A Quick Note on Making Comments For the Blog

Hey guys, just a real quick update. A few of you have sent me questions on how you can make a comment on the blog here. A few of you have mentioned that you have tried to post a comment and that you didn't know how to do it. Well I looked into and you can do it.

First off, you click on the article you are going to read. Then go to the bottom of the page and type in what you are wanting to say. After that, you go to where it says "Comment as." If you click on the drop down menu and don't see that you are attached to any of the social networks that are listed there on the page, then just click on "Anonymous." This will allow you to post without having to be connected to any one social network site.

I highly encourage that you guys leave comments on the postings I put on here. I love hearing feedback from you all.

Until next time,

Hash

Appreciating the Ninth Doctor

So here I am at 31 years of age and I finally experienced the appeal of a comic convention. I get it. I don't know why I never went to more of them. I decided that if I was going to do it, I was going to dive head on into it and dress up as someone. But who was I going to do a cosplay of? I knew I wasn't going to spend too much money. I needed something cheap but something that was cool and something that people recognized. What I needed was a Doctor!

 

I decided to go to Lexington Comic and Toy Con as the Ninth Doctor from Doctor Who. I had the leather jacket. All I needed was the black paints, a deep colored v-neck t-shirt, and a Sonic Screwdriver and I was set. All of this was found pretty quickly. 

As I set about to do this, I watched a couple of the episodes from the ninth doctor's era. Watching them, I realized what it was about this era that got me into the show. My friend Natasha had told me before I watched the show that the first Doctor that I watched was always going to be my favorite. She was right. Christopher Eccleston is my favorite doctor. 

Everybody loves David Tennant or Matt Smith and both of those guys are very good in their portrayals of the Doctor. But Eccleston for me set the tone for those guys. His portrayal of the doctor was not the overly jovial one that we are use to, but one of a man who just got out of a war and lost too many of his friends. We see it in his eyes, in his attitude and even in his clothes. He is in a dark place at this period of his life. The Doctor has just lost his home planet of Gallifrey and all the people from it. He is the last of his kind and it has hit him hard. 

Throughout the series, we see him start to come alive again thanks to the help of Rose Tyler, the companion he picks up in the first episode. The attitude is still there but it is more in a defensive mode now. He gets mad at Rose for screwing up but we also see him have compassion with her. We see this in my favorite episode from the series, Father's Day. In the episode, we see the Doctor take Rose back in time to the moment her father died in the street after being struck by a car. Rose was only suppose to watch the accident happen and comfort her father as he died. But Rose can't help herself and ends up saving her father causing a time paradox. The Doctor is angry throughout the whole episode. But in the end, when Rose's father sacrifices his life in order to restore the timeline, we see the Doctor be comfort Rose as she finally gets the chance to say goodbye to her father. It is a very beautiful moment in a great episode.

Like all the doctor's before him though, the doctor was doomed to die at some point. The ninth doctor would be no different. In The Parting of the Ways, we see him die in order to save the life of Rose. The last moments of the ninth doctor are really touching. Eccleston is very smart and doesn't over play the moment at all. We see the sadness in his eyes as he realizes this is end. He plays it like a man who was just starting to enjoy his life again and is sad that he is not going to have another day to live it. Quite different from the man who pushed literally pushed Rose away in the first moments they met. 

Tennant and Smith have of course gone on and taken Doctor Who to bigger heights and huge ratings. But I don't think none of that would have been possible without the acting talents of Christopher Eccleston and what he brought to the role of the Doctor. Eccleston set a high bar and brought real weight to the role. It something that I have noticed has been carried on by the other two actors who went on to play the part. Plus Eccleston was cool and he took no prisoners. That is something I found to be very cool. 

So dressing up as the man for a comic convention in a way has made me think of the ninth doctor quite a bit this week. Looking around the convention hall, I saw a ton of people dressed up as Doctor Who. Mostly as of them dressed up as either Tom Baker or David Tennant. I might have been the only person there dressed as Eccleston. I was okay with that. I got quite a few complements from people for dressing up as the Ninth Doctor. The outfit I had was pretty "fantastic" as the ninth doctor would say. I realized that although Eccleston's time on the show was short, the impact he had on it's success was something that should be appreciated for years to come. 

FBON Interview Series: John Vinson, Author of The Nobodies

 

John Vinson: Author of The Nobodies

Since starting this blog, I always kind of hoped that the opportunity would rise that I would get the chance to interview a few folks along the way. People who are pursuing their passion. People who are doing interesting things. People who are doing what they love. Well my first interview guest on my blog here is someone who definitely fits into all three of those categories.

John Vinson is a long time friend of mine. A fellow movie and TV buff like me, he has now gone and done something he has always dreamed about doing: Writing a comic book. He got together some money, found a great artist and created his first comic book series, The Nobodies.

Set in the future, The Nobodies is about a man named Iggy who wakes up in a garage, attached to all sorts of medical equipment. He wanders outside into a different world than he saw last. Lifeless people known as the Nobodies roam the streets. Iggy runs into a group of survivors who explain to him what is going on. What follows is action, mystery, and suspense and some dark humor. The concept sounds familiar, but Vinson and artist Ger Curti put a great amount of detail into the world Iggy now inhabits. Vinson also peppers the comic book with storytelling that will get you talking.

The first thing I had to ask Vinson about was the cover. The one with the giant marijuana leaf on it. It definitely is an eye catcher and is one of the things that makes the comic stand out.

Here is my interview with John Vinson. Enjoy!



Steve Hash: You look at the cover here and right off the bat, amongst the great artwork is a giant marijuana leaf...

John Vinson: (Laughs) Yeah, There it is. It's pretty apparent.

Official cover for The Nobodies

SH: One question that comes to mind is the comic being used in anyway, even in small ways, to comment on politics of marijuana?

JV: Um, not the politics really. It's basically... the marijuana aspect, it's a part of this world now in a different way than we know of. Because in this world, there is no law. There is nothing to say that marijuana is wrong. There is nothing to say that this is wrong or that is wrong. Which, you know, is pretty standard with any post apocalyptic tale. I guess the marijuana for me was the way to say, without the law to say that this is wrong, it could just as easily become a staple of society as it could be seen as detrimental. You know like alcohol!  Alcohol is a part of our society. It's legal. There are bars. There are places you can go to drink this alcohol.

SH: Well even alcohol was illegal at one point....

JV: Even that was illegal! Right? They turned that around... it is so arbitrary in a lot of ways. But in this world, marijuana is actually a currency. I don't really dive into a lot of that in the first issue. I think the only marijuana use in issue one is Tom and Dr. Edeman smoke a joint and pass it back and forth with each other. But you'll see more of it as the book goes on. That is just kinda the details of the world I wanted to establish. Marijuana is very prevalent. Everyone smokes it. Everyone is fine with it. It has become a part of society.

SH: Do politics in general even enter into the the theme of the comic? 

JV: Politics some. It's not the main drive of the book. There are going to be a couple of storylines later on in the book... it is a seven issue miniseries. So I think around issue three or four, there is going to be a little more politics involved. I don't want to dive into that too much, but it does get somewhat involved but nothing heavy handed really.

SH: So how did this idea come to you? Where did the story come from?

JV: Actually, it was started by two things. First would be a book called The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I highly recommend it. To me it is the greatest piece of fiction ever and there is a chapter in the book where they talk about humanity and the loss of it. One of the chapters in that book is called "The Devil. Ivan's Nightmare.' One of the characters, whose name is Ivan, has a hallucination of Satan. It talks about how Satan uses out aspects of humanity against us. That was kind of what drove me to write this book because the essence is about humanity. What makes us human. What are the negative things that makes us human? What are the positive things? If you take that all away, what are you left with?

SH: That is fascinating. Was this always going to be a comic book? Or did you have something else in mind?

JV: Yeah it was always going to be a comic book. It's funny another inspiration was Led Zeppelin's "Dancing Days." That is where I got the idea that I didn't want to do zombies because to me... I didn't want the threat to be the undead. I didn't want it to be something supernatural.

SH: That actually was going to be a question I had. Where did the idea for the Nobodies themselves come from?

JV: It came from when I was actually listening to "Dancing Days." It's weird, it actually came when I was listening to music. It didn't come to me when I was reading a story, or watching a movie, or watching a television show. It happened while I was listening to this song. It made me think, the Dancing Days: You are having fun and it's free spirited, all these positive emotions. What would happen if all these emotions got taken away? All the emotions gone from a person. Like what if I am sitting across from a person. You know, I am not sad or happy or angry. I am just sitting here. Nothing is looking back at you.

SH: It almost would be traumatizing.

JV: Exactly! It is! Funny you say that because part of that comes into play too about how people react to the Nobodies when the Rapture happens which is the event that they call it in the book.

SH: You said that there are seven issues, are we ever going to see the actual "rapture" happen? It's mentioned obviously.

JV: No. This takes place 20 years after the event.

SH: So might we see flashbacks or anything like that?

JV: There might be flashback maybe. I think most of the flashbacks if they happen are going to be mentioned in the POTUS letter. Whoever has read the comic and seen the POTUS letter at the beginning, he actually is a character in the comic and he will talk about it and flesh out the world a little more. I have a couple of ideas for flashback stories later on. For the most part, I am not going to dive too much into the details. I am going to focus more on the world as it is now.

SH: So you come up with the idea of the comic, how did you go about funding it? Because self starting your own comic book has become a thing here lately. How did the process go?

JV: A lot of savings. A lot of... praying. (Laughs). Let me tell you one thing about comic making is that it is very expensive.

SH: Really? What's the ballpark figure on making one?

JV: Well if you don't do the art yourself, and you find a competent artist and a competent inker. Without coloring, $1,500 to $2,000. And that is if you are doing a single issue, which is usually 20-22 pages. For me it was pencils, inks, and grayscale.

SH: You planned for the no color then?

JV: Yeah. That decision wasn't made from the funding. It was made because I didn't think the story required color. I didn't think color would help it. It is not a very vibrant world. Like when you are reading Superman. You wouldn't want to read a black and white Superman book. To me, a lot of stories don't require color. I did grayscaling because I wanted to give it more depth. I looked at the inks and there just wasn't a depth on the pages. I gave it a little bit of gray scale just to kind of give the world a bit more layer to it.

SH: So who is the artist? How did you hire them?

JV: I put out a advertisement for this website called Digital Webbing (www.digitalwebbing.com). I highly recommend it if you are ever looking for artists. If you ever post there, you'll receive hundreds of postings there and they all want to work for you of course. So I posted it there, and I was going through the submissions and right off the bat you can just see... you know (shakes his head no)... and some people are good but they just don't fit your style. But with Ger (Curti, the artist for the Nobodies), it's funny in that you don't think with an artist that there is going to be so much back and forth, but you really want someone to get the gist of your book. So it was down between him and a couple of other artists and so I talked to each of them and kinda got their take on the book and if they were into it or not. But Ger and I clicked together right off the bat.

SH: Was it his art that just popped right out at you?

JV: Oh yeah! When you send out advertisements for these artists on the website, they'll send you something right back that they have worked on. Most of it is stuff that you know won't work at all but with Ger's stuff, I couldn't get it out of my head. You know, it is like with anything artistic that you like, it clicks. You don't think about it too much. It just works.

SH: So where is the story going to go? Is it going to go worldwide? Because in the first issue here, it pretty much stays in Buffalo, NY for the most part. Do you see it go to somewhere like London? Could we see this from a worldwide perspective?

JV: This actually is a tough question to answer. I can't give specifics because a lot of the places that Iggy and the other characters travel to are actually part of the story. So I don't wanna give away any of the story but I can tell you it definitely expands beyond Buffalo. I can give you a little more insight into the next issue. What's going to happen is that there is going to be a lot of violence in the next issue. A lot of movement in terms of things that are going to happen to the characters. So it is going to be... the second issue is going to be much more action packed. It definitely gets bigger that is for sure.

SH: So what is next? You said that there is seven issues but what is next after you finish this run? You got any other comics planned out ot any other ideas?

JV: I do have a couple of ideas for sure...

SH: What kind of genre you thinking about doing?

JV: Superheroes. I can say that. It's funny though. As hard as it is just to get one issue done, I can't even fathom.... unless this takes off where I can do it full time... fathom what the next series is going to be. But I do have some ideas to keep things going beyond The Nobodies that is for sure.

SH: Cool thanks very much.

JV: Thank you!


A comic book series based off of Russian novels and Led Zeppelin songs? Sounds pretty badass to me! If you want to go buy and read the first issue of The Nobodies, go to http://www.comixology.com/The-Nobodies-1/digital-comic/73859 and you buy the issue there for $1.99. It's getting great reviews already so I recommend you find it and read it soon.

Enjoy and go to the Lexington Comic and Toy Convention if you are anywhere near Lexington, KY this weekend. Sure to be a great time if you go! Till the next time!

- Hash