VIZBlog
posted 12-30-2008 6:35 PM by Rob L McCarthy
New Year's Blog!
As I write this, the day before Viz’s New Year's break I am struck by two things. First, the word “blog” is a perfect sound effect for many bi-products of upset stomachs. Older readers know why that comes to mind at New Year's. Younger readers, stay away from what the older readers are drinking!
My second thought is that only on your birthday (if you even celebrate birthdays-some people don’t) and New Year's do we celebrate the passage of time.
Most people who are not desperate for a blog topic and/or Latin American novelists of the late-60s-to-early-70s even think too much about time. We're too busy dealing with it to think about it. If we think about time passing at all it’s always negative: “Dang, I've only got an hour to write this blog post." "Damn, two only two weeks 'til finals." "Only three billion years 'til the sun goes nova and ends life as we know it."
Surely, my friends, it’s to view time as we do on New Year's Eve. “Look what we made it through! Look at all the people who helped us, and just maybe we can make the future better.” That’s the way to think. Because the future is coming, so you may as well smile about it!
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
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posted 12-29-2008 10:44 AM by HR
Intern at VIZ Media!
VIZ is looking to fill several internships for winter/spring, 2008.
All internships are unpaid and interns MUST be able to receive college credit. We cannot accept candidates who are not currently enrolled in school. All applicants must be able to provide proof of school credit on request.
You can read more about the internships we are offering and the requirements here.
To apply for an internship, please send your cover letter and resume to jobs@viz.com, specifying the internship for which you are applying.
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posted 12-19-2008 6:43 PM by Rob L McCarthy
Reasons to not watch TV after Thanksgiving
This is going shock a lot of readers but none of the things mentioned on the annual Oprah episode about “holiday blues” bothers me too much. My family is great and shopping doesn’t bug me (and REALLY—if fricking SHOPPING is so stressful, then give away some money!).
What does bother me is an hour of network TV devoted to how much the holidays suck. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t, but it’s a boring topic!
TV gets really dull this time of year, as saying “Happy Holidays” at the end is thought to render plot and character unnecessary.
The Lifetime Network (called “the network for women” but more truthfully “the network for guys trying to justify not dating much”) can usually be counted on to give us a good old obsessed stalker movie with TV actors from the 80s (think Sleeping with the Enemy with Tony Danza and Loni Anderson). But for the last 15 days they've had nothing but “Ed Asner/William Shatner/George C. Scott learn the true meaning of Christmas.” Yawn.
Am I saying they should ignore a season both holy and profitable? Heck no! Lifetime, put your stalker in a Santa suit! Sci fi? Show the Star Wars Xmas special! I DARE YOU! Oprah? Buy my uncle a new car!
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posted 12-12-2008 6:02 PM by Rob L McCarthy
Puzzles
As a serious minded young comic fan people always used to ask me, “Who’s your favorite Batman villain?" I always answered Catwoman, because she’s the only one smart enough not to leave any clues.
Of course that was just me acting “mature.” Actually my real favorite was the Riddler precisely because he was obsessed with puzzles and clues.
I could have used a guy like that earlier today. I have been trying (largely without success) to design a really good puzzle for Shonen Jump.
We can’t change the art in the magazine, so no “what’s wrong with this picture.” Nor any hidden images, or anything that a lifetime of visualizing how my descriptions will look on a page is going to help with this either.
That leaves me with word puzzles. I’m going to work my way up to crossword puzzles because making a crossword puzzle freehand is a pain in the (three letter homonym for donkey).
I could download a crossword template off the Internet but that’s just not how I roll. I was told to design the puzzle and by (three letter word for deity) that’s what I shall do.
Besides, all the templates are typical of modern crossword style—just last night I found out that Arthur Wynn’s first 1913 crossword was diamond-shaped, and that the grid type we know today was not universal until the 1930s.
My first thought was a series of anagrams, another word puzzle with a noble history! No less than Robert Hooke, inventor of the compound microscope, used to write his notes in anagrams so rivals couldn’t read them. I love anagrams, but the bosses say they’ve done too many.
So what do I have? So far not much. Just the beginning of a puzzle based on a code by a famous pre-Christian general whose name can be arranged into the anagram “a jail cures us.” Sure I could just tell you the name but really, you should at least be required to go to the bottom of the page.
I hope to get the puzzle published in Shonen Jump but if not, at least I had some fun doing this research.
*Julius Caesar
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posted 12-9-2008 5:53 PM by Rob L McCarthy
Playing post office
A few blog posts ago I mentioned Santa Claus. A lot of readers (and I agree) find Santa hard to believe in. It’s not the flying reindeer–he just breeds them with super efficient colons and feeds them a steady diet of beans. That’s right, super-flatulence! And it’s not the getting to every house in the world in one night, or even going down the chimney in houses that don’t have chimneys. A wormhole and a decent contractor explain that. Don’t argue that it’s all possible within the framework of General Relativity.
No my friends, the most impossible thing about Santa Clause has nothing to with Santa himself. I just can’t believe the United States Post Office found the right address in the North Pole!
When I’m not doing the fun part of my job (blogging and lifting boxes), I have to do the slightly less fun job of taking the mail out of the boxes and sorting it. We get some totally wrong mail. There’s a dentist in Oregon whose patients should love VIZ Media…we’ve been getting all their bills for years. Missing an entire state and heading blissfully southward many times a year over the course of several years seems like something that could be corrected.
The best thing the USPS does is their new(ish) envelope that they send out when they KNOW they screwed up. It’s a HUGE envelope with 14 point blue “Franklin Medium Gothic” typeface (for the moments when “Times New Roman” just won't do). It says “WE CARE.” If you saw that slogan on as many letters as I do per week you'd recognize the irony.
Still, one always hears that either the U.S. or England has the best post office, which really makes me wonder about other countries!
Oh well, the blog is done by 2:18 Tuesday. Which is good, because tomorrow is “mail day.”
p.s. If you read this far, I might as well ask: How many people would like to read a blog about fonts and lettering?
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