hughtron

What’s the black pres. thinkin’ on election night
Is it how can I protect my life?
Protect my wife?
Protect my rights?
Every other president was nothin' less than white
Except Thomas Jefferson a mixed Indian blood
and Calvin Coolridge
KKK is like 'what the f--k', loadin' they guns up
loadin' mine too,
Ready to ride
Cause im ridin with my crew
He dies - we die too
But on a positive side,
I think Obama provides Hope - and challenges minds
Of all races and colors to erase the hate
And try and love one another, so many political snakes
We in need of a break
Im thinkin' I can trust this brotha
But will he keep it way real?
Every innocent n---a in jail - gets out on appeal
When he wins - will he really care still?

Black President - Nas

Man so I am stoned pretty much all the time now.

I fell over on Sunday morning in the kitchen feeling the most incredible pain sensations, which turned out to be a Kidney Stone passing though. It hasn't come out yet, so for the last week I've been high non-stop on painkillers. I can hardly read, when I close my eyes I get the funniest daydreams and I've done nothing but play X-box and watch Battlestar Galactica. I'm also really cranky all the time. It is awful and I just want it to end.

2007 is nearly over can you believe it I cannot!

Every year people who can write things better than I tend to make up top tens or 'best ofs' or what have yous. I don't have the willpower or memory to whittle a list down to ten items, and I don't really think that anybody reads this anyway, but nevertheless I have decided to make my

HUGH-TRON's BEST AND FAVORITE COMICS THAT HE READ IN 2007:

Some of these probably came out in 2006, but I don't think I can remember for sure. This is more for my benefit than anything, to organize my thoughts. I'm sure I will forget some things. That is the way of it. I am going to be brief, unless something was incredible.

Death Note: Uh, I read this, and it was pretty good. The art was fun? I pretty much forgot about it the second I finished reading it though.

Jeff Smith's Shazam Miniseries: It was really fun looking, and at one point he drew a cat's star hole, so he gets bonus points for that. This was fun and full of 'whimsy' and obviously it looked fantastic. I'm much more excited for RASL, which is Smith's big project coming out next year.

Casanova: This comic is the best thing ever. I love it to bits and I bought it twice because I hate having money for any period of time. The book is genius and the art (drawn by TWINS!) is gorgeous. Maybe my favorite thing. I don't have words for it, but there are spies and robots and such.

Batman Year One Hundred: Paul Pope Paul Pope Paul Pope

Pulphope: Paul Pope Paul Pope Paul Pope Paul Pope is neat although I've only read a couple of books by his because the rest are out of print so really I am a bit of a Paul Pope poser. Did you know he did the storyboarding for the Cavilier and Klay movie? (I didn't even know they were making a movie!)

Tekkon Kinkreet: The movie looked really great, and the comic looked completely different but the same. I'm quickly running out of steam to describe these things. This one book is probably better than everything else on the whole list though.

TEZUKA: I bought a whole bunch of books by Osamu Tezuka this year, and the ones that really stand out to me are the SUN volumes of Phoenix and Ode to Kirihito. Next year: BUDDHA!

Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together: This book is kind of a big deal, even if the author is a big jerk. (haha no he isn't he's a pretty nice dude and one time we made fun of Joel Plaskett) The art looks great and I want some money so I can buy pages from it. I will hang them on the walls.

The Plain Janes/Street Angel: I got both of these this year and I think they are both GREAT! even if the Plain Janes is not aimed at me at all. Jim Rugg is a handsome gentleman and he slings ink like you would not believe. Except that my Street Angel book had not much glue and it FELL APART and so I can't read it now!

Daisy Kutter: I bought this and it looks really nice. Amulet is out now too, maybe? Anyway, Kazu draws good.

Pop Gun War: Farel Dalrymple! New York City! INK! Okay I am really running out of things to say now.

Drifting Classroom: Lord of the Flies meets uh, a lot of crazy blood and time travel? Probably my favorite manga.

Sharkknife/King City/Multiple Warheads/Wonton Soup: These guys all live together and these books are all kind of similar. I like them all. King City is the best one. It is so good. How good? Really good. The wonton soup guy is like 22. That makes me pathetically jealous.

Pirates of Coney Isalnd: Day glo art and some fighting and cars and blood and gangs. Really great. How many times will I say great in this post? A THOUSAND I HOPE (PS The Last Call was pretty great too)

Shortcomings: i'm totally an Adrian Tomine poser. This is the first thing by him I've actually owned myself. He draws pretty, and is funny. I asked for his art book for christmas!

Sexy Voice and Robo: Nancy Drew meets Japanese Art Comics. Funny and beautiful and poingant and everything nice and right with comics.

American Born Chinese: Did this even come out in 2007? I don't know! It was good though! I liked it! You should read it! All hail Gravey, my cat. She is very cute.

OKAY THAT IS ALL I CAN DO FOR NOW I AM SORRY THIS IS SO LONG BUT ALSO SHORT AND ALSO AWFUL SORRY FOR EVERYTHING

NEXT: Things I want to read in 2008!

This is a thing from my sketchbook:



I am trying to work on my art, but it isn't working! Sorry about that, people who might have accidently added me to their friends pages! Now you have to look at some things I've sketched! I'll put the others under the cut, to be considerate.

Some other thoughts:

1) There is this Dark Knight trailer out there now, but who cares really? Honestly my favorite part of the whole thing was when Morgan Freeman and Bruce Wayne are all smiling and happy. I'd love to watch a movie about smiling Bruce Wayne.

(AFTER REWATCHING: I also like smiling Maggie Gyllenhaal! Maybe the third movie will be everybody getting along and having a fun party!)

2) That comic is pretty much never going to get posted because I hate it now. Sorry, The Internet!

3) I watched a bunch of videos on YouTube tonight, in honour of the storm. They were of cars sliding around and crashing on ice! They were awful and the act of watching them, alternating between cackles and "OH NO OH MY GOSH THOSE POOR PEOPLE", has made me into an awful person.

4) My wife needs to come home soon because Brazil is far away and look at what is happening to me! I am watching car crash ice storm videos on Youtube!

5) Man, the reason that Tezuka could draw like a hundred pages a day is that he didn't have the internet to occupy all his time with terrible time wasters.

I have decided to try to ink this comic, and it is not going so great, so that is why it is not here. Sorry. Soon, children, soon.

I had a million different things I wanted to discuss, and I forgot them all. Here are some things.

1) Oh That Speed Racer trailer: Oh this looks so great. I really want it to be as bad and nutty as the trailer makes it seem like its going to be. Also: I should start wearing a little scarf, I think.

2) The Current had a news story today: About this church in the Lower East Side of Vancouver. They were helping out street workers and giving them shelter and food and support and then the church congregation decided that the best/most Christian thing to do would be to kick out the pastor and throw all the prostitutes' clothing in the garbage! AWESOME! WWJD DUDES!

3) Look at this comic. It is a good great comic. If I could make something as awesome as this I would die happy.

4) Jennifer is in Brazil: She has some pictures on Facebook, if you can see those things. They make me feel very jealous and I wish I could be there. The kitties are going crazy, but I can't tell if that's because they miss her or because Gravey has Brain Damage.

more if I think of it....

I found 300 to be kind of disappointing when I saw it, to be honest. It wasn't crazy enough!

Like, if you're going to make this right-wing crazy-fest, take it to the limit. The politics of the movie were kind of wacky, but they could have been wackier! And the action could have been crazier! I wanted like guys flying through the air and killing a million people and blood EVERYWHERE.

If I had made that movie it would have been a discussion of how great facism is and how you have to fight FIGHT FIGHT for freedom and only the strong are good and it is totally great and worth it for all the soldiers from your country to die in the name of freedom and then the Spartans would have like punched people's heads off and thrown their swords like boomerangs and junk. Probably the king would have survived too.

ALSO: The best part of the Golden Compass is everything with the bear in it. It is not often enough that the primary focus of the action in a children's movie is a bear mauling people to death.

The rest of the movie was so perfunctory and rushed that I hardly had any idea what was going on and I've read the books a few times. To paraphrase a review I've read, it somehow manages to be both breathtakingly rushed and also incredibly slow and boring. But man, that bear.

ALSO ALSO: I watched Fearless Hyena last night and in case you haven't seen it at the end Jackie Chan kills the main villain by punching him so hard in the dick that he dies. When I was in high school this was my all-time favorite movie and now looking back I can only conclude that my high-school self knew what was going on.

ALSO ALSO ALSO: The ending for Fearless Hyena 2, in case you didn't know, is the best. Jackie Chan quit the movie halfway through, so the director just took footage from other, older Jackie Chan movies, edited them together and then put on the ending from the first movie! It makes no sense! Imagine if Spider-Man 2 ended with Tobey Macguire learning a valuble life lesson from Micheal Douglas about writing, escapes from Pleasentville, racing Seabiscuit and then he kills the Green Goblin by flipping him over and punching him in the crotch.

edited to add: Tobey Macguire is apparently making a Robotech movie? Who knew?

Internet, I have to finish a million (actually: 3) papers for Thursday, and Jennifer left for Brazil this afternoon and I am a house full of cats and I don't want to do anything but draw comics and read books not about the sociology of ethnicity and race or the epistemology of autism research or KARL MARX.

Anyway the point is I'm going to the school library so that these things won't distract me but later tonight I'm going to make a big post about the comic I drew. It is about a midwife during second wave feminism who delivers babies that no one else dares deliver! It is an action-adventure romance. She has an eyepatch. (It's basically Black Jack if all he ever did was deliver babies.)

... and like so good though.

Vertical's releasing a bunch of new Tezuka soon, and these covers are so crazy. God bless you, Chip Kidd.



This cover is pretty rad. I am so excited for this book, and the art looks kind of different and 'mature' for Tezuka. I think it comes out very soon. What I'm really excited for is....





DORORO!!

I can't quite decide if these covers are the best things ever or the worst, but they certainly are crazy as hell.

Anyway, Tezuka is nuts and I finally read Sun part 2 and Oh Man It's Great. I especially liked the part with all the demons and spirits hanging out and fighting.

This week was totally crazy.

It started off well enough. I finally got my student loan, and so I got to buy all my school books finally, just in time for midterms. I have also bought way too many comics in the last few days, and they are all awesome. They will probably get their own post later, so that I can tell the internet what I think about some comic books.

I had to take my wife to the hospital on Tuesday, and so I missed every single class that day, which was kind of terrible. She is doing fine, but that was a little scary and a lot stressful.

On Thursday I had two mid-term exams and a paper proposal to pass in, and so I was at school for something ridiculous like twelve hours, and that was kind of awful.

On Friday I had to go to court with Jennie to dispute a traffic ticket she had received. It was withdrawn by the crown, which was nice. However, the Nova Scotia legal system does all of their traffic pleas once a month, and in alphabetical order. This means we waited for four hours on cold, wooden benches in a court room, so that Jennie could go up to a microphone for two minutes and say "Not Guilty.' Exciting Stuff indeed!

Finally, when I came home from work today, I discovered that the wind had knocked a tree over on top of the car, and had brought down a powerline with it. There were live wires all over the car and drive-way.

1) I cannot believe that I did not know that the guy who made Ninja is the drummer for Lightning Bolt. I even knew that they were both named Brian Chippendale! Clearly I am a failure as both an indie-comics snob and an indie-rocks snob.

This reminds me that my totally awesome fake-band the Noise Tanks are still the coolest fake-band around. They sound just like Lightning Bolt only all of their songs are about Jet Set Radio and Rollerblading and Graffiti and I made them up.

2) Nothing, nothing would make me happier than if Common was in the Justice League movie. I hope he plays Superman.

Also? Common, Kanye West and Q-Tip are apparently starting a new hip-hop supergroup, if Wikipedia is to be believed, and I will of course believe it in this case because that is awesome.

3) My wife is really very pretty. I am her biggest fan.

It has been some time since my last post, but I wasn't quite sure how to top underage british party girls. Now I know. The answer is beef.

I was in the local comic shop, picking up some comic books. Specifically, I was looking for The Mourning Star. Which, by the way, is an incredibly difficult comic to describe to the very helpful comic store clerk.

"It's uh, a black and white .....art-comic I guess... with talking vampires and....a comet....? I can't pronouce the cartoonist's name?"*

Finally one of the helpful clerks remembered the comic.

"Oh yeah! That one's really great......and we're all sold out. Bryan Lee O'Malley bought the last copy."

Listen, Mr. O'Malley. First you crush my spirit, and now you buy up all the comics I'm looking for. You're just lucky you moved to North Carolina, or we'd have to settle this the old fashioned way. **

Just for that, I bought your very nice book Lost At Sea from the discount rack, where it was six dollars. That is some 50 Cent/The Game-level beef, I'd say.

In non-beef-related news, I finally found an MP3 of 'The International Tweexcore Underground'. Oh Man It Is So Great.


*It's Kazimir Strzepek.

**Nintendo games or something. The only time I was ever in a fight was in the sixth grade when I weighed like fifty pounds and was like four feet tall. He broke my glasses and I got a black eye. So even that isn't really a fight. Also, O'Malley has like a foot on me.

This is the first result for 'Hugh Stewart' in Google Image Search:



(I guess there is a dorm somewhere called Hugh Stewart Hall, and these girls live there?)

First Result for 'Hugh Charles Stewart' in Google Image Search:



(It is a house built by a person named Charles Stuart, and I guess he is related to someone named Hugh?)

First Result for 'Hughtron' in Google Image Search, and the first and only result in any way related to me:



(My Cat!)

1) Tonight I watched a huge limousine go through the McDonalds drive-through.
2) Jennie later saw a limousine drive by the Shoeshop downtown, young girls hanging out the side calling people 'bitches' and asking if they 'knew how 'high class we are?'
3) As I drove to pick up Jennie tonight, I saw that same limo parked outside the Oxford for the Atlantic Film Festival.

I found this career thing on, uh, Douglas Wolk's livejournal. (signifier)

Apparently, my top 10 career choices are:

1. Anthropologist - (This is what I'm studying to be in school! Interesting stuff...)
2. Desktop Publisher - (I don't even know what this is, really.)
3. Technical Writer
4. Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator - (Out of the many, many things I have wanted to do since I was five years old, this is the only one that has remained constant the entire time.)
5. Animator - (If only...)
6. Interior Designer (If I designed homes they would be very white, and very empty.)
7. Writer - (Oh goodness yes.)
8. Activist - (Is this a career? Like are people professional activists? I suppose they must be. I'd imgine it is heartbreaking work.)
9. Critic - (I know good criticsm when I read it, but I doubt I could ever write the stuff.)
10. Print Journalist - (Yeah, this would be rad, I guess.)

Tonight! Paprika at the Atlantic Film Festival!

This week is Tekkon Kinkreet week and also a new Casanova issue but instead of buying some fantastic-looking comics I'm spending all my monies on school books.

OH! and ALSO! There is a new Los Campesinos music video and it is the most precious.

Okay so first of all I've listened to this Mae Shi song Lamb and Lion about a hundred times in the last day and goodness I love it. I wish that every band sounded just like this. You (Jennie) may remember me going crazy about Run To Your Grave back in the sping, because that song was (and continues to be) amazing. The Mae Shi full-length, HLLYH, cannot come out soon enough. It is out on cassette already, apparently, if you can catch them on tour. I honestly have no idea how I would play that, even if I could manage to see them. I don't even think I know anyone with a tape player.

On the topic of managing to see bands, perennial 'bands that Hugh always talks about going to see and then never goes and sees' the Hold Steady and Art Brut are teaming up to play big places that are not Halifax, Nova Soctia.

Finally, I saw this silly Kanye West/Daft Punk/AKIRA video last night.

I turned 24 a few weeks ago.

This had the noticable effect of terrifying me to no end.

The Blue Album was released when Rivers Cuomo was only 24 years old.

Bryan Lee O'Malley started drawing Scott Pilgrim  when he was only 24 years old.

Osamu Tezuka was only 23 when he created Astro Boy.

Stephen Malkmus was 24 when Pavement recorded Slanted and Enchanted.



What have you done, Hugh Stewart? I don't know. Nothing.



I must draw and draw until my wrists bleed.

Persona 3 continues to revolve around shooting yourself in the head to unleash your inner demon Pokemons, and it continues to be very fun in the process. Sometimes you must date cute Japanese schoolgirls so your demon Pokemon get stronger. I have a robot, a dog and a little boy on my team now.

There is a apparently a manga of the game available in the Japans, so perhaps it has been scanlated? I hope so.

In Brief:
-I start school this week. Someday maybe I'll graduate.
-My job is awful awful awful. I would be very happy drawing Persona 3 fanart and robots and comics about my cats for the rest of my days. Does the Canadian government give art grants for that sort of thing?
-Vertical is bringing out Dororo next year! There is a Dororo PS2 game, but I've never played it.
-How can people hate Dragonball Z so much when it's clearly the best comic book ever made?

Did you know that: Baseball is so complicated that the study of baseball statistics it has it's own fancy sounding name? SABERMETRICS!

If only we could harness this science for other uses.

Forget the fuel cell. We need baseball-powered automobiles.

Last weekend was TCAF and Hughtron's Birthday.
I only got to attend one of those two things, but on the upside I did get to watch a silly kung fu movie with my family, and that was fun. I hope that at some point in our life we learn how to budget money, so that we can actually attend one of the super cool comic festivals that I always get to read about. And that one (TCAF) had pretty much all of my favorite artists in one spot.

I did, however, get a silly videogame for my birthday. It is about Japanese schoolchildren who use special guns to shoot themselves in the head and somehow this lets them fight demons. It is also a dating simulator. I love it.

ALSO: What is the deal with Brandon Graham comics? They are always super amazing looking, and funny and clever, but I also always feel really skeezy reading them.