Friday Roundup: Tom at the Farm, Common People, Attack on Titan, and more Glitter Princes

Happy Friday! Just look at all the fresh content I’ve churned out in July thus far! Not one but two brand-new Duranalyses (Kulture Shock and “Come Undone”), plus a bunch of Miami Vice, a little Kidd Video, and that epic-length Sailor Moon piece. This, for me, is an unprecedented level of summer activity.

Crunching the numbers on my site traffic over the past seven weeks (in which I turned out fifteen new posts), compared to the seven weeks prior to that (in which I turned out five new posts), it looks like the overall number of visitors to this website has… dropped fourteen percent.

Egad.

Too bad. I’m going to continue to ride this rare burst of summer productivity. Onward and upward!

“Bloom County” is back! This is good news. Truly, the eighties are upon us again. Here's a relevant-to-my-interests strip, circa '85:

Glitter Princes update: I picked up one of those jointed wooden artist’s mannequins, which is making drawing properly foreshortened figures ever so much easier. The old Stan Lee-John Buscema classic How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way has been a big help, too, even though I clearly don’t draw comics the Marvel way. This week, I’m going to introduce you to Rob. The quietest Glitter Prince, Rob is probably also the most competent secret agent on the team. He works mostly behind the scenes, and is in imminent danger of being driven mad by his line of work.


Here’s the team as it stands thus far. Clockwise from the top, we’ve got Marcel, Rob, Sebastian, and Etienne. Next week, I’ll introduce you to problem-child Smitty, and then the group will be complete.


I watched Xavier Dolan’s gay-themed French-Canadian psychological thriller Tom à la ferme (Tom at the Farm) this week. A darling of the 2013 Venice Film Festival, it was released worldwide last year, yet was somehow passed over for distribution in the United States. Finally, at long last, it’ll be released here in limited theaters and through video-on-demand services on August 14th. Or you can do what I did and just buy the Canadian DVD through Amazon. Anyway, it’s really, really good: tense, stylish, sexy, scary. Great cast--Dolan stars as well as directs, and he's pretty outstanding in it. I’ll post my in-depth review next Wednesday.



The full trailer for the live-action film version of the Attack on Titan manga/anime series is out, and it looks phenomenal:


(Also worth seeing: This Attack on Titan-themed Japanese commercial for the Subaru Forester. Holy crap, Japanese car commercials are way more exciting than ours.)

I leave you now with this delightful, beautifully-edited, fan-made Star Trek-themed video for William Shatner’s bravura cover of Pulp’s “Common People”. It’s wonderful: pure giddy, silly, unfettered joy. I love it to pieces.


I’ll be traipsing around Seattle and Portland next week, getting back to my Pacific Northwest roots, but I’m going to do my best to stick to a Monday-Wednesday-Friday posting schedule. See you then.

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