Okay, so I mostly loved Spider-Man 3. I've always liked Sandman, but he was just spectacular here. I really felt for the guy. It was nice to see Venom, though his story was so brief. And I giggled when Gwen showed up wearing the classic hairstyle with the classic black hairband.

But here's what I hated.



Look at that. Yes, we all know Tobey McGuire wears a muscle suit under his Spidey outfit, if you're going to have his costume ripped, the skin that will be showing won't be Real Tobey. YBut why glue pieces of fake skin ON TOP OF the costume?!? Didn't they care how ridiculous it looked? Not only did the skin look completely fake and yellowy and rubbery, but those pieces of fake flesh looked like they were constantly threatening to fall off.

This might have been okay and maybe even desirably humourous in director Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series, but in a movie of this quality and expense (most expensive movie ever made), you'd think someone would have caught this on the set and fixed it, rather than give us the hokeyist costume effect since Captain America's rubber ears.

But other than that, the movie was great.

That's right. In one 24-hour binge period, I finished the monkey comic. It's done, after seven years. Go check it out!

http://kenten.com/comics/monkey

I also dug out some illustrations that I did for a French storybook project back in 2000. I've added some new accompanying text to fill in the gaps.

Read "Petit Singe"

For no reason at all, I redid the Chuck Loves the World part of the site, adding a random strip generator and merging the archives with the centre page, using the same basic "engine" I wrote in php for the sketchbook, pix, and Under the Bed sections.

I like php. It's so fun. Like old school Commodore 64/Apple II programming in BASIC. Ah, the memories...

I added a bunch of pictures to the pix section. Check it out if you feel like it. And comments are always welcome.

It's been a busy couple of days. Tonight I saw Frank Black in concert for the third time. Another excellent show. This time seeing him was different. Because I saw him with the Pixies a few times a couple of years ago, this time when I saw Frank Black standing up there singing Frank Black songs and even singing Pixies songs, this time I didn't squint and try to imagine that it's the Pixies on stage.

No, this time I just enjoyed Frank Black as Frank Black. Front and almost-centre, as usual.

Then yesterday, I fulfilled a three-year wish to see BodyWorlds, the touring show of real human bodies. I first learned about it when I saw a poster on the Subway in Tokyo on my last day in Japan. I could have gone, but it would have been a race across a city I didn't know very well, while Julie sat with our boxes at Tokyo Station, and then rush back in time to catch our flight back to Canada. So I passed.

A couple of years later, I saw a tiny skinless person on the cover of a Vancouver newspaper, and it was a full page article about BodyWorlds coming to Toronto. If it came to Toronto, I thought, it would have to come to Vancouver...

So here we are, more than a year later. And I finally got to see it. It's amazing how normal it was for everyone there, looking at dead human bodies in various states of dissection. Parents, children, seniors... by halfway through it's like we'd seen this kind of thing every day. The strangeness quickly wore off.

It was a fascinating experience. I recommend it to everyone, if you get the chance to go.

October already, huh? That must mean it's almost HALLOWEEN!

So tonight we went to Fright Nights at Playland, the amusement park here in Vancouver. How was it? Pretty spectacular. Like all of my best amusement park trips (Calaway Park near Calgary, Rusutsu between Sapporo and Niseko in Hokkaido, Japan, NinjaMura on the other side of Sapporo, etc), a little cold or wet weather makes it great. The crowds are kept low, and you have your run of the place.

So we explored the park on a drizzly, misty Wednesday night, with a crowd of about 400 when on busy days there's 5000. It makes the whole park creepier, with so few people milling about, and so many dark corners. And of course, the whole park was decked out in skeletons and zombies and corpses and graves and monsters.

There's five haunted houses this year, all full of actors in full costumes that pop out, yell at you, even chase you around with chainsaws. It's pretty neat, you can't help but have bolts of fear course through you.

The rides were great and the haunted houses even better, but a couple of the rides were shut down due to malfuctions or something. One of them was a new haunted ride called the Munchner, so that was sad, the other being the old wooden roller coaster, which runs without lights when it's running at all.

They shut the park down early due to weather, so we missed the haunted maze. If anybody goes, please tell me what I missed.

But yeah, amusement park plus haunted houses and spooky decorations? Awesome. I'll be there every year from now on.

Hooray! Someone has finally posted all of the 4-minute episodes of Popee the Performer, an animation from Japan that no one seems to have ever heard of (even IN Japan, because it just ran on this one little cable station).

Hooray for YouTube and js1541 (a Commodore 64 reference?), a Japanese dude who did all of the work posting these. Enjoy, and I recommend you watch them in order!

Click the image below to get to a page with all of the embedded episodes.



Enjoy!

... and what do I see? Usually there's a bunch of those yahoo widgets all over the desktop, like the daily Dilbert strip and the weather, what phase the moon is in, stuff like that. Here in Vancouver it's been ridiculously hot the past two weeks or so (can't wait for it to end), and every day I say to someone, "at least back on the prairies enduring this kind of heat would mean it climaxes in an evening thunderstorm, which both drops the temperature and entertains me like few things can. Here, though... just heat."

But what do I see on my desktop?

That's right, apparently it's supposed to be thunderstorming right now! Unfortunately, the sky is completely blue without a whisp of clouds in it, so I can only hope this isn't some weather reporting glitch and there's actually an angry back of cumulonimbus badboys coming over the hills from Abbotsford...

My widgets are also telling me it's a new moon today which you can see if you squint into the big black space above that thundercloud.

I'd better see at least one lightning fork like that tonight or I'll be very disappointed.

UPDATE: Turns out it was just a computer glitch. Twenty minutes later that weather forecast had been changed to "sunny".

After a few hours of finally finishing the design of the new character, I've finally added some more panels to the monkey comic.

Yes, that's right. There's finally some more monkey comic. And now the truth can be told. The reason I've left it this long (haven't touched it since May 2002) is because I just couldn't get that new character to fit with the simple design of the monkey and the bird. But after tinkering over the past week, I finally nailed it.

So go check it out! Hopefully I finish the climax of the story soon...

(And by soon, I don't mean 4 more years.)

So the Master Plan keeps evolving. Right now, my "To Do" list of projects looks like this:

- Under the Bed (300 page graphic novel)
- 3 years worth of comics if UTB is successful
- a half-hour animated Halloween special
- a half-hour animated winter special
- a 13-episode dramatic animated series
- a card/board game

and so on. Then there's the movie ideas, the novel trilogy, the multi-season animated series, the blah blach blah. All things I'd love to do before I die. (Most of those are projects I plan to attempt entirely on my own, while the rest will require a lot of other people, so they may never happen.)

So this week, during the cartooning classes at the summer arts camp in Coquitlam, while talking my usual nonsense with the kids, I stumbled upon yet another story idea. I haven't decided what it should be yet, but it might be another animated special, or else an illustrated story book. We'll see which way it decides to go.

But I clearly don't need another good idea for the rest of my life... My To Do list is already too full. Now I just need to get it ALL on paper before I get some debilitating head injury...

Anyway, hooray for the summer art camp!