Linkage

It was a grim Sunday in Iceland when my hosts drove me out into the interior of the country — the central area that they close off for six months of the year because if you go there you will just die. The interior of Iceland looks like the moon, only with moss speckling the rocks. Apollo astronauts trained here. The moon probably looks nicer. And in a spacesuit you don’t have to inhale the tang of geyser-polluted air that makes much of Iceland smell like an army of sick old men have been farting on it since Noah was a boy. We drove out to a black cave in the middle of nowhere. Just a hump of black rock. The hollow didn’t extend back more than thirty metres from the mouth. It was full of language: Icelandic words scratched into almost every inch of the rock. “My neighbour,” one of my hosts said, “was one of the last people to be born here. In 1929.” I looked around again. All those scratches. The marks of families who’d lived in this cave, generations going back hundreds of years. And empty for less than a century. It wasn’t a cave. I was standing in an old house on a stand-in for the moon.

First things first: doubtless many of you hit the homepage yesterday looking for new content and didn’t find any. The start of July (well, actually the second day in July) marks a shift in Sequential Tart’s publication schedule. We’re now a weekly publication. And in celebration of that fact, we decided to make a great deal of July’s content food themed. Every Monday, we’ll be serving up a toothsome assortment of new interviews and Tarticles. Come hungry (for great content), leave happy.

It’s July. Con season has kicked into high gear. You’ve doubtless seen Tarts at Heroes Con and Wizard World Philly, and you’ll be seeing several of us at San Diego, where we will be partnering with Comicon.con Pulse to publish daily updates from panels and around the con.

The Platform festival is helping to widen how the audience thinks about animation and looks at its use beyond traditional platforms of the television and big screen. Festivals have begun to feature Internet competitions and Platform was no exception. However, it was notable that they included a competition specifically for mobile devices and jaw-dropping installations, curated by artist Rose Bond.

An entirely different medium can also help us reconsider what makes some elements of animation tick: comics. While not all animators are into comics and vice versa, there are many who enjoy, derive inspiration from and create in both media. Many current animators are producing comics in printed and digital format. Walt Kelly and Osamu Tezuka were both animators and comic book artists, as is Hayao Miyazaki. I’ve recommended comics on fps before that I think some animators will enjoy, because of the cinematic quality of their stories.

Strangely, Kendra Saunders is known as Hawkgirl, and Karen Starr is named Powergirl– even though the former is 20-something and the latter is over 30; this seems a subliminal undermining, since “girl” is perceived as a lesser form of female than “woman“. Powergirl has powers to nearly rival Superman, and she was recently promoted to Chairman of the Justice Society. And yet she still doesn’t have, and never had, her own title. Renown for her costume choice that displays her ample bosom, she is both annoyed and accepting of her breasts– because she realizes she is more than her body, stating: “shows what I am: female, healthy, and strong. If men want to degrade themselves by staring and drooling and tripping over themselves, that’s their problem, I’m not going to apologize for it.”

Bonus points to DC for this elegant inside joke, commentary on the industry and a reasonable utilization of big breasts. But how does a potent character like that not have a book?