Kibbles 'n' Bits, 7/13/09

I thought I’d stop by and check out this month’s Zuda entries, which made me wonder about how similar they were all becoming. I noticed that many of them were tagged either Super-Hero, Action/Adventure, or Horror. There were smart-alec animals, girls in their underwear, bloody fights, talky conspiracies, and always, too much time spent waiting for the viewer to load. The content reminded me of what I can already get elsewhere.

Up until yesterday, I’ve not allowed myself to actually think it was happening, as it’s been well over 3 years since we first met Pete Berg and things started moving. Three (maybe four) directors along the way, hearing it had stalled a number of times, we thought it was unlikely it’d see the light of day. I’m sure that’s part of the course in the movie world, but as it’s been both mine and Andy’s first experience with film, we’ve erred on the side of caution so as not to get our hopes up too much. But it got cast. It got a shooting date. It got a release date. Still, every time we didn’t hear anything for a few weeks, we assumed it probably wasn’t happening.

At first, Ai Yazawa’s high school, high fashion romance “Paradise Kiss” seems to be working faithfully from the frog prince model. The male love interest, George, is a precocious clothing designer whose heart appears to be divided about equally between his love of couture and his admiration of his own eccentricities. The protagonist, Yukari, agrees to model his clothes for his senior contest, and then falls in love with him…letting herself in for a bucketful of pain and humiliation. On their first date, George tells her she “lacks initiative” and sends her home by herself on the train. He also appears to have a number of other lovers, of both genders…or at least, likes to insinuate that he does, which isn’t much less hurtful. And, of course, he likes S&M play (though this is treated much less explicitly than in Secretary.)

DC Comics, at the time I joined the firm [laughs], they had 32 colors. And I didn’t quite understand it until I got their chart, and I noticed that they didn’t have what we call “tone yellow.” They did not have 25% yellow and 50% yellow, and I did not understand why that would be, because I had done a syndicated strip and all kinds of other process-color work using the same basic chart, and I thought, “If you have 25% and 50% of red and blue, why don’t you have 25% and 50% of yellow?” It didn’t make sense. So I asked around a little bit … kind of quietly … and, apparently [laughs] at some point to save money in some weird way at some weird time they decided to do without “tone yellow.” So that if you see a DC comic book from back in “them thar days” you notice that all the Anglo-Saxon flesh is pink. You don’t continue to notice it because after you turn the page you’re reading the story and it isn’t a glaring difference but the flesh is pink. Whereas if you looked at Marvel Comics from the same time period, it’s more of a flesh color—25% red, 25% yellow. Because they only had 100% yellow at DC, if you tried using that for a flesh tone you’d have orange flesh. You couldn’t have all the subtler colors with “tone yellow” values. You lost HALF of the colors. Instead of 64 you had 32.