Heading to Wizard World Chicago ...

Just a note to all my pals in ROBOTECH-land -- I'm heading out of town for about a week, in order to attend Wizard World Chicago. I'll actually be set up in the Artists' Alley at table #4212 along with a couple of co-conspirators -- I'll be selling copies of my Scwonkey Dog comics, but if you just want to drop by and say hello, or have one of the handful of ROBOTECH-related books I've contributed to over the past year or so (for example, The Art of Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles) that you want signed, any attention and conversation will be appreciated. I've got a feeling it's gonna be a looooooooooong weekend!

I'll see about getting another ROBOBLOG CHRONICLES video up the day I get back, though I think I'll probably be spending the better part of next Tuesday evening trying desperately to get the next page of Scwonkey Dog up before Wednesday morning ... so, no promises there.

Hope to see a few of you in the Windy City (or rather, a suburb of it)!

The Roboblog Chronicles Episode 23 - Context

Yeah, I finally found ten minutes out of my day to do a new ROBOBLOG CHRONICLES video. I hope you're all happy.

This one is me finding a quote that I've been paraphrasing for the better part of two years in regards to new ROBOTECH animation, and then talking about the whole "Holy crap, Lawrence Kasdan is writing the live action movie script!" thing.

Enjoy!

THE ROBOBLOG COMICS CONTEST - GRAND PRIZE WINNER

Well, it's the moment you've all been waiting for ... the winner of the ROBOBLOG COMICS CONTEST can finally be revealed! The winner of one copy of THE ART OF ROBOTECH: THE SHADOW CHRONICLES, autographed by your oh-so-humble host, is ...

GPPR of Robotecha.com, with her entry, "Memento."




"So, Jonathan, why does she win and I didn't?" you might ask.

1) It's self-contained. It gets in, tells its little story, and gets out. This is one of the few entries I got that was COMPLETELY self-contained, and it gets MAJOR bonus points for that. With, say, MedMapGuy's entry, I got to the end of it and felt like buying a plane ticket, flying out to where MedMapGuy lives, kicking down his door, and yelling at him, "KEEP GOING! I NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT!" This is not a problem here.

2) The presentation is polished as all hell -- this looks more professional than some of the material that came out of Antarctic Press in the late 1990's. Damning with faint praise? Maybe, but the point is, I've paid $2.99 for things that looked worse than this. (And weren't as well written, to boot.) Aaron and his crew on the Live Action Graphic Novel do some sharp work, but that typeface and those word balloons have ALWAYS bugged me. Maybe it's just a case of personal preference, but I think both GPPR and MedMapGuy's entries have a lot more polish to them.

3) What it has in common with BOTH the other two winners, though, is that there's some real meat on these bones. Different kinds of meat in each case -- the Live Action Graphic Novel team's story tastes like a moment torn from a twisty ROBOTECH RPG campaign to me. MedMapGuy's entry delivers a tantalizing taste of what could be a neat post-Masters/pre-New Gen tale of a society in chaos, the kind of thing you might've seen out of the ROBOTECH comics of the mid-1990's (only back then it would be in black & white and probably not as well drawn). And here ... well, the way I look at it, GPPR delivers Rick and Lisa's true happy ending, the one cruelly snatched away from them in Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles ... but maybe that's just me. The point is, to the ROBOTECH fan, each of these pairs of pages has something substantive to offer.

Which isn't to say some of the other entries don't do the same, but to my eyes, the work of these folks here do it with more solid craft and style. Speaking as someone who's been spending a lot of time toiling away on comic art for the past nine or ten months, I know I probably couldn't do a better job than the people who I've hoisted up on this pedestal here.

And when you get right down to it, that's probably why they REALLY won. ^_-

If you missed 'em, here's links directly to the other two winners:

2nd Place - "Conflict" - Story & Art by MedMapGuy

3rd Place - "The Black Knight" - Written & Directed by Aaron David Cole and Lukus Traverso

Sometime in the next day or so, I'll be pestering each of the winners for their mailing address (yes, even if I already have it for some other reason -- my records are a mess, sorry) so I can get your prizes mailed out before ... well, let's just say before my life gets turned completely upside-down. So, probably before the end of the week.

More on that later. Now, a round of applause for the winners!

*clap, clap, clap*

Raiders of the Lost Macross?

Friend of the Roboblog Brian Diegnan sent me a link to an article on Slashfilm (read it yourself, though it's not going to give you much more than I'm telling you here) claiming that Lawrence Kasdan -- screenwriter of those '80s Lucasfilm classics Raiders of the Lost Ark & The Empire Strikes Back -- is writing the screenplay for the ROBOTECH movie for Warner Bros. & Maguire Entertainment.

So, that could be cool, right? At least, if this is true, we're one step closer to knowing what in the hell this thing is going to look like ...

THE ROBOBLOG COMICS CONTEST - 2ND PLACE WINNER

Enough of this talk of stalled animation projects and live action movies that are nowhere near off-the-ground! We need another comics contest winner! Let's see who's next ...

Second place prize of his choice of one of the recent non-Macross. Robotech novel omnibus editions, featuring appendix/continuity notes pages by Yours Truly, goes to ...

*drumroll*

... our old pal MedMapGuy, who offers up a two-page opening salvo to a post-Robotech Masters, pre-New Gen story he calls "Conflict." Enjoy!

(Again, click on the images to make them nice and big and readable.)



Was that not enough for you? Do you need more entertainment out of the Roboblog? Well, how about yet another ROBOTECH anime music video! I edited this one together about a week ago. Seven minutes of fun with Zor Prime and his, err, issues! How about THAT, ladies & gentlemen? Is that enough for you?

The Shadows Can Wait, Apparently.

Robotech.com forum member Xenophon dropped some news from this past weekend's Project A-Kon in Dallas, TX at the forums. Let's see what he had to say:

Yesterday Kevin Mckeever spoke at A-Kon in Dallas. I was there in the room and he stated that at this point, absolutely nothing has happened with the movie other than that WB and Tobey Macguire's production company have acquired the rights. All that means is that they they now have the option of making the movie. To quote him "There is no script. There is no director. There are no actor. There is no budget" etc. There is no movie whatsoever as of this time. That does not mean that some guy in WB somewhere is not doing something to make these things happen, but I'd guess you'd have to get some sources over at WB to find that out. I asked him what rights they'd gotten and he basically said everything. They can make a film set in any time period about any subject whatsoever. He said "They can make a film about the Dana Barbie dolls if they want" by way of example. So this film we're talking about could be just about anything. Furthermore, it sounds like it's pretty flexible as to how WB "interprets" the canon.

McKeever also said that the next animated film is "on hiatus" because WB doesn't want what HG is making to get in the way of the live-action. So the live-action has to come first before we see The Shadow Rising film. Suck. However, he did say production had started, but then he said how far it had gotten was classified. The movie definitely will happen (provided WB doesn't just keep stalling for 10 years or something).

(See it at the forums here. Link via RobotechX.com; thanks to my pal Evan Cass for pointing it out to me.)