Ben Paddon

Blog

  • SoulGeek

    As many of you know, I’ve been quite heavily connected to SoulGeek for the last three-or-so years. I’ve helped site founder Dino Andrade coordinate convention appearances, I’ve helped to organize the Singles Nights over in Van Nuys, and I even co-host them with Dino (it still baffles me that Dino credits me as “creator of JUMP LEADS” when it’s a webcomic with a small audience, but who am I to argue?). Over the last few years I’ve become close friends with Dino and his better half, Casey. They’re family. I love ’em to bits.

    I feel very strongly, very passionately, about what Dino is trying to accomplish, and what he’s already accomplished. I may have a personal bias – I met my girlfriend on SoulGeek, and I’ve made many great friends through the site – but I am completely behind what he’s doing. He didn’t create the site to “cash in”. He does what he does because he genuinely, genuinely wants to see geeks like us be happy. I think that’s fantastic, and I feel very privileged to have been allowed to contribute to that.

    For those who are interested, SoulGeek will have a presence at the Long Beach Comic-Con this year. Dino will be there at booth #941, along with an absolutely cracking guest list that includes the likes of Walter Jones (Zak from “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers”), Gregg Berger (“Transformers”, “Men in Black”, “Halo Wars”), Alexis Cruz (“Stargate SG-1: Children of the Gods – Final Cut”), Richard Epcar (“Transformers”, “Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe”). Then there’s Dino himself, of course, who has voiced characters in “World of Warcraft” and “Brutal Legend” among others, although my favourite performance of his is definitely his turn as the Scarecrow in “Batman: Arkham Asylum”.

    I might even be there myself, if I’m able to go. Might be my last chance to attend a convention with SoulGeek for some time, so if I can squeeze myself in I’ll be there. And you’ll continue to see me at the Singles Nights, of course – who else is going to bring Rock Band, after all?

  • Congratulations DC Comics, You’ve Successfully Ensured I Never Buy Any Of Your Stuff

    I’m not much of a comic person. I don’t go out and buy new issues of things, with a couple of rare exceptions, and there’s a narrow band of trade paperbacks that I buy – Y: The Last Man and The Walking Dead, for examples, and the Buffy Season Eight stuff. Any of the “traditional” comic trades that I have fall  into the “event” category – stuff like Batman: Year One, Watchmen, that sort of thing.

    I have toyed with the idea of getting into DC and Marvel’s core comic universes, picking up issues and jumping straight into the deep end, and before I lost my job last year I actually picked up a few issues of various stuff to get myself started. Having a friend who works at Marvel certainly helps – she can, when she’s not busy working on Super Secret Projects™, provide me with new materials to peruse. Which is nice.

    I had yet to truly delve into DC’s stuff, and now they’ve rebooted all of their core lines there’s really no incentive for me to do so. Why would I want to invest in any of their comic universes when they’ve made it clear that they’ll quite happily undo years, sometimes decades of history to try and bring in new readers? What reason do I have to get attached to characters, or to follow storylines that may be largely irrelevant a handful of years down the line?

    So congratulations, DC Comics. In your pursuit of potential new readers, you’ve alienated a potential new reader.

  • ANNOUNCEMENTS!

    There are a few things I want to update you on, gentle reader, so here they are:

    • Five-Dollar Fiction is now on its own dedicated website and is picking up steam, which is pretty spiffy. Feel free to pop over and commission your own micro-story, if you dare!1
    • But, Sir… is back in full since since the British government relaunched their ePetition website. Andrew and I have been maeking poast for almost a week now. It’s good to be back.
    • Nothing is set in stone just yet, but it looks like I’ll be writing and appearing in a web video with a SPECIAL CELEBRITY GUEST. Is that not awesome? I think it’s awesome.
    • Jump Leads will be updating at some point in the near future. I’m sitting on the inks for not one but two pages, and politely waiting for Kris to finish colouring them. Both he and JjAR have a lot of paid work on their hands right now, which is why the comic has been delayed so much. My apologies to the six or seven hardcore Jump Leads fans out there.
    • Somehow my friend and writing collaborator (not to mention Amazon best-selling author) Adam Croft snuck out a second book while no one was looking. It’s called “Guilty as Sin”, and it’s available to buy from Amazon and SmashWords. The non-eBook print editiony thing will be out before the end of September, or so Adam tells me.

    That’s more or less it. I don’t know if I let the world at large know about my personal Tumblr, but there it is for thems what wants to know.

  • I Didn’t Make It

    I had hoped to have mailed off my application for the Disney Writing Fellowship yesterday, but over the weekend I came down with an absolutely murderous coldy-fluey bug thing that prevented me from finishing my script.

    Which, I’ve decided, is something of a blessing in disguise. If I’d tried to crank out a script in less than a week it wouldn’t have been indicative of my usual standards. And, as my friend Joe aptly pointed out, there are professional writers who wouldn’t take a gig with such a short deadline. It’s bad enough trying to mount a shoot on the beach when the tide’s coming in, but if it starts raining you can either soldier on and hope you’ve got something good, or you can cancel and remount when you’ve got more time and improved weather.

    So my goalposts have shifted – I’m going to spend the next few months working on my script, making it shine, making it work, making it brilliant, and I’m going to submit next year. Really it’s my only option.

    I think my dad was a little disappointed that I didn’t get my script finished and sent in for this year. He rather kindly went to a lot of trouble to get two recommendations from industry professionals for my application – two wonderful, glowing recommendations that I’ve had to pretend were written about someone else just to stop myself from collapsing in a heap on the floor, quaking with anxiety, a big nervous grin on my face – so I can understand why he’d feel that way, but it just wasn’t going to happen this year. I should be able to use these recommendations for next year, so that’s something.

    Still, I know what my script is about. I know what I’m writing for, I have an outline of the beats I want to hit, and while I’m a little disappointed that things didn’t quite work out this year I know I’m going to have something ready for the next application window.

  • Fellowship of the Thing

    That would have been funnier if Thing had been a thing.

    It occurred to me today that Disney have a Writing Fellowship. I’ve known about this for literally years, but it’s never occurred to me to apply for the damned thing. Looking into the application requirements, it seems the application window for the 2012 fellowship was May 1st to June 1st of this year, which means I’d have less than a week to pull together everything they need. While I don’t doubt I could pull this together, it’d be a rush job. I’d much rather take my time and get everything done in a neat and proper manner, so I’m going to hold up until next year’s application window.

    This means setting myself deadlines. Traditionally, deadlines are poison for me. I’m terrible with them. The further away the deadline is the harder it becomes for me to muster up the interest in fulfilling them, but if a deadline is close – within a handful of days, say – I’m more inclined to get it done.

    So… wait, does that mean I should apply this year? I may have just trapped myself up against a wall with my argument, here. Wow. I honestly didn’t expect that to happen. Maybe I should put together an application this year. I can at least try. If I don’t get accepted I can simply resubmit next year, right? Right.

    Blimey.

    Edit: Y’know what? Sod it, I’m going to have a go this year. Will I make it? Will my application be up to scratch? I don’t know, but it’s going to be a lot of fun finding out.

  • Perchance to Dream

    Every day people get into cars they haven’t finished paying for, drive to jobs they don’t like to earn money to pay for things they don’t necessarily want but that will distract them from the soul-crushing tedium of life.

    You know what these people need? They need a TV show to remind them of the joy of life, a sort-of Sesame Street for adults that says that, yes, you may not like your work, you may have a mortgage to pay, you may not be as young as you once were, but you can still chase your dreams. You can still achieve your dreams. There is nothing, literally nothing stopping you from being the person you want to be, from living your life how you want it to. Those dreams are still attainable.

    Far too many people have let themselves be pulled down by a cynical world. Far too many people I know have given up on their dreams and desires because the world tells them to get a job, get a car, get married, get a mortgage, have some kids, as though this is the only adventure one could possibly hope to experience in one’s brief flicker of a life.

    When we were children, the world seemed impossible and vast, like a place where anything could happen. And we dream that we might grow up to be astronauts, or race car drivers, or Elvis. As we enter our teens our dreams get a little more sophisticated, and we decide we want to be writers, inventors, physicists, actors, musicians.

    Then after school, possibly after college, we get ourselves a 9-to-5 job, and this cynical world begins to have its way with us. We end up working in a Purchasing department, or as Head of Marketing for a company that makes toilet seats, or maybe we get stuck doing data entry for the next ten years. It wears it out of you. It strips you of your energy, drive, ambition, and you begin to believe that maybe this is about a far as you can possibly go. And though you may rise up the corporate ladder and one day become VP of the Sanderson Bobble-Head Company, is it really what you wanted? What dream did you sacrifice for this illusion of stability?

    So that’s what we need. A half-hour show every day that reminds adults that they don’t necessarily have to be so adult about everything. That it’s okay to be a little childish once in a while, to hold on to childish things, and to dream.

  • Facebook – Site Changelog for May 2011

    • The “Keep me logged in” checkbox at the sign-in screen is now purely decorative.
    • We’ve added everybody to everybody else’s friend lists because, y’know, it’s basically all going that way anyway.
    • Pressing Alt+F4 will display a sarcastic message about Friendster shutting down. I mean, it’s about time, right? Thankfully that’ll never happen to us. People will use Facebook forever.
    • We might have sold your personal details to a company overseas that makes shower curtains.
    • On the plus side, expect some fantastic emails about shower curtains some time in the next few days!

  • And Now: A Writer Critiques A Cartoonist

    Firstly, full disclosure: Scott Kurtz and I had a bit of a falling out last year. Despite this I remain a huge fan of his work, and once my finances are more balanced I intend to pick up the books I haven’t bought yet (namely, all of the post-Awesomeology ones). PvP is consistently one of the most entertaining webcomics out there, and it’s one of the comics I look forward to each day.

    Despite this, it’s hard to ignore that Scott’s art has been a little… well, difficult to look at lately.

    I’m no artist, but take a look at the latest PvP. Compare Jade (black top) with her sister, Miranda (the “hot librarian”). Compare the physique of the two – Jade is well-proportioned and distinctly cartoony, while Miranda appears to have a cartoon head affixed to a body with reasonably human-ish proportions. The two styles don’t mesh. It hasn’t worked, and it pulls me out of the comic. That’s not even touching upon Miranda’s hair, which is apparently a character all of its own with its own feelings and motivations.

    This bizarre juxtaposition of the real and the cartoon also occurred in the previous strip, where Miranda is a little less cartoony than in today’s strip, and yet is still human enough to clash with the distinctly cartoon appearances of Jade and Brent. The proportions of her head are even worse in this strip. If Miranda had always appeared in the comic in this form (and she hasn’t) I’d wonder if she and Jade were actually biological siblings. Perhaps Miranda was adopted. Perhaps she was found amidst the wreckage of a small, slightly too-real space vessel, the last survivor of a planet on the edge of the PvP reality and a bordering “trace-comic” universe that was destroyed by, I don’t know, space zombies or something.

    And here’s that weird reality-bending look again, this time with Jade appearing to be the quasi-real person instead of Miranda.

    Looking through some of Scott’s other recent strips, it becomes rather apparent that his weakness appears to be the female form. All of the male characters – Cole, Brent, Francis, Robbie, as well as Skull the Troll (gender variable) – are distinctly cartoony, and drawing those male characters seems to come incredibly easily to Scott. I mean, look at this strip. The character designs, the shapes… they’re brilliant. Yet Jade and Miranda aren’t coming as easily as they used to back in the old “head and shoulders” days. Drawing a cartoon-friendly version of the female form isn’t something Scott’s quite got a handle on yet.

    It’s likely because he’s trying to push himself by drawing his characters in more dynamic poses other than the more static look of earlier strips – something I definitely approve of – but you can see it’s still a learning process. He’s not quite there yet. He’ll get there, provided he can push beyond the “trace stuff from the real world” phase he’s been in for the last couple of years and start using reference photos as, well, reference photos.

    For now, though, he’s stuck in this weird webcomic Uncanny Valley. It’s a tricky spot to be in, and it’s far too easy to get comfortable in that space and not want to leave it, but hopefully Scott can push forward. In fact I’m all but certain he can – it’s been a joy to see his art grow from strength to strength these last few years, and I look forward to seeing that stuff because once Scott has it all figured out his art is going to shine brighter than ever.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to tell Jamie Oliver how to be a chef despite my having virtually no experience in the kitchen other than operating a microwave.