Perusing my regular rotation of websites for news and geekiness this morning, I was ecstatic to come across a new review for Makeshift Miracle on Ain’t It Cool News’ Comic Column… scroll down to near the bottom:

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MAKESHIFT MIRACLE OGN
UDON Comics

Jim Zubkavich has made a wonderful surprise of a comic book. This stand alone story is a fantasy adventure that could entertain children as a cautionary tale, yet is intelligent enough to entertain adults. The story follows a young boy whose life is interrupted by a mysterious young girl falling from the sky. Not knowing what to do, this resourceful young man takes the girl home with him and all of a sudden his boring life becomes nothing but. This is a sensitive story about the development of identity and the sacrifices one must make in order to grow up. It is also an inspirational story about taking risks and making the best of what life has to offer. Calling this a “feel good” book has too many negative terms attached to it in this apathetical society we live in, but when I put this book down I felt just that. This tender read looks great too. The panels are animation cell quality and literally pop off the page. Each panel has a crisp three dimensional cartoony feel that gives the book a look all its own. – Ambush Bug

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A good start to my day.

My pal Eric Kim held the first (of hopefully many) Throwdown events on Saturday night. It was ridiculous and childish, which is why it kicked so much butt.

There’s hundreds of photos at the Flickr Photostream, but here are a few of my highlights:

Yay! I can finally talk about one of the secret projects we’ve worked on!

UDON artist Arnold Tsang contributed a custom-console paint job design to the Art of Wii website. If you’re Canadian and you head to that site and register, you could win one of 6 custom-painted Wii consoles.

I had a lot of fun working with Nintendo Canada and the Henderson Bas ad agency on this promotion. Both companies were excited to have us on board and enthusiastic about our design ideas.

Wii!

I owe Scott Robbins a pint or two for helping set the whole thing up. Thanks Scott!

Articles:
Blog TO
Kotaku
NOW Magazine
The Torontoist
Joystiq
comics 212

The Season 3 finale of Battlestar Galactica was like an acid-induced writing seminar titled “We Have No Fucking Clue What We’re Doing”.

Characters catching strains of a sitar-and-electric-guitar-squealing cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” in the walls of the ship, going so far as to actually spout lyrics from the song as lines of dialog. Just rereading that last sentence feels like I made that shit up, but that’s what actually happened – the show was spontaneously possessed by the spirit of Bollywood! Ending the episode with the same Watchtower cover tune blaring, full-on with lyrics drowning out the regular sound and voices was horrifying icing on the cake.

When Ron Moore says that he came up with these big plot twists “this season as I worked toward the finale” I can plainly say “No guff”. Massive screwy plot alteration midway through the season is exactly what it felt like – no forethought, no consistent threads and no over arching plan for the show. The sheer number of flaming hoops the writers will need to jump through to make any logic out of the 4 Cylons revealed in the finale is staggering. They bent their own story over a barrel. Even the actors seemed detached from the whole thing, losing their regular verve as they spouted lines that felt wildly out of place.

Just like the terrible “1 year in 10 minutes” end of Season 2, they jerked their audience sideways for the sake of doing it and sucked away any empathy I had for the cast. Shock endings can be great when they don’t feel completely random, pointless and out of step with everything else the show has presented up to that point.

Bob Dylan by way of Bollywood 80’s hair band rock… Seriously, did that actually happen? I’m still in shock.

Fantastic quote from Mike Mignola’s interview on Newsarama:

“My one piece of advice has always been, if I’m an example of anything, is that you take what you really want to do and you do it—then it is possible that it will work out. Thing’s aren’t always going to work out but I tell guys all the time—if you want to take a shot at something else just do one issue of a comic; like I did, you finish your Batman book then you say, ‘I’m going to do this one Hellboy mini-series and if it works out great and if it doesn’t work out—that’s fine; I took a year to do this thing now I’ll go back to drawing Batman or whatever.’ At least you took a shot at it.