What’s the plural of Kaiju? 

You know what’s been missing from the tried and true western genre? Monsters. Big stumpy monsters. Like Godzilla. Can you imagine a book that had a cool stoic western protagonist and tons of stomps monsters? Man, I wish there were more comics like that. I guess I’ll just have to make some. Well, that is to say Nick Diaz and I will have to make some.

Along with Action Hospital, my day job of writing commercials, and the screenplay I’m writing right now, I’m working on a Kaiju western with artist extraordinaire Nick Diaz.

Nick has done work for Archana and Moonstone in addition to drawing some comics for a middle eastern comics publisher. That’s right. Nick’s made comics in the middle east. How rad is that?

old west mustache, FOR THE WIN!

Anyway, Nick and I have put our heads together and are currently in the middle of creating a western/kaiju epic titled Creaturelands.

Just take a second and look over these character sketches. How good is Nick? How amazing are his monsters? Super pimp, right? Yeah, super pimp.

Nick and I are plugging along with Creaturelands. Hopefully, we’ll have some finished products to show you soon. Currently, Nick is about five pages away from finishing the first issue. We should be selling it to a publisher/setting it up as a webcomic/or whatever we’re going to do with it after that.

Nick is a work horse, man. You should see the detailed thumbnails that he sends me. His thumbnails are almost as impressive as his finished pages. The guy really puts his back into everything he produces.

I’m so thankful to have him as one of my collaborators.

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Action Possible and the Progress of the Hospital! 

Robert is still working on his layouts and I’m about 1/3 of the way through my Action Hospital script.

Writing comics is hard. Drawing comics is hard. Writing and drawing comics is like giving birth. You’re constantly questioning yourself. Why did I write this scene this way? Why did I set it in this location. I suck at drawing this location. Why didn’t I set it in a different location. What is my problem?!

Like I said: I’m a glutton for punishment.

That all being said, I’m pretty happy with the way things are progressing. I’m not hating the work I’m putting down on paper. I’m not unhappy with the script. I’m just slowly working through it. I’m hoping to have this all wrapped up next week so that I can move from the pencils to the inks.

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She Said With A Strangely Nasal Voice

My journey with the starship Voyager is progressing and I’m starting to Love/Hate it.

So far in the first five episodes the show seems obsessed with the idea of reflections. In theory this isn’t a bad idea. The concept of reflections serving as a visual metaphor for the fact that Voyager is the fourth tv show to carry on the legacy of the Star Trek legacy. The fact that these various franchise installments mimic and imitate each other is analogous to the reflections concept. It’s a really great idea for commenting meta textually on the various permutations that the franchise has gone through.

However, it’s pretty terrible in execution. Nearly each one of the first five episodes has dealt with a reflection of the Voyager in someway. For example, the Voyager drops out of warp due to a distress beacon from a ship trapped in the even horizon of a collapsing star. Eventually the crew figure out that the ship that they’re attempting to save is, in fact them. That they’re seeing a reflection of themselves across space and time. Cool idea right? Sort of. The show just misses each time. I don’t know if it was because famed Star Trek writer Brannon Bragga was primarily assigned DS9, which left Ron Moore do be the head writer  Voyager or if it this is just this is what happens with all Star Trek shows. They’re bad for like two or three seasons and then the writers figure the show out and BOOM. It’s amazing. I’m not sure.

All I know is that every episode of Voyager is brimming with potential and very few episodes have really excelled.

I’m keenly interested to see how they handle Commander Chakotay, the Native American first officer. At one point in the pilot one of the Star Fleet officers calls Chakotay an Indian and I cringed. It’s really hard to believe that a 24th century man would use that term to describe someone of indigenous birth.

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Alien? Anyone? Alien? 5 Points?

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Until Next Time,

Dave Baker

Hollywood, Ca 2013