123: Factions

Ian Jay on Dec. 12, 2007

Hey, guys! I'd say “sorry this one is late”, but I'm beginning to hold a sneaking suspicion that the only ones left reading TEO by now are the ones who don't really that much care about weekly deadlines. Either way, there's no real reason why it's late. I just kept procrastinating, I guess. Now that I've got it out, though, I want to make another one, and I want to draw a bunch of other things, too, so I guess I must be getting my momentum back. Which is always good. (Also, regarding the page's subject matter: I based TEO2 around the whole “conspiracy” idea, but I didn't want Walt, Lloyd and Dexy all fighting against Séile Corp– that'd reduce the whole thing to a “good guys vs. bad guys” deal, and that I definitely didn't want. So Walt fights against the elves directly, Dexy fights to the advantage of the elves, and Lloyd is sort of neutral– while the elves think of him as an opponent, he's really just reacting to events that occur out of his control. Don't tell me I'm making this crap up as I go along, although to be perfectly honest about maybe half the time I am.)

New York City was fun. Cold, though. We saw the usual tourist attractions– Times Square, Central Park, Macy's, Rockefeller Center (choked with people– and if I've said it before I'll say it again: the skating rink there is always much, much smaller and mankier than you'd imagine it to be), the Empire State Building (although a ninety-minute wait and Jilly's friend Britney's acute fear of elevators prevented us from going to the top… pansies), and even the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (a DEFINITE MUST-SEE, readers, especially with their current feature exhibit on webcomics– plus I picked up a copy of Maxwell Strangewell in the gift shop for half-price). It's the height of the holiday shopping season, so all the fancy stores and buildings were festooned with lights and wreaths and ribbons and spangles and elves and snowmen and frolicking reindeer and nutcrackers and presents and ornaments and candles and chestnuts and sleighs and bells and fruitcake and all that other bullshit. One thing I found odd that I hadn't noticed on any of my other trips to New York was how many people there wear fur coats, and how many stores devoted to furs they have. I hail from middle-class suburbia, where people who wear furs are seen as either a) incredibly eccentric or b) evil incarnate, so it was weird to just see people walking around wearing gigantic fur coats without getting strange looks from others. (And yet I did get a couple comments from random people on my rather tame-looking earflap hat. Strange.) Afterwards we went to the Polish Quarter in Brooklyn, where we ate pierogis and goggled at how many signs we couldn't read. All in all, an enjoyable trip.

This journal has already gone on way too ridiculously long, so in conclusion, the music video for Jose Gonzalez's single “Killing For Love”. I knew about this song for a while, and I've been a fan of Jim Woodring for a while as well, but I only found out about this video, the visuals of which are loosely adapted from one of Woodring's comics, very recently. (The only major difference being that, in the video, Manhog doesn't slice the skin off his own leg with a carving knife and slather the bloody muscles beneath with silver paint. But I guess I can see why they changed that.)

Sincerely,

Ian Jay