Rocket Bomber - linking to other people's stuff

You want a quote-civilian’s-unquote perspective on SDCC?
NPR has you covered:

Caped Crusaders Descend On San Diego
Comic Convention Draws Record Crowds
Librarians Harvest New Manga Titles At Comic-Con

As might be expected from radio, the articles linked above are just to whet your appetite; there is close to 8 minutes of audio split amongst the three reports (two 3 and 1/2 minute stories and the first short teaser).

And the NPR stories led me to KPBS based out of San Diego — now here is a damn fine use of your pledge-break dollars: KPBS set up a Comics Con Blog with local reportage, embedded video, images, and a fair amount of coverage:

the KPBS Comics Con News Blog

I’m not sure I want to be there, in point of fact, but between Comipress and Ms. McDonald and Comics212’s flickr stream and the KPBS blog linked above, I know that yes, in fact, SDCC is one damn big con.

KPBS might be a link to save for next year (and the year after, and…) as CCI has a contract that keeps them in San Diego up through 2012.

I not only listen to NPR, I visit its website on a regular basis. (this makes me ineligible for Republican Party Membership in at least 3 states)

The latest gem found there is actually from Thursday, but it took me a few days to pick up on it:

as part of NPR’s ongoing Summer Books 2008 series, Glen Weldon has pulled together a neat little roundup of recent (well, within the past year or so) ‘real’ books that play off of, celebrate, twist, or chronicle the comic book phenomenon for the civilian populace.

You could do much, much worse than to just read the whole damn list in order.

On the one hand, I could claim the banner as my own work (which of course it is, in the sense that a well trained monkey can cut-and-paste with the best of them, and so can I) but in providing due credit to the sculptor Hans van Bentem [*sigh*, like most artistes he insists on flash for his site; be warned] for his robot statue (that’s the 4th image right-to-left) it occurred to me that I should probably credit all the source photos.

It just took me a while to track all the breadcrumbs (or search blindly until I could rediscover sources) but if one were to glance to the sidebar immediately left, one might discover that it is awfully bottom-heavy at the moment with — while not up to legal or academic standards, still a better-than-average web attempt — actual citations

If you feel you are the owner of one of the said images (and in the case of the Soviet stuff, hell, I might take you to court just for kicks — I’m fully prepared to cite Marx & Lenin on the record in a court of law, in the face of your greedy grab for someone else’s work done under the guise of collective ownership for a country that technically doesn’t exist anymore, unless you’re the original artist which would be cool and in that case I’d take you to court just to meet you face to face and shake your hand) drop me an email at matt [at] rocketbomber [dot] com and after verification, I’ll remove your image (and the free link at left, and the free publicity, that you’re getting for free) and replace it something even cooler. Your loss, dude.

Not much more to it than that, actually: I just wanted to point you to this NPR piece featuring Matt Madden and Jessica Abel and their new book, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures

Pitched as a college-level text rather than just another how-to-draw book, it looks like Abel & Madden have put together a fine book — and it has certainly been selling like gangbusters over on Amazon the past couple of weeks (which you could see on my Manga Top 500, if I had posted it. The data entry—the time sensitive part—is done, I just need to churn a weeks worth of numbers; strike that: two weeks worth of numbers.)

In addition to the audio, NPR also put up a short article on the authors and a snippet from the book, tips on drawing from a photo.