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Cartoon blog day 31: RIP Stan Lee

20181113 RIP Stan Lee

I am still sad. Even before knowing Stan Lee, you sort of knew him. In certain documentaries about comics, people criticized him for taking the credit for solely creating characters like Spider-man when Steve Ditko came up with the brilliant design we now know and love.

But Stan always took the time to mention the talented artists who worked with him Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Romita and so on.

Everybody loves Stan Lee, he was our link to what people referred to as Golden Age of comics.

I truly mean it, his legacy lives on. An artist always puts a little bit of himself in everything they do, in that way those who looked up to his characters also looked up to Stan Lee, the author.

He taught me that it was cool to be good, you can use your superpowers to help people. When most boys went to the gym to impress girls in high school, the loser I was I went to the gym to look as close as I can to his characters hoping it would give me superpowers.

We have lost a living superhero who made even a skinny, shy kid from India dream his way out of his shell, thank you Stan Lee, Rest In Peace.

Cartoon blog day 30: Lizards, snakes and phobia

20181117 CBD30 Geekdom

As you might have noticed by now, I don’t mind sharing my secrets. I had the idea for this cartoon because I have a phobia of lizards, no matter the type, the size, they shake me to the core.

I haven’t quite put the finger on it, I think it has to do with the way they move. I argued that this weird movement is actually one of the reasons I find practical effects scary compared to the CGI alternative.

I made a video proposing practical effects as a way to improve the quality of special effects in Indian movies (YOUTUBE channel: MOVIE MESSENGER). Some would say, no you are scared of lizards because your ancestors must have fought against lizards and that is now programmed into your brain.

I live near this (I’m not in a prison it’s just my balcony has steel bars):

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And there is a Monitor lizard swimming sometimes here and I often have nightmares where I wake up the moment some sort of lizard or lizard-like creature appears. By the way they are called Monitor lizards, I thought they were called Molitor lizards, what are they monitoring?

What is your phobia?

Bonne journée.

Cartoon blog day 29: Geekdom

Everyone is geeky about something … or someone right?

How is buying more shoes than you need is tolerated more than buying comics to read stories you can see nowhere else.

Again we keep coming back to the same topics: ATTACHMENT, whether it’s your national sports team, your favorite TV show or your nation itself. You have to be receptive of criticism, because there are some good ones out there.

Because it’s by being critical that we improve ourselves and the environment around us.

Balance, as complicated it is to grasp should be the path to follow. But we rarely think about BALANCE.

Stories I consume in different mediums (comics, movies, series, novels, etc.) feed my imagination. And unlike what most people tend to believe, imagination is always based on something human. So I always learn something which is why I created a whole Youtube channel for that (check out my Youtube channel MOVIE MESSENGER).

When students ask me how can I draw things from nothing, you can’t. You have to express intangible concepts from your mind to the canvas, meaning ideas from other ideas which exist in your head.

All this ARTxplanation is good but how do you know if you are off balance?

This is where ART comes in, art keeps things in check. Here is one way in which you can test yourself from obsession: If you are a pseudo-religious Batman fan and you are comfortable laughing at yourself, in other words laugh at comedians who make fun of Batman fans, you are in a healthy mental relationship with what you love.

Bonne journée.

Cartoon blog day 25: Reincarnation

First of all, I have some question about the link of time travel with reincarnation. Is reincarnation us going to the future, I mean who said that you retain your biological form when you Time travel, maybe you become a baby again and have to grow up in the future in the hope that you will still remember why you Time traveled in the first place. If you have any theories on that let me have it in the comments.

20181107 CBD25 Reincarnation.jpg

Usually like any common mortal, my thoughts at any particular moment are influenced by the books I am reading. I just finished reading HOMO DEUS in which the author Yuval Noah Harari said that we record History not only to avoid mistakes by drawing lessons from the past but also because it liberates us.

Which is why talking to a friend about a problem you have, feels good. I usually find myself on the other side of the conversation because for some reason people believe that I am a good listener who doesn’t judge.

The problem I have come to realize is that I try to give solutions to any problem I hear, even if the person sharing the trouble doesn’t want one.

I cannot ask the person who is going through something horrible: “Now wait do you want me to listen or to give you a solution?” if you do this, you are considering the feelings of the person in front of you.

Maybe because we unconsciously know that History is mostly written by Victors we want all stories to end in a good way, or at least have some sort of closure FOR US. But that’s exactly the point, it’s not always about YOU.

As I grow up, I realize that everyone is going through something at any given moment and putting your feelings in front of theirs, is not helping anyone.

Bonne journée.

Cartoon blog day 22: Artificial intelligence

20181102 CBD21 Artifical intelligence

Usually what I create, which means the things I put out there come from what I am reading, watching at that time. Since I am currently reading the brilliant Yuval Noah Harari’s HOMO DEUS, I was hit with a fear that I put aside for some time.

There is so much in the book to take in and I need to read it again to make notes and take lessons for myself. His book SAPIENS was about human history and this is about the future of humankind in which Artificial intelligence will play a major role.

He argues that many people or most people will become militarily and economically useless because their jobs will be taken over by artificial intelligence (A.I.).

The question I asked myself as a teacher and cartoonist, is not whether my job will be replaced by A.I. because that is inevitable, there are already computer programs which compose music, it won’t take long for them to make jokes. However, i start thinking about when it would happen.

We live truly in a crucial moment, you might say “yeah but every generation says that about their era”. Well, if not for anything else the rhythm of changes have never been so high in Human history. Do you realize that the first Smartphone IPhone was released in a 2007? 11 years ago? Look how much has changed in ten years.

Like I said in my cartoon, I have hope that we still have time. I went to see a movie the other day and I wanted to buy the ticket from the Automatic machine and it didn’t work so I went with the human option, which made me smile a bit.

We have time, Yes. Not to enjoy but to focus on reducing our Carbon footprint because that is for me the biggest problem at the moment.

Bonne journée.