More fun characters hot off the pencil tip today from D (iego) C (omics)!!
This new super group is called The High Five.
Which one is your favorite?
I'm secretly hoping that Ska-doosh gets his own series (and maybe even a theme song, or a sidekick, or a henchman)!
These days anything seems possible!
Enjoy!
william
Move over, Stan Lee.
There is a new kid in town, with a vivid imagination and a seemingly endless supply of new superheroes and super villains to people his own cartoon universe.
Today's all-star team up is called The Nova Nine, and the members include:
A-Grow
Boost
The Ringtail
Sizeo
Man-Flame
High-Volt
The Anialatior
The Constrictor
Tony Jackstone
Diego is having a blast hand drawing these beautiful pictures and has become something of a factory for new characters daily.
Stay tuned, fans! Look for the "made up by Diego Horberg" credit as the sign for quality comic entertainment!
DC is the new name for Diego Comics.
Enjoy!
william
I first visited LA's famous Farmer's Market on Fairfax and 3rd Street in the mid-70's and it had already been going strong for almost 40 years at that point. It remains one of our favorite places in town and although diminished in footprint from what it once was before it was tucked into a corner of The Grove, it's still a small oasis of preservation of the past amidst the ocean of physical change and transformation that defines SoCal culture.
I found this vintage book of colorful illustrations and photos in a thrift store all the way in Woodstock, N.Y. of all places. Wonder how it got there?
According to the book, the market was the brainchild of one Roger Dahljelm back in the midst of the Great Depression, who took the notion to a friend named Fred Beck, an ad man, and Beck sold the concept to Earl Gilmore who owned a big farm including the tract of land that the current market sits on. The market will be 80 years old this summer, so I guess it was a pretty solid idea after all.
David Hollander wrote a wonderful play once called The Sun Diaries about a group of regulars, free lance script readers and analysts for the studios and independent producers, who meet at the market and kibbitz and trade horror stories about their low level wanna-be creative jobs. The conceit of the play is that, as expected and desired by the system, one reader has read and covered close to a thousand screenplays without ever recommending a single one. But to his dismay, he is reading a script that he loves, knowing that his recommendation could force his boss to actually have to read the thing, and perhaps cost him his job. It was a wonderfully droll piece of humor and so familiar and true to those of us who started in the business as readers and used the farmer's market as our office!
I have some great old color photos from the book to scan and share with you next.
Enjoy!
william
The holidays were a fun escape for many reasons, but one of the pleasures of the season was the discovery of the 60's channel on the XM radio in our rental car.
At Elsa and Natalie's insistence, we stayed tuned to 60's on 6, and put the pedal to the metal cruisin' the Hudson River Valley to the sounds of famous and one-hit-wonder tunes from my childhood.
While the songs were almost all familiar, many of the names of these groups were lost to the fog of time in my memory, so it was also fun to look them up and reconnect to these lesser known performers of the era.
Check out the chart below:
The Spiral Starecase? The Blues Magoos?
Can you connect the group to the song they made famous, and name that tune?
Enjoy!
william
Me: That's amazing. Who is that a drawing of?
Natalie: That's a picture of Diego's best friend.
Me: Diego, who is your best friend?
Diego: Natalie!
william
Looking back on 2013, among many adventures and highlights, this will always be a year defined by the special privilege I had to be able to take my ten year old daughter on her first trip to Paris!
With a bit of spare time over the winter break I was finally able to pen and ink my droll comic tribute to that memorable adventure.
Enjoy!
william
Natalie is amazing.
For Christmas she made a series of small original drawings with color markers for Elsa and me.
Each one is the cat dressing up in costume as different characters. We love them!
Can you name them all?
Which one is your favorite? We are partial to the Napoleon Dynamite Cat ourselves!!!
Enjoy!
Happy holidays.
william
Just back from a wonderful week in Paris with Natalie! Lots of walking, both at our option and by necessity.
Have any of you had this experience?
Enjoy!
william
There was something both surprising and ultimately gratifying when I stumbled across this pop culture artifact at the Japan/LA store this week - a Ryan Gosling coloring book! And lo and behold, a drawing from one of my favorite movies that I had the privilege to be part of making.
I guess seeing Lars and Bianca wind up as a line drawing in a coloring book is a testament to some kind of lasting imprint in our cultural consciousness, even if it is hard to imagine what a kid would make out of the two of them?!?
With just a hint of her wheelchair-bound status in the line drawing but nothing to really reveal to the uninitiated the plastic doll that lies underneath the wig and sweater, Nancy Oliver's brilliantly original creation and Lars' instrument of love and therapy has been reduced to this simple iconic image for posterity.
Thought you might enjoy printing it out and coloring it in - if you have the DVD of Lars and The Real Girl you can even try to match the color palette as chosen by costume designer Kirston Mann!
Enjoy!
william
Of all the cool stories in Chicago-based cartoonist Chris Ware's amazing new big over-sized box collection of "Building Stories", this one in particular jumped out at me:
Our film of the same general theme and title but different story "Disconnect" does not open until April, but it was fun to see "great minds think alike" and find this disconnect/connection with an artist whose work I have always admired.
For a pretty great review of the film "Disconnect" from our Toronto Film Festival premiere click here!
Enjoy!
william
