I did a couple of drawings/paintings in preparation for a wood engraving. As I type this, the engraving is still in progress but, if all goes well, it will be part of an ongoing series of engravings based on Italian horror movies. This image is derived from the notorious scene in A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin which had the producers of the film having to prove to an Italian court that the dogs seen in the film were an effect and not real dogs.
After a very Geralt-centric novel, this fourth book in The Witcher series returns to the Ciri being the primary focus. She’s finally starting to become interesting. I still enjoyed it quite a bit but the shift of focus from section to section breaks the cohesiveness of the story.
The third book in The Witcher series brings the story back to the quality that was shown in the short story volumes. There really isn’t much development in the plot, but there’s less jumping around and we get to know a group of interesting characters over an extended period of time.
Thief 2 has not aged terribly well. I’m usually not one to complain about dated graphics, but in this case they affect the game. A core mechanic is hiding in the shadows, so when the game engine can barely render a shadow you’ve got a problem. I would plan my movements based on scurrying between dark areas only to discover that I would be running through a brightly lit hallway. There is probably a mod out there somewhere that fixes all this.
The guard AI is pretty janky too. Sometimes you could just clop around in your tap shoes and the enemies would be none the wiser, but then other times you’d turn your head and trigger their alerted state. Eventually I got used to just walking in a slow crouch all the time to avoid them.
There is a bit of a story here which is told as inter-level cutscenes. It’s not bad for what it is (sloppy amateurish art and all) but for some reason the main baddie is voiced in that Howie Mandel baby voice. So goofy.
A horror-comedy that takes aim at lampooning Italian giallo and horror films. It never quite nails the comedy part and is more concerned with simply recreating elements from the films of Fulci, Argento, and Martino. For example, it parodies the spider attack scene from The Beyond but there’s no joke other than, “Look spiders!” The sharpness of the digital filming kinda kills the vibe too. I’ll admit I chuckled two or three times but it mostly misses the mark and could have used a joke writer’s sensibility in the writing rather than a film buff’s.
This is another drawing I created for the Nox Archaist manual as part of their Kickstarter’s call for artwork. We were given a list of creatures from the game but I didn’t really have a specific one in mind when I drew this. I had labeled as a nightmare. They decided this worked better as a swamp dweller and worked some of my design choices in to the creature’s description:
What happens when a child prodigy detective like Encyclopedia Brown graduates out of schoolyard mysteries into solving real crimes? He becomes a washed-up alcoholic who can’t seem to do anything right. The Kid Detective plays mostly as a dark comedy but it is elevated my its tight plotting and smart screenplay. It skates the line between humor and a real mystery thriller perfectly.
A nice collection of works by Eric Ravilious. This isn’t too text heavy, but each print gets a few sentences of copy. Much of Ravilious’s work leans towards the decorative side, especially his later prints. There’s a bit of the stench of Eric Gill in those simpler images. I much prefer his earlier, more illustrative works. For what it’s worth, there are not many books about wood engraving out there so this one is a fine addition to any collection of books on the topic.
In keeping with animal themed giallos, this is also known as The Scorpion with Two Tails. I don’t know what the deal is with Etruscans and Italian screenwriters, but that particular lost civilization is not at all scary or threatening. All their sculptures are grinning men with permed hair. The acting in this one is simply appalling. I thought John Saxon would elevate it, but he is dead within the first five minutes. The rest of the film is supposedly carried by Elvire Audray who is embarrassingly bad as an archeologist who is also the reincarnation of an Etruscan priestess or something. The unique hook here is that the killer twists his victim’s heads 180 degrees. Sans-CGI this is accomplished by, wait for it, the actors wearing their clothes backwards. It’s the Kris Kross Killer!
This is the sort of book that I feel like I have read already but that is mostly because we devoted a class or two of high school English to this and The Odyssey. I was inspired to read this after having watched season two of Great Greek Myths which helped me keep all the characters straight. I can say that for a book that was written two thousand years ago, it’s pretty darn exciting. It is also quite graphic in its descriptions of violence. Homer knows all the places that a spear can penetrate a body. Some of the best moments in the story are when the gods are scheming against each other. On the negative side, there was way too much text is wasted on describing the complete lineage of just about every minor character who is killed. Also, no Trojan Horse! That’s like the one thing everyone knows from this story and it turns out it is not in this book. I feel a little ripped-off.
