Here's the second strip of the second Comic Konga!. Click on the image to see the full strip.

This was actually the first strip drawn but I wanted to post it after the single panel from yesterday. Tomorrow's strip has been penciled; I only have to ink and scan it, perhaps shade it in like this one. Like I said yesterday I think I'm not going to do full colour versions (Today's strip is done in shades of desaturated blue). For no other reason than, like most Indians, I have a bit of a lenient hand with colour and it always ends up gaudier than I would like (strangely this is only a problem with my illustration work; my colour sense works fine when I'm doing design).

V

So begins the second Comic Konga! I think I'm starting to like doing the first one as a single panel gag; it's a format I never otherwise use, and it's a challenge to distill something down to one panel and one line only. Like most writers I have a tendency to ramble, and something like this could easily have been a three or six panel piece.

The anatomy and line-work is all over the place, and I did try to colour it but decided just to keep it to black and white (perhaps that can be a theme for this time's CK). Hope your own comic endeavours are fruitful. Can't wait to see what you lot have come up with.

V

The last time I updated the Work page was probably sometime in 2005. This was back when the site was still on free hosting and looked all grey and lime green.

Yeah, it's been a long time. Quite a bit has happened since then, not least of which is this redesign. I've always wanted to redo the work page, make it richer and more than just a bunch of images, but then I realised that while I was putting that off for the right time (it would be a good deal of work), two years had gone by.

So, I bit the bullet, sorted through my work and came up with a bunch of stuff -- some of which has been posted on the journal before -- but much of which is new. So surf on over to the work page and have a look around. There's about 30 new things in the Design and Illustration sections. I haven't added anything to photos yet, and might do so in the coming weeks.

V

It's been far too long since I've posted here, and even longer since our first Comic Konga! Half a year has gone by in the blink of an eye, and so I thought it would be best to get back into blogging by jumping in at the deep end with another CK.

CK2 will begin July 7th (that's Monday after next) and run until the 11th (that Friday). The rules are the same as last time: five days, five comics (in whatever way you define a 'comic') posted to your blog or online space of choice. A free-form festival of graphic delights, hosted by your truly.

You have about twelve days so that should be plenty of time to come up with ideas, doodle, and even prepare your finished comics. If you're participating do drop me an emial or a comment here (don't forget a link to where you'll be putting the work up!).

See you then!

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Yesterday was Earth Hour in several places around the world, including here in Dubai. Not much happened, though a few buildings did turn their external lights off. One lovely radio jockey suggested that the best way to spend the hour was to turn off all the lights, fire up some candles, snuggle up with your significant other on the sofa... and watch a romantic movie on DVD (preferably on your big screen HDTV).

Take that, energy conservation!

Elsewhere people in India were complaining that cities like Mumbai were not on the bandwagon, and shame on them for not participating in this noble effort. Um, yeah, except that cities in India go through almost daily scheduled power cuts, most of which last for longer than an hour. There is a prevailing view from what I can gather, that by shutting off our light bulbs for an hour every year, we will all be directly saving the earth.

This, as far as I know, is not strictly true. Most power stations around the world run on fossil fuels; in them power is generated and thrown out onto the grid. If we aren't using it, they do not actually store any unused energy in large batteries somewhere. If the power companies got together and said, "okay, in order to save the earth we're going to shut down our power supply for a few hours," everybody would be up in arms. But that's really the only way the current electricity supply model is going to help.

Then there's all the energy that went into publicising the Earth Hour event itself; multi-storey billboards, the energy to light them for days leading up to yesterday, t-shirts and caps, concerts and karaoke and whatnot. The Earth Hour site itself declares it a 'carbon-neutral' event in its faq (and also addresses the power issue with what amounts to an "Um, yeah, we know.") but doesn't say much else about it. Are they policing every floodlit billboard around the world?

I applaud the idea as a PR exercise, certainly, but I do feel that the execution is little more than a token gesture, and everyone around the world has just jumped on because it's a lazy, easy way to think we're making a difference. It's like every Indian I've met who expects the government to solve all their problems personally, in the same way a 5 star hotel might, because, "they voted. (harrumph!)"

Conservation and reduction of our energy usage is a vital thing, but we can't pat ourselves on the back and get back to our wasteful lives just because we shut off the garden light for an hour.

I was preparing the photos for this week's Ten Rupee Book Club post when I remembered that Dan was tagged with this meme, and I hadn't done it yet. The Rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people and post a comment here once you post it to your blog so I can come see!

Now, having not just one but seven at hand posed something of a problem. They were all technically 'nearest' to me, and all but one of them had enough pages to satisfy criterion no. 2. None of the books had the same problem Maija encountered with Good Omens either, so I was stuck. Having to look through them for the book post anyway, I figured I'd do quotes from all seven books, subsituting a quote from page 12 rather than 123 from the one that was slim. Consider this a teaser for the whole post (which should be done by tomorrow). Here goes:

Director Duo Abbas-Mustan (not otherwise known as 'The Brothers Burmawalla') have been steadily putting out pulp thrillers since their early 90s hit, Khiladi. The brothers' latest offering, Race, hit theatres a couple of weeks ago, and since then has gone on to do unexpectedly good business. Some of this success can be attributed to the fact that it's the first truly 'Bollywood' movie to come out for months; whether we admit to it or not, posh city folk like nothing better than an indulgent entertainer now and then. The last one that fit the bill -- Om Shanti Om -- was released last October. If only someone would tell our filmmakers, who are increasingly shifting their attention towards an output of macho noir violence-fests, epic historical snore-a-thons, Oscar bait (and always failing that, Filmfare Critics award bait) and trendy urban train wrecks distinguished by their characters calling each other 'Guys' a lot and knowing what ribbed condoms are.

In this age where the term 'Pulp Fiction' is more synonymous with an overrated art movie than the vibrant genre that supposedly inspired it, it's nice to see that someone, somewhere at least isn't trying to reinvent the wheel or make a genre of pure entertainment 'relevant to this post 9/11 world.' Wielding the twin cannons of amoral pulp and bollywood exuberance (with both genres' devil-may-care attitude to realism as their car's engine) the brothers have came out with a winner.

Over the past five years I've been amassing an eclectic collection of cheap used books on my trips to Bombay. At Rs.10 apiece (around $0.25 US) they aren't expensive or significant (most of them are, in fact, the very opposite), but they are valuable to me, insomuch as they are weird -- and I love weird. I have read very few of them; Of the hundreds (and by now, thousands), I have only finished a handful. There have been plans ever since I started blogging to talk about them, to read and review them, but this has so far not happened.

I was reminded of this recently when Dan blogged about his bookshelf, and in the comments I lamented that most of my books were in boxes (he suggested I just take a picture of the box). "That's it," I said to myself, "enough dawdling!" I looked through a small box of them and chose seven -- none of which I have read -- but which I think are interesting. Maybe this will give me the impetus to actually read some, but for now I will talk of their weird and wonderful subjects, their pretty and often breathtaking covers, and their all-round coolness. I hope you find them as fun as I do.

In case you never noticed, there's a 'Recent Comments' column in the sidebar, and the more astute among you will realise that my comment has been sitting at the top of the pile for quite a while now. At first I thought it was just my readers being polite and staying silent while I ranted and raved about hot army women, haunted dream homes, and the unsexiness of the modern caveperson. But, pretty-much every reader of this blog is a blogger themselves, and we're a chatty lot. It was unusual to have no comments for weeks.

I decided to test the system out, and lo and behold, ran across a host of problems, all of which had to do with a malfunctioning captcha system (a 'captcha' is a test to find out if you're a human and not a malicious spam program, by asking you to answer a question only a human could) . Hmm, malfunctioning is not entirely right, because it seems to have been behaving a little too well.