(Yoda sketch by Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening)
If you are still in awe over Fantagraphics Web Editor Mike Baehr’s Yoda Sketchbook featuring drawings from comic book icons such as Daniel Clowes, Lynda Barry, Tony Millionaire, Adrian Tomine, Gilbert Hernandez, Craig McCracken, and Mary Fleener, get ready to be impressed further.
Looks like Mike has some more amazing portraits of Yoda to add to the collection, and are now up on his Flickr set for our viewing pleasure. I met Mike face to face at this year’s Alternative Press Expo (APE) in San Francisco, and got to see the sketchbook in person. And let me just say it’s packed with truly creative renditions of our favorite Jedi Master!
Mike writes:
I’ve got the APE Yodas scanned and uploaded, including Matt Groening (WOO HOO) and a bunch of other great ones (Tom Neely: CRAZY; Lilli Carre: GORGEOUS) plus, fresh from last night, Bill Griffith (it’s a hybrid Yoda/Zippy)!
Check out the new Yoda portraits here:
Yoda convention sketchbooks
(Yoda/Zippy Sketch by Bill Griffith)
While some people think of November as a month full of good food and holiday shopping, some of us are hunched over our laptops attempting to write a novel in 30 days. November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for short). NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty started the group to inspire would-be authors to quit talking about writing the next Great American Novel, and just do it. Participants attempt to write 50,000 words of an entirely new novel, with little or no planning — all in one month!
For those fans who want to be the next Matthew Stover, Aaron Allston or Timothy Zahn, this is a great opportunity to work on your writing chops and have a support group of fellow NaNoWriMos to cheer you on.
io9.com chats with Chris Baty and gets some advice for sci-fi writers who want to try their hand at penning a book in a month.
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Found on eBay, this entire set of Clone Wars toys signed by Lucasfilm Animation artists and staff. Signatures include: Supervising Director Dave Filoni; Series Directors Giancarlo Volpe, Brian Kalin O’Connell, and Steward Lee; Designers Darren Marshall, Killian Plunkett, and Russell Chong; and many, many others.
Proceeds to benefit the Heifer Foundation.
Check out the auction here:
Star Wars Clone Wars TV Act Figs- SIGNED – FOR CHARITY (eBay.com)
One of my favorite newsstand mags to browse is Popular Science, leading the way for some of the better and more fascinating subjects you can read and digest in a short period of time. Every year they name their favorite new things we can spend our paychecks on – and the list is, quite often, a geeks dream.
This year is no different, with things from OLED Televisions to sub-woofers for your seat gracing the pages. A personal pick is the new Onkyo Receiver. The ability to adjust color and brightness before the video signal hits your television is any videophiles fantasy.
Not to be left out, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, thanks to the brilliant physics and AI engine within (DMM and Euphoria respectively), made this years list. As the award exclaims, videogame players finally get a tactile sensation they are effecting physical objects, and actually hurting Stormtroopers. We’re flattered for the award, and our thanks goes out to PopSci.
Graeme McMillan at io9.com makes a fan plea to bring back the Nagai into the Star Wars lexicon. He has some interesting points to make about the Nagai and their ilk.
For those who have no idea what I’m talking about — which is more than likely the majority of you, unless you happened to be around ten years old in the mid-80s — the Nagai were a bunch of bad guys introduced in the dying days of Marvel Comics’ Star Wars series in the hope that they could replace the Empire as the main hive of villainy of the franchise post-Return Of The Jedi. It didn’t work, for a number of reasons — not least of which was the cancellation of the comic, forcing a somewhat awkward end to the story that showed that, hey, that warlike race wasn’t so warlike after all and just wanted to join the Alliance and hold hands in the end — but the potential was such that, almost quarter of a century later, I want to see more of these albino aliens. And soon, so will you.
Graeme reminds fans of a few interesting tidbots about the long-gone comic baddies like the fact that Chewbacca’s brother-in-law consorted with the Nagai to kidnap Chewie’s son Lumpy, and that they’ll recruit any slimeball wanting a job, and they often say “drats!” when in retreat.
Read more here:
Bring Back Star Wars’ Second Best Bad Guys (io9.com)