. All Rights Reserved
| | Friday, November 7th, 2008 | | 7:32 pm |
Some Perspective...
 ...from the often brilliant South African comic strip, MADAME & EVE by Stephen Francis and Rico. I've been a fan since I saw some originals in Angoulême a decade or so ago. Read it at http://www.madamandeve.co.za/Strip ©2008 Rapid Phase | | Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 | | 3:14 am |
Tonight...
Tonight we go to sleep knowing we're a better country than we thought we were this morning. ©2008 Jim Wheelock. All Rights Reserved. | | Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 | | 9:25 pm |
"Man on the Moon"
I liked it when Keith Oberman said: "It's Man on the Moon". He nailed it. It's that big. | | 12:07 am |
WHUPP 'IM GOOD!!
 This frame from Tom Neely's great "Obama vs. McCain" strip sums it up for me. See the whole skirmish at http://www.iwilldestroyyounews.blogspot.com. I'm a big fan of Tom's work. He channels the Popeyed Segar/Fleisher studios style into a fine art mode. Check out his excellent graphic novel, THE BLOT and his tribute comic for the hipster band, the Melvins. His use of large sequential images in gallery art -- in particular his werewolf series -- is some of the most exciting stuff out there. Art ©2008 Tom Neely. All Rights Reserved. My stuff ©2008 Jim Wheelock. All Rights Reserved. | | Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 | | 11:50 pm |
| | Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 | | 4:47 pm |
The Crime Scene Photographer!
Here are some drawings from last Thursday's session at the Drawing Club. The set-up was more difficult for me than some, featuring things I have a rough time "seeing", like eyeglasses, the old camera, and that damn 1940's hat. As one of the other artists said, there was "a lot of information there". If anything, it was a good learning experience. Take a look at the other folks' fine work at http://www.thedrawingclub.com/blog.    As usual ©2008 Jim Wheelock. All Rights Reserved. |
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