Just a quick note, the supercool cats over at The Cutting Room asked me to do some guest art for them and it went live today! I was going to turn it down and get some extra coloring done on the older SM strips but then they sent over the script. Tim Burton. Nuff said, I’m on board. Anyway, it’s really funny and they’ve got some great stuff going on over there, so go check it out and spread the word. They also wrote up some really kind words in the comments, but they may be clinically insane. I don’t know yet.

When I work, just about the only thing playing in the background are movie scores (like so many other webcomickers I’ve talked to). I’ve loved them since I started really Drawing. As in, isolating myself in my room while I work. The emotional “flow” of the music is just enough to keep me exited about the work in front of me, as if I were creating the epic myself. And the lack of lyrics really helps me stay concentrated on what I’m doing. If I pop in Tears for Fears, inevitably, I find myself singing along and that’s when I make mistakes.

The first one I bought is the one I still listen to the most. Conan the Barbarian. A movie with really sparse dialog needed something to keep the audience captivated and still move the story along. Basil Poledouris did that with this score. It was where I first realized just how important the score can be. It can make or break a movie. Sometimes, a failure of a movie will have an incredible score, but scores do not sell tickets.

So this week, I thought I’d post some of my favorites in good ol’ Top-Ten form. These top ten are not in any specific order, they are just my favorites at the moment. They can also change anytime with the summer movie season coming up. I’m sure I’ll forget some great ones, so feel free to add your favorites in the comments below. You’ll find a lot of Hans Zimmer overproducing and Danny Elfman just being Danny. Two people you will never find on this list, Randy Newman and John Williams. Yeah, I said No John Williams.

Top Ten (in no particular order):

• Conan the Barbarian – Basil Poledouris, the Music drives the movie.
• Star Trek – Michael Giacchino, Just outstanding.
• Coraline – Bruno Coulais, Creepy and just as cool as the Movie.
• Sleepy Hollow – Danny Elfman, Deep, Loud and Dark. A Danny Elfman specialty.
• At World’s End – Hans Zimmer, by the 3rd flick, he gets the score just right.
• The Last Samurai – Hans Zimmer, Sooo Good. A very emotional score that just fits.
• The Last of the Mohicans – Trevor Jones & Randy Edelman, Epic in scale. I found myself humming the melodies in this for years without even knowing it.
• The Dark Knight – Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard, I don’t need to tell you why this one’s so good.
• Edward Scissorhands – One of my first, and easily the most Timeless. Danny Elfman has never topped this fairytale.
• Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire – Patrick Doyle, Best Movie in the series, Best Score in the series.

Some under-rated scores

• Chronicles of Narnia: (1) – Harry Gregson Williams, really good melodies.
• Eragon – Patrick Doyle, Meh movie, but Patrick Doyle hit it outta.
• King Arthur – Hans Zimmer, Turd of a movie, but the score is incredible.
• Van Helsing – Alan Sylvestry, I know, I know. But the music is fun.
• Serenity – David Newman, Goes without saying. The western space thing is represented beautifully. Every bit as under rated as the movie.
• Wanted – Danny Elfman, It’s really nice to see Danny Elfman play a little and he got to in this one. Heavy, Guitar laden, Just good.
• 300 – Tyler Bates, Over bearing and exaggerated, just like the movie. But that’s a good thing.

And one OVER rated score

• Avatar – James Horner, No wait. It’s the MOVIE that was over-rated.

Yes I know it’s been out for six months, but if you’re on Verizon, then it’s new to you!

The Palm Pre is the first of Palm’s “Reboot” phones. They started over so you can forget what came before and got stale over time. The key feature here is the new OS, webOS. Built upon web standards, including HTML 5, Ajax, and Javascript, webOS is familiar programming ground for any developer that can set up a website. And it’s awesome.

The Hardware: the phone itself is what it is. A slider phone with a mediocre physical keyboard and decent enough build quality. It slides up with a satisfying click and feels sturdy in your hand. I’ve dropped mine enough time to know, it seems durable enough. Some people have complained about build quality, with issues from the twisting “oreo effect” to the “cutting the cheese” sharp edge, but those people are all iFanboys who prefer unibody-can’t-open-the-damn-thing-construction. Kidding. There were some issues in the early days but Palm seems to have hammered them out.

The Software: This is where it shines. webOS is the greatest mobile software on the market. It’s form and function all in one. Web standards built on top of the Linux kernel equals easy to program apps and the ability to run Native C+ apps as well. They recently launched awesome 3D games you can’t even run on Android yet. They’ve got EA on board (good or bad), Gameloft, and lots more. The ability to multitask is the big selling point and it is indispensable. Days after I got it, I found myself getting irritated at the iTouch being unable to pause twitter, spell check something, google a link, etc, then come right back. The wife has my iTouch now. Bah. On the drive home from work one day, I was out of podcasts and thought I’d give Comics Coast to Coast a try. I opened the Podcast app and it wasn’t listed in their directory yet. So I paused the app, typed in the name which it searched for on Google, then I found the feed URL, copied that, switched back to the podcast app, pasted said URL and it started downloading the Axecop episode right away. Multi…wait for it….Tasking.

It took Apple a full year to get apps onto the iPhone, now they’re up to thousands of apps (5000 less w/o the jiggly apps), and a couple of them are even good. After Six months, the Pre app catalog has finally broken the 1000 app mark but it’s growing fast. With the addition of the PDK (plug-in development kit) allowing C+ apps, any iPhone app can be ported over to webOS in no time. It’s looking better and better all the time. As a matter of fact, in the time it took me to write this blog post, Grooveshark announced a native app for webOS. Growing by the second!

Bottom line: I love the phone. Love the OS. Love the multi-tasking. And, (where I live at least) I love Sprint. The plans are affordable and I despise AT&T. I will never use them again, for lack of quality among many other things. If the iPhone had come to Sprint before the Pre was released, I probably never would have given it a second glance. Now I anticipate the day the iPhone comes to Sprint so I can proudly say, “Meh….pass.”

If you’ve been here a while or you’ve gone back and read the archives, you know about Roland’s gadget addiction. Tez hooked him on it with the help of a particular fruit-themed smart phone and it was all downhill from there. I did that story arc for two reasons, 1. Everyone has an addiction of some kind. They’re not always destructive addictions, but everyone has them. and 2. Roland’s addiction is MY addiction.

I love my Gadgets. Can’t function without them. The wife will tell you. My phone is in my hand every five minutes, whether there’s a reason for it to be there or not. I buy gadgets that I know I have no use for, usually fabricating some kind of justification to myself. I bought a netbook just so I could hack it and put OS X on. Haven’t used it since. I have a Sony Vaio UX280 (look it up) that I occasionally use to write. MacBook, (my 3rd) 2 MacMinis, Tablet, Touch tablet, a gazillion keyboards I don’t use, a Cintiq (which I love), I’m on my fourth smart phone in three years and who the hell knows what else. I’ve had every iteration of the PSP. Even the new PSP Go. It’s crap. I knew it was crap. But I bought it anyway because it’s new. Even with the first gen PSP, I’d say I’ve totaled about 30 hours of playtime across all three versions. So why buy them. Dunno. Addiction at work.

To the point, Roland’s addiction–My addiction will give me some more fodder for these Thursday Blog posts. During the Temptation story arc I had lots of other ideas for gadget gags I wanted to throw in. But Shattered Myth is NOT a gadget strip or Blog. Not really. So I shortened it with the intention on doing extra Gadget reviews (like deleted scenes in the Temptation story arc) in strip form. Then if/when I get to the point of compiling a book, these deleted scenes would make great bonus features to fill out extra pages. Now I’ve decided to start doing some of that in a weekly blog post called “Of Gods & Gadgets”. I’ll review a gadget or two if I can get one, maybe just some hands on time, or in some cases, speculate on the device based on media coverage. When I go to put a book together, I’ll look at converting those reviews and observations into strip form and throw them into the back somewhere.

I’m not sure if this will be within the regular Thursday blog post or possibly a Tuesday thing, but I’ll let you know. Follow me on twitter for updates. First up will be my one true love, the Palm Pre (the Spartan’s phone). It’s six months old but it’s my baby, and a lot of people don’t seem to realize how great webOS is just yet. Look for that next week. Thanks for reading!

Quick Note: Percy Jackson and the Olympians – The Lightning Thief opens Friday. I may not be able to see it right away so I’m counting on you guys to go suffer through it for me and report back. Suck, or not Suck. Now, onto the Blog post.

When I decided to do Shattered Myth as a webcomic, I did so entirely based on the Halfpixel book, “How to Make Webcomics”. While those guys are the first to tell you, nothing in webcomics is concrete, they do set down some “rules that work for us” as a starting point. I took a lot of what they said, analyzed it, agreed with everything, then ignored it as I broke rule after rule. They said, B/W, four panel, gag-a-day strips will attract an audience more quickly than anything else. Keeping it simple will allow you to update more regularly, preferably Five days a week. I agree with all that.

So I converted SM from a long from comic book into a 4 panel strip because it is more sustainable as update schedules go. It’s not Five, but I can do Three strips a week as opposed to One or Two pages. SM was originally (like 10 years ago) going to be a newspaper style strip, so that would be no big deal. I honestly tried to keep it simple at first but between my semi-complex character designs and the desire to make it more of an Adventure strip (less talking heads, more action) I don’t think the strip will ever be Five days a week. Even if I were doing it full time, I think I would just use the time for other SM related stuff. Rule kinda broken.

Then I went to write the thing. Apparently, I’m not funny enough for gag-a-day strips. I found I needed the “crutch” of a beginning, middle and end to lean on or I would never be able to hammer out three strips a week. Shattered Myth would tell a story. Rule broken. After about 50 strips, I started experimenting with Color and decided my particular art style is more suited to a color strip. As of strip #100, SM has been full color and I’ve been slowly coloring the first 100 as well. Recently, Don Fox has been helping me color up the early ones, doing his best to make my mediocre line work less mediocre. So I’ve gone to color and I’ve gone back and changed what I’ve already finished. That’s two more rules broken.

Tread lightly on issues of Politics and Religion. Pfft. You’ve all seen how I respond to that one. I’ve never been one to avoid anything, particularly discussions on religion. While I have my belief system (or lack thereof), I have no desire to offend anyone or call people out. No need for controversy here. I’m not big on social commentary, I just want to entertain and tell the best story I can. However, if we ever, as a country, elect another George W., THEN you’re going to see some social commentary and some Political bashing. Rule broken.

The bottom line for me is this: There are NO rules in webcomics. Do whatever the hell you want and make it work over time. It’s an uphill battle for sure, next Thursday I’m going to go into the struggles I have telling this story four panels at a time. As always everybody, thanks for reading!