Wednesday, July 2nd, 2014
A teaser trailer of Studio Ghibli’s adaptation of Joan G. Robinson’s When Marnie Was There directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi (Arrietty). It’s from Japanese TV, so there’s all kinds of graphics all over the screen, but hopefully a cleaner version will find its way online soon.
The song, by the way, is “Fine on the Outside,” sung by Priscilla Ahn.
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2014
Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy, Chris O’Dowd, and Naomi Watts star in writer-director Ted Melfi’s St. Vincent, about a grumpy old man (Murray) who befriends the neighbor kid. There are a lot of familiar tropes in this story, but the dialogue and the cast seem solid enough to get past that. (Or at least it earned a few laughs from me.)
St. Vincent opens on October 24, 2014.
Monday, June 30th, 2014
So… big news today: you can now read Multiplex in the super popular Comic Chameleon webcomic reader for iOS. If you already use the app, check it out! If you don’t, well, you probably don’t care, because with just about every single great webcomic in existence included in their app, how could you possibly need another reason to check it out? Girls with Slingshots, Dumbing of Age, Questionable Content, HijiNKS ENSUE, Wasted Talent and many, many more are all right there at your fingertips. (Even Oglaf, for you perverts with dirty dirty fingertips!)
What does this mean for Multiplex for iPhone and iPod touch? Nothing. Jelly and I hope to add some new features to it soon (likely after iOS 8 is released). I enjoy Comic Chameleon, and I use it to read loads of my favorite webcomics, myself. But it’s not an either/or thing. There are several differences between the two apps:
Comic Chameleon has a cool panel viewing mode that makes reading really nice on smaller screens and loads of other great webcomics right in the same app. But — the Multiplex app is ad-free, has the Notes from the Manager posts, Related Strips, and the Cast pages. (There’s no way to include them. in Comic Chameleon.)
Also, only Book Seven (strips #771 and forward) are available in Comic Chameleon right now, but if people seem to like reading it in their app, I’ll find time to put more of the strips into their system. Marking all the panels up for their panel viewing mode gets time consuming when you have hundreds of comics in your archive.
Frankly, my hope for including Multiplex in Comic Chameleon is that new readers will discover the strip through their app and continue to read the comic whichever way they like most: in Comic Chameleon, on the website, in the Multiplex app… I don’t really care how people read Multiplex so long as they enjoy it. (And if I get any significant amount of ad revenue from Comic Chameleon, sweet!)
For Android users, this doesn’t change anything — for now. Sorry. Comic Chameleon has plans for an Android version in the works, but nothing firm yet.
Saturday, June 28th, 2014
Many of you will recognize Glen Keane as a longtime Disney animator, probably best known for being the designer and animator of Ariel in The Little Mermaid. After 37 or so years with Disney, Keane left in early 2012, eventually joining Motorola’s (later Google’s) Advanced Technology and Projects Group to work on interactive hand-drawn animation.
Keane’s animated short “Duet,” a part of ATAP’s Spotlight Stories, debuted at Google I/O Conference yesterday and is a lovely showcase of everything hand-drawn animation excels at doing. Enjoy! (Sadly, this is only SD, but I’ll see if I can replace it with a higher quality version eventually.)
For more on the Spotlight Stores series, check out their official site.
