#the other dog is also not a dog its more shaped like stimpy from ren and stimpy

[suddenrundown]

house/dog sitting this week and one of these dogs isn’t even a dog its just a noodle with fur

[houseofvans]

ART SCHOOL | INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN SMITH

Filled up sketchbooks of distorted portraits of passer-bys, mundane objects, personal notes, weird thoughts and meanderings are just a couple things in artist Brian Smith’s sketchbook and works. Textured with black and gray tones, Brian’s drawings are often personal, humorous, and observational. We’re excited to chat with Brian to find out more about his background, drawings, and what he has coming up for the rest of the year. Take the Leap!  

Photographs courtesy of the artist. 

Introduce yourself? My name is Brian Smith, I’m from a town called Hicksville, New York. Now, recently living in Los Angeles, California. I’m currently the sole employee of a warehouse and I like to draw.

What was your introduction to drawing and/or art in general? What were your early influences?  I’d had a babysitter who showed me how to draw actual hands and not just the turkey ones you make when you’re little. That was pretty big for me. It got me interested in figuring out how to draw other things just by looking at them for a bit.  I always had sketchbooks as a kid, and in turn would forget them somewhere. My Nana who was kind of a closet artist would find them and leave little watercolor drawings of shore birds, ladybugs on tall grass, pond habitats etc. That seeded some notion I wouldn’t come to until much later about the intimacy of sketchbooks and how good it feels to give and receive drawings. Early influences would definitely be those two women. There was also a lot of adolescent suburban troublemaking, the inevitable introduction to skateboarding and cartoons like Rocko’s Modern Life and Ren and Stimpy.

How would you describe your work now to someone who is just coming across it?  I generally stumble through an explanation if I’m ever asked.  I recently looked back at like two years of drawings for a show. Seeing a good chunk of what you’ve drawn over a period of time all at once is wild. I still don’t think I’ve got my answer. It’s all kind of vague, sad, funny and personal. I like it to be just so, where people can attach their own meaning to it or ask questions about it.  

How did you find yourself going from maybe keeping a journal to actually getting work creating art or selling artwork?  I’m still getting there.  I think so far those things for me have a mutually beneficial relationship. Drawing in sketchbooks is where I’m most productive.  Everything after that is selected and isolated into its own drawing. That isolated sketchbook drawing might become a print or an image someone wants to buy or use for something which is always great.

How do your ideas take shape? How do you get from start to finish? What’s your process? It’s a total crap shoot haha. Sometimes I’ll blast through something in a night and others, a half inked drawing will sit in a drawer for months before I’m ready to get back into it. I get my ideas from a lot of things and in a lot of different ways though. I have a very distracting internal dialogue from time to time, I don’t know what it is. Sometimes I’ll just hang on a phrase, words that sound funny strung together in a sentence and put it down on paper and save it, maybe draw what it makes me think of later on. This croucher character I started drawing came from a thought I had of how dumb I must’ve looked a few days earlier, scrunched down taking a photo in the city while a wall of people moved around me. 

When are you most inspired? And what is your favorite subjects or things to draw and why? Inspiration strikes at random. I mostly like to draw at night or very early in the morning. I like drawing dogs and people, they’re emotional critters.

What artists inspire you these days?  The artists in my immediate circle at Bill’s Bar (@billsbarla). Those people are constantly creating and progressing. It’s insane.

You moved to LA not too long ago, how has living here influenced your artwork if at all? What do you think about the art community in LA?  I got out here in November. Lots of sketching and a few finished drawings in the bag since then. I’ve got a few ideas that’ll have to cook a bit longer before I figure out what to do with them. It’s definitely been a receptive town for me, showed a bunch of drawings I’d been sitting on and got a nice response. I’ve been to a few art shows and they got me pretty excited on what’s going on and what can be achieved with some elbow grease. 

Tell us about a favorite project or collaboration you’ve done. What kind of challenges do collaborations pose and what do you love about them?  My favorite collaboration has been with Austin England (@mochelife). We started sharing drawings through the mail over a decade ago. We did that for years before we actually met in person 6 or 7 years ago. Now we share a studio space with some other great artists and I’m currently babysitting his dog Lola. Collaborations for me can tend to lead to overthinking. Not always, but sometimes.. and when it gets to that point it’s tricky to dig yourself out and just relax and work with what the other person is doing. I love the whole process of it though, it’s fun and you never know where it’s going to go. You usually learn something new and wind up with something cool. That’s the best.

What was your last adventure that showed up in one of your illustrations, thematically or just visually?  Driving through the midwest. Indescribable. I drew a bunch of roadkill from memory that was pretty fun and weird.

Every artist has a different way of making his or her artist career work. How do you make it work for you? Do you spend time maintaining an online store or just draw when you want when you have free time?  I pretty much draw when I can. Sometimes I just don’t feel like it, which is always tough. I just draw in my sketchbooks, turn those pages into zines or actual finished pieces and let people know they’re for sale on instagram. I haven’t quite dialed in the online store thing just yet, but I’ll get there. Every now and again a drawing job or commission will pop up. 

What advice would you give someone who wants to follow in your footsteps and pursue art? Don’t follow in my footsteps. Go to lots of museums and art shows. Keep a pen in your pocket. Take the extra time to get an image to look the way you want it to. 

What’s your best Art School tip that you want to share with folks?  Don’t write your artist statement in the 3rd person. 

When you aren’t drawing or hustling, what do you do to relax or just stay fresh in life?  Beers, talks, books and walks to relax. Going to a museum, taking a trip and or getting out of the old comfort zone to stay fresh.

What are your favorite style of VANS? I like the white Vans Authentic, especially all worn in and pretty raggedy looking.

Anything you can share that is coming up? I don’t have anything coming up which is nice. Everything’s pretty wide open creatively, so I’m just gonna keep my antennas tuned and try and get productive.

FOLLOW BRIAN | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

[ouchmaster6000]

RE that zim/anpanman post - while Anpanman doesn't get as dark in tone, Baikinman regularly tries to kill people and has done things like tear pages out of an anthropomorphic book and make food-based characters spoil and rot. Not as gruesome as doing it to "real people" characters but that's not the point really; the idea behind it is still there, so Japanese kids are just very accustomed to an alien being that sadistic within the context of their series

First of all, I should point out I agree that Japanese kids are probably used to seeing more intense stuff on TV than american ones. Alot of shows like Yu-Gi-Oh, One Piece, Digimon and even Pokemon occasionally are known for having stuff edited out of the english dub. A pretty decent number of shonen series just flat out get marketed to an older audience in the states (stuff for kids in japan being aimed at middle schoolers here, stuff for teens being aimed at adults etc.)

Hell, I’m fairly certain Dragon Ball Z and Tenchi Muyo probably would have been marketed to adults in the US if it came out today too (Former for the violence, latter for the sexual stuff) and only got away with as much they did because they were on cable, and the idea that kids anime could appeal to adults simply hadn’t occurred to most western producers at that point.

I just…. Dont really think Anpanman is a good example of this? I also dont agree with the original poster’s Zim comparison. Granted, I suppose I probably should watch the show, but from everything I have seen of it, such as discussions on Bogleech’s website, it doesn’t seem that much edgier than standard kids show? Definitely a bit weirder and more violent than most preschool shows in the states, but overall, I doesn’t sound like Baikinman is much worse the your average kids cartoon villain.

I mean for starters, its pretty standard in kids media for killing and mutilating for non-human characters to be allowed, especially if said characters don’t have blood or flesh.

The obvious example is robots. Star Wars, Transformers, Doctor Who, Superman, Green Lantern, Teen Titans, Xiaolin Showdown, Age of Ultron,  - There are way too many shows, comics and movies to list that eithor aimed at kids or families, that have robots and cyborgs being torn apart in ways that would be pretty graphic if it happened to humans or animals.

Digimon is a related example - The only reason the franchise is allowed to have as much death as it does is because 99% of the fatalities happen to digital lifeforms that dissolve into pixels upon death.

Hell one of my favorite movies as a child was the original Toy Story, and all the scenes where Sid was mutilating and blowing up his toys would have gotten a hard R rating if he was doing it to people. I’ve heard a lot of people compare Sid to Dr. Frankenstein, but with toys, but at least Dr. Frankenstein used parts that were already dead (as opposed to tearing/cutting apart still living people) and put them together in a shape roughly resembling a human. Really, Sid’s toys are less Frankenstein and more human centipede.

I also remember Fosters Home for Imaginary friends having a similar reoccuring theme of “food friends” meeting a worse fate than Anpanman. This included half eaten, traumatized anthropomorphic food dreamed up by kids in stuck in fat camp, or a talking pizza dreamed up by the bully character and eaten and killed just seconds after being “born”

So, although obviously dark comedy, Baikinman doing those things isn’t really anything new for childrens media. Neither, is trying to kill someone, since a lot of cartoon villains have made serious attempts to kill people, they just never succeed.

But Zim successfully mutilating and removing the organs and body parts of human children is definitely not normal for a kids show.

Another issue I took with Revretch’s post was that she wasn’t just talking about Zim the character, she seemed to me to be claiming that “Invader Zim” the TV series wouldn’t be seen as edgy just because the main character is similar to Baikenman… but thats not really how it works? You can’t necessarily tell the tone of a show, just from the nature of its protagnist.

Like, by that logic, Courage the Cowardly Dog should be one of the most light hearted and kid friendly shows out there, but in actuality the world he inhabits is much, much darker, scarier and more surreal than Courage himself is.

Its true that, though the writers/network let Zim do much worse stuff on screen, there are plenty of other childrens cartoon characters whose personality is pretty similar to Zim, or whom are a lot creepier and more threatening. Mojo Jojo and HIM from the powerpuff girls are good examples of both of these, respectively. 

In fact, Powerpuff Girls, Xiaolin Showdown, Codename: Kids Next Door, Danny Phantom and plenty of other childrens cartoons all have both villains that are similar to Zim, and villains that are considerably more evil, creepy or serious than Zim ever was, but the tone of these shows, overall, is a relatively more optimistic one, where the main protagonists have more or less happy lives and good always triumphs over evil in the end.

Hell, even Gravity Falls, with its use of creepy horror imagery, occasional forays into adult humor, and having one of the most infamous big bads in childrens animation (and easily my favorite from the last 10 years) remains a fairly optimistic show at its core, about family and summer adventures.

This is not the case with Invader Zim, which is a show where humans as a species are portrayed as so comically stupid and mean spirited that, even if Zim somehow successfully killed or enslaved them all, it probably wouldn’t come across as a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

A show where the Irkens are depicted both commiting genocide, and electrocuting a disobedient slave on screen, and whose society is such a dystopia they are forced to udergo intense military training from birth and generally assigned roles for life based on genetics.

A show where the elementary skool is portrayed as a collection of all the absolute worst aspects of public school, both in terms of how its run, and how the kids treat each other, exaggerated to an absurd degree.

A show where a reoccurring joke character is a homeless man, who got taken advantage by a fast food chain, paid in free pizza and a room in the back of a resturant, became morbidly obese (Yes, this is Bloaty’s canon origin story) and was last seen in the original show sobbing uncontrollably because he hates his life.

Also, although this was obviously changed significantly in the comics and the Enter the Florpus special, in regards to what was portrayed in the original show, its really not difficult to make the argument Dib’s own dad and sister don’t give a shit whether or not he lives or dies.

Of course, this was all done for very dark laughs, as well as to create a setting that was just the right balance of humor and nihilism that the viewer could choose to either root for, laugh at or sympathize with either Zim or Dib without really worrying about the actual moral implications of either sides goals.

I’m not saying Zim is the edgiest show out there, comedic or otherwise. With stuff like Warhammer, Berserk, Venture Bros, Metalocalypse and all manner of gritty 90s anihero comics, Zims pretty light hearted and goofy in comparison.

But for childrens animation? Aside from some of the 90’s “grossout” cartoons like Ren & Stimpy and Cow & Chicken (which varied a lot in quality, imo) I can’t really think of any others that come close (Maaaaybe Billy & Mandy, but I think its too tonally inconsistant, with a lot of episodes being pretty standard cartoon slapstick.)

Wow, I sure did type a lot. Sorry about that. But Invader Zim is one of my all time favorite shows, and fictional villains one of my favorite topics, so I feel like I have a lot to say about them.

[engagedfamilygaming]

Family Video Game Review: The Adventure Pals

The Adventure Pals from Armor Games is an absurd jaunt through a bizarre world where almost nothing makes sense. Turtles can do back flips. Whales complain about “hashtag body shaming.” The hero’s best friend, Sparkles the giraffe, can use his tongue like a propeller to slow their collective fall. The villain wants to turn everyone into hot dog monsters. Every single one of those sentences is true. And here’s one more: This game is just as fun as it is ridiculous.

The premise is simple. Your dad has been kidnapped by the maniacal villain Mr. B, and is at risk of being turned into a hot dog. You, Sparkles the giraffe, and Mr. Rock are his only hope. You need to travel through several diverse and colorful levels full of pirates, cowboys, and other (even weirder) oddities in order to save him. Each new zone has a series of quests that will have you exploring complex platforming levels in search of rubies, cupcakes, and other treasures.

No. Seriously. This pirate is made out of bacon and eggs.

The Adventure Pals may be absurd, but that doesn’t mean it is simple. Eventually you will find yourself wall jumping up a passageway, then hovering with Sparkle’s tongue as you attempt to float closer to an element that you can grapple from, only to ride a zipline afterwards. It can be difficult to chain all of these different moves together, and there are no checkpoints to speak of. I would have quit in frustration if the game didn’t go out of its way to help me. The platforming in The Adventure Pals is forgiving thanks to snappy controls, easily timed wall jumping, and a mechanic that lets you mantle up onto a platform if you mistime a jump. This compensates for some devilishly challenging platforming sections as you progress through the games 105 levels. The mantling mechanic alone saved me dozens of times.

This isn’t just a simple platformer either. The Adventure Pals features a leveling system that lets you choose from up to three different perks each time you gain a level. This added a sense of progression and drove me to defeat every enemy I could find in search of blue experience orbs. The perks were varied and all of them felt useful. I loved the ability to improve my inventory size early. But, I was able to unlock pretty exotic perks later on in the game.

No one needs to play The Adventure Pals alone either. The game features drop-in/drop-out cooperative play. This is a great feature for families that have kids who just can’t make up their minds what they want to play.

Is this a kid friendly game?

The Adventure Pals is rated E 10+ by the ESRB for Fantasy Violence and Crude Humor. It is also rated PEGI 7 by the Pan European Game Information organization.

The Fantasy Violence is negligible in this game. You run around fighting hot dog monsters and oddly shaped blobs with a wooden sword. This will not be an issue for the vast majority of parents.

The Crude Humor is where some folks might have concerns. I played through the game and found it to be on par with the humor found in most cartoons on Cartoon Network, or with older Nickelodeon cartoons like Ren and Stimpy. This isn’t intellectual humor here folks. We’re talking fart jokes and bosses made up of literal bacon and eggs.

Can Kids play it?

The Adventure Pals is a challenging game. Inexperienced gamers won’t be sprinting through this one. As I said above, though, the game’s mechanics are forgiving enough to keep it from getting frustrating. Youngsters looking for a challenging platformer after finishing Super Mario Odyssey will be very happy with this one.

Most of the story is delivered through text so I don’t recommend this game for early readers unless they have a helper nearby. The iconography is ok, but it is still pretty hard to follow what’s going on without being able to reason what is going on.

Conclusion

I loved this game and I think that it is worthy purchase for families looking for a smaller game to play. It will launch on Xbox One, PS4, PC/Mac, and Switch on April 3rd.

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