I, Robot and other metal people

Yesterday akawil, ladymondegreen, and I saw I, Robot at the Regal Battery Park, a nice, convenient walk from the WTC PATH station. It’s a much better movie than I’d been expecting from the previews, actually taking inspiration from Asimov’s ideas and including a few scenes that clearly indicated that someone who’d worked on the screen play had actually read the stories. Still, it rewards emotion over logic in a very un-Asimovian fashion, and favors drama over sense in the typical Hollywood action-movie way.

Afterwards we wandered around Nelson Rockefeller Park for a bit, and I snapped crappy photos of Tom Otterness sculptures with the lousy-but-handy camera in my Clié:



That fourth one in the top row? That’s a close-up on a little sculpture in the neck of the big head in the third photo.

I need a better digital camera. I’ve got one — a Canon PowerShot A10 — but it’s bulky and heavy enough that I never carry it around with me. I think I want one of those teeny Elph models.

Then we walked up to Pier 45 and caught the last ten minutes of a concert by The Guitar Guy, followed by dinner at the downtown branch of Monster Sushi, where I sketched this woman sitting across the room:

Comics

This week’s comics booty included the new Powers TPB, “The Sellouts” (and I really need to sit down and reread all of Powers now that the trades caught up to the point where I stopped buying the floppies) and, um, was that it for Wednesday? I thought I bought something else too. Was it Seaguy #3, or did that come out last week?

Anyway, on Thursday I went to Midtown (the other comics store I’ve got an account at, and holy crap, NYC has a lot of good comics stores!) and got the new Finder trade, “Mystery Date”. Some of the pages were redrawn for the collection, and there’s at least one bit of info that I think was in the original floppies that isn’t in the trade.... Anyway, it’s Finder, so it’s brilliant. Need I say more?

My only complaint is about the fan art in the back — no URL provided for John Peters! How the fuck am I supposed to google for a name that common? I think it’s this guy, who doesn’t even show up till the second page of search results. Oh, hm. I think I read a couple issues of Forty Winks, liked it, and then forgot all about it.

I also got Conversation #1, the mini-comic collaboration between Craig Thompson and James Kochalka. It’s a bit meagre for the five bucks they’re asking, and more than a bit woo-woo and artsy-fartsy, but it’s fascinating seeing them weave their styles together.

I’ve also gotten back to that big pile o’ comics from MoCCA. Today I read both issues of The Adventures of Mia by Enrico Casarosa. Cute, and clearly inspired by Miyazaki. The first story has a clever little twist to it of the kind that’d be hard to pull off in a non-visual medium.