Spring!

Thursday, 26 March 1998

Yes, it's finally spring. Officially, spring started last Friday, but we got more snow on Sunday than we did for the entire past year combined. Today was a nice, sunny day, warm enough for a light jacket (not quite for shirt sleeves though), and tomorrow should be more of the same. We may get bad winters in the northeast (though this past one was pretty mild), but spring and autumn in New York are glorious.

Yesterday was new comics day, of course. Mark Waid started his stint taking up the overworked Grant Morrison's slack on JLA with this issue, and he did a good job of writing something very Morrisonesque, with quantum mechanical luck, altered history, mysterious disappearances, and some clever misdirection.

I'm feeling lukewarm towards the current Stormwatch storyline. I'm not sure why. It just seems rather, well, transitional, like the writer's setting something important up further down the road.

Issue #6 of Mage is finally out. A neat fight scene, more heroes, and mysterious behavior on the part of Excalibur. It seems that we're going to see three witches next issue, which may have interesting implications given that the opening page quotes for this section of the saga are from Macbeth. (That was really too minor a detail to warrant hiding it behind a spoiler warning.)

Usagi Yojimbo is great, as always, and turns me bright green with envy over Stan Sakai's elegant, simple-seeming rendering ability. But the "Grasscutter" storyline has enough characters that I'm losing track of who everybody is. I may drop the regular issues and collect Usagi solely in trade paperback form.

I stopped off at the Strand last night, looking in vain for some old copies of Zen and the Art of the Macintosh. I wound up buying a few practical art books, including Arthur Guptill's Rendering in Pen and Ink. It would do me good to really practice pen-and-ink drawing. I think of it as the most difficult artistic medium, and the skills I pick up will serve me well in other media. I'm going to have to go to Pearl Paint tomorrow and pick up a drawing board, since I don't think I can sit in one position at my drawing table for long because of my leg.

Oh, my left leg has been giving me trouble since Tuesday. I think it's the sciatic nerve. I'm starting to suspect that it's due to my spending too much time sitting in this hard, sharp-cornered wooden chair in front of my computer, so I may wind up having to buy a stool, too, but first I'll try swapping chairs between the living room and the study.