Tuesday, April 11, 2006
'w00t!'
This is an update from Matt Broersma's own site, but I thought I might as well share it with our dear robot-alert! readers as well!
Matt has had a bit on his plate lately, to judge by his instant messages.
Generally, that's the way he communicates with me. You see, I handle press relations for Matt and do little Web chores like updating the portfolio and putting news on the "blog". I don't find that sort of thing much of a strain, since my thinking is in any case very structured. I just fit it in when I have a pause from manipulating servos or positioning the exterior crane.
However, I'm not located very near Matt. He's based, I believe, still in Birmingham, which is in England. I am stationed on the International Space Station. Fortunately, there is plenty of bandwidth available to us up here nowadays, which is very good, because it seems I'm in orbit more or less permanently.
But as I was saying, Matt's schedule seems to have been more packed than a tin of oversize sardines of late, in my observation.
I understand there's a religious holiday of some sort coming up in the Christian calendar, and that appears to have something to do with it. Half the country absconds for a week or two, making it difficult to get much done in April. Some organisms have all the luck!
The downside of all that downtime is having to squeeze loads into the remaining crumbs of the month.
And this month there looks to be rather a lot. Matt was caught up in some rather tedious-sounding nonsense in March, and since April Fools' has been madly chasing after some more amusing form of bread-winning. Seems to be mostly magazine illustration at the moment. Tells me he's been on the phone lots.
Then there's a screen-print project courtesy of Sturgeon White Moss, the rather nifty alternative-comics anthology published by a Canadian in London. They've arranged for a press to bring out screenprints by several of their chaps, including our pal Matt.
There'll be A1, A2 and A3-sized images, apparently, out sometime in the next few weeks. But the deadline is the end of this week.
I should put up the images here, really, but somehow can't quite be bothered. Here're some links, though: A1, A2 and A3.
You can also spot them in the 'illustration' portfolio section.
Now then, where were we?
Another pressing deadline involves a project called l'Eprouvette - 'The Test-Tube' - which is a sort of periodical anthology of experimental comics published by that champion of comix anarchy, l'Association. Doesn't seem to have a Web page of its own, but here's one on fnac (the French Virgin Megastore).
A couple of weeks ago Jean-Christophe Menu put out a call for entries for l'Eprouvette No. 2, with a deadline of, you guessed it, the end of this week. Matt tells me he is bravely beavering away at the drawing table, but personally, I don't think he's going to make it.
Contributors are asked to critique another cartoonist's work in the form of a comic strip. Something tells me our Matt is going to do his on Paul Pope. I've never known him to miss an opportunity to trot out his story about having met Paul at a party in Austin, Texas when they were both teenagers - nearly 20 years ago. Get over it, Matt!
For those of you who don't know, young Paul is a successful comic-book artist living a life of bohemian glamour in Manhattan and working for the largest comics publishers in the US, not to mention getting rave reviews about his artistic merit as well as his dress sense. Doesn't mean much to me, but Matt seems to go a bit green whenever the subject comes up, so I like to mention it whenever possible.
Going down the list, there are a couple of items related to Insomnia, Matt's comic with Coconino Press. A draft of the cover is due middle of next week, as is the script for issues three and four.
Issue three should be out by mid-year, with number four by the end of the year. Those two issues wrap up the 'storyline' - if you can call it that! - begun in the first number. A collection will probably arrive at some point late this year or early next year.
Matt also tells me he's decided to redraw two pages from the second issue. Given that that issue is in the final stages of production, he'll need to do it, hm, sometime in the next few hours to slip it in before the tome goes to press.
Dear oh dear!
And on top of this, he tells me he's organising a quick nip over to the US this summer. Typically, he thought the easiest way to do it would be via Stuttgart, where a friend of his was visiting the same week! Really! I think he's decided against that little idea, though.
You know, I really must not pay so much attention to the silly, backwards way people do things. I do find it rather upsetting.
Matt tells me he has been struggling through a book or two in his copious spare time. "In Cold Blood" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's", both of which he rather enjoyed I think. '"In Cold Blood" is a lot like that movie, "Capote"', he mentioned the other day. 'The pictures on the screen, they're a lot like the pictures the book makes in your head.' And who says literary criticism is a dead art?
Before that, I recall he was making another of his periodic attempts to read "Castle to Castle" by Céline, but as usual gave up after a few descriptions of starvation in a post-war castle surrounded by Nazis.
A couple of weeks ago he also had a fresh go at understanding what it is that gets people so excited about Graham Greene, but after skimming through "Brighton Rock", "The Power and the Glory", "The End of the Affair" and "The Heart of the Matter", came to his usual conclusion that he just didn't get it.
All those discussions of Catholic theology must have made some impact, though, as he's been going on about how guilty he feels not having given up anything for Lent or gone to confession, well, ever.
Personally, my reading of choice has been the classics - e.g. that old chestnut "The Undocumented PC: A Programmer's Guide to I/O, CPUs and Fixed Memory Areas". Ah, takes me back to my youth in 1995... Happy days...
Matt has had a bit on his plate lately, to judge by his instant messages.
Generally, that's the way he communicates with me. You see, I handle press relations for Matt and do little Web chores like updating the portfolio and putting news on the "blog". I don't find that sort of thing much of a strain, since my thinking is in any case very structured. I just fit it in when I have a pause from manipulating servos or positioning the exterior crane.
However, I'm not located very near Matt. He's based, I believe, still in Birmingham, which is in England. I am stationed on the International Space Station. Fortunately, there is plenty of bandwidth available to us up here nowadays, which is very good, because it seems I'm in orbit more or less permanently.
But as I was saying, Matt's schedule seems to have been more packed than a tin of oversize sardines of late, in my observation.
I understand there's a religious holiday of some sort coming up in the Christian calendar, and that appears to have something to do with it. Half the country absconds for a week or two, making it difficult to get much done in April. Some organisms have all the luck!
The downside of all that downtime is having to squeeze loads into the remaining crumbs of the month.
And this month there looks to be rather a lot. Matt was caught up in some rather tedious-sounding nonsense in March, and since April Fools' has been madly chasing after some more amusing form of bread-winning. Seems to be mostly magazine illustration at the moment. Tells me he's been on the phone lots.
Then there's a screen-print project courtesy of Sturgeon White Moss, the rather nifty alternative-comics anthology published by a Canadian in London. They've arranged for a press to bring out screenprints by several of their chaps, including our pal Matt.
There'll be A1, A2 and A3-sized images, apparently, out sometime in the next few weeks. But the deadline is the end of this week.
I should put up the images here, really, but somehow can't quite be bothered. Here're some links, though: A1, A2 and A3.
You can also spot them in the 'illustration' portfolio section.
Now then, where were we?
Another pressing deadline involves a project called l'Eprouvette - 'The Test-Tube' - which is a sort of periodical anthology of experimental comics published by that champion of comix anarchy, l'Association. Doesn't seem to have a Web page of its own, but here's one on fnac (the French Virgin Megastore).
A couple of weeks ago Jean-Christophe Menu put out a call for entries for l'Eprouvette No. 2, with a deadline of, you guessed it, the end of this week. Matt tells me he is bravely beavering away at the drawing table, but personally, I don't think he's going to make it.
Contributors are asked to critique another cartoonist's work in the form of a comic strip. Something tells me our Matt is going to do his on Paul Pope. I've never known him to miss an opportunity to trot out his story about having met Paul at a party in Austin, Texas when they were both teenagers - nearly 20 years ago. Get over it, Matt!
For those of you who don't know, young Paul is a successful comic-book artist living a life of bohemian glamour in Manhattan and working for the largest comics publishers in the US, not to mention getting rave reviews about his artistic merit as well as his dress sense. Doesn't mean much to me, but Matt seems to go a bit green whenever the subject comes up, so I like to mention it whenever possible.
Going down the list, there are a couple of items related to Insomnia, Matt's comic with Coconino Press. A draft of the cover is due middle of next week, as is the script for issues three and four.
Issue three should be out by mid-year, with number four by the end of the year. Those two issues wrap up the 'storyline' - if you can call it that! - begun in the first number. A collection will probably arrive at some point late this year or early next year.
Matt also tells me he's decided to redraw two pages from the second issue. Given that that issue is in the final stages of production, he'll need to do it, hm, sometime in the next few hours to slip it in before the tome goes to press.
Dear oh dear!
And on top of this, he tells me he's organising a quick nip over to the US this summer. Typically, he thought the easiest way to do it would be via Stuttgart, where a friend of his was visiting the same week! Really! I think he's decided against that little idea, though.
You know, I really must not pay so much attention to the silly, backwards way people do things. I do find it rather upsetting.
Matt tells me he has been struggling through a book or two in his copious spare time. "In Cold Blood" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's", both of which he rather enjoyed I think. '"In Cold Blood" is a lot like that movie, "Capote"', he mentioned the other day. 'The pictures on the screen, they're a lot like the pictures the book makes in your head.' And who says literary criticism is a dead art?
Before that, I recall he was making another of his periodic attempts to read "Castle to Castle" by Céline, but as usual gave up after a few descriptions of starvation in a post-war castle surrounded by Nazis.
A couple of weeks ago he also had a fresh go at understanding what it is that gets people so excited about Graham Greene, but after skimming through "Brighton Rock", "The Power and the Glory", "The End of the Affair" and "The Heart of the Matter", came to his usual conclusion that he just didn't get it.
All those discussions of Catholic theology must have made some impact, though, as he's been going on about how guilty he feels not having given up anything for Lent or gone to confession, well, ever.
Personally, my reading of choice has been the classics - e.g. that old chestnut "The Undocumented PC: A Programmer's Guide to I/O, CPUs and Fixed Memory Areas". Ah, takes me back to my youth in 1995... Happy days...
'Detour' review
"Detour", Matt's new story collection, has got a rather spiffing review in Les Inrockuptibles, which one might describe as France's attempt at Rolling Stone Magazine. They devoted a page to it, with a quarter-page excerpt. Not bad, Matt!
The American cousin.link
An American author to be followed, close to some classic Europeans in a minimalist style.
Matt Broersma - Détour
In the short biography we can read on his site, the young comics author Matt Broersma, born in southern Texas, explains two things : he was a lounge singer in Osaka and journalist in San Francisco. Quite nothing is said about his illustrations and his comics, as if the fact that he creates comics is secondary. But still, reading reading this book, we understand that Matt Broersma has everything a sequential storyteller needs, deploying in comics style multiple universes or fragments of his own life, or all the other ways to show the world that surrounds him.
Détour is made up of four stories, different from one to another, already published in several American magazines, but still unseen in France : “The Texas Parliament“ (subtitled “Dream of January 2004“), “Mediterranean Blues“, “Détour“, “The Mummy“. Read together, they create a kind of unsuited puzzle, more than a multiple faces entity, giving us a range of what Broersma is capable of.
To be honest, he seems to be capable of a lot of things : with easy-flowing introspection, nomad narration, auto-fiction or classic based fiction, he is also, like several other authors of the his generation (Jeffrey Brown, Sammy Harkham, Anders Nilsen, etc) a follower of minimaliste lines, almost sketchy, but going straight to the essential, never blowing a strip or a drawing with superfluous effects.
Moreover, Broersma’s minimalism moves on to ellipsis. Because his stories often lay on unspoken comments, whole flaps of irresolvable storytelling, strangely go round dead ends and deflections brutally stopped by sudden comebacks to reality.
In the last story of this book, “The Mummy“, Broersma adopts a tone and some themes recalling European authors. First of all, the atmosphere and the sites where the story takes place remind us Jacobs’ La Marque Jaune. But his storytelling, detached and eliptical, calls up more of Floc’h and Rivières’s works, when they reinvented the clear line in the book Le Rendez-vous de Sevenoaks. Broersma’s work is close to Loustal’s, we can recognize some undulations and gleams. Even if still he is far from the graphical control of some of the elderly Europeans and still doesn’t have his great graphic novel, this American author is to be followed very closely.
Joseph Ghosn
LES INROCKUPTIBLES n.539 / March 28th 2006
Friday, April 07, 2006
robot images
These are of course not true robots but artists conceptions of robots. Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Japanese robo-exoskeleton
The Age is reporting that two experienced mountain climbers will wear Japanese HAL exoskeletons to assist in carrying a quadriplegic and a muscular dystrophy sufferer to the summit of a Swiss mountain.link
