The Mayfair opened in 1932. In 2009 I became a co-owner.

Hope everyone has an Alpha Flight-tastic Canada Day. I will be crewing at some concert festivities like a chump. Or at least stuck there, hiding from the rain and not working because it looks like thunderstorms. No BBQ themed day off for me.

I'm working on a couple projects at the moment. Neither of which can I really talk about. Which makes blog updates a bit uneventful and difficult. I can at least say that one is a web-series and one is a comic book, and progress is happening on both.

The artist sent in the thumbnail layouts for issue three of the comic mini-series (it's five issues total). And even just at that stage it has me really excited. Can't wait to see it all penciled and inked.

Looking into getting an short bit of animation done for my mascot Batty there. Something quick and short for the opening titles of the web-series. Been meaning to get something like that done for an age, will be cool to see Batty in motion. Now if only I could get an action figure made in his likeness.

This upcoming Friday (May 29th) the Mayfair Theatre will be screening 'Young People Fucking' as their late late show (11PM). The movie is being shown as part of Canterbury High School's 40th anniversary, as it was directed by Canterbury alum Martin Gero.

Glenn Cockburn (one of the film's producers) will be in attendance to introduce the movie.

Tickets available at the theatre ($5 for members, $9 for non-members).

A movie that I worked on a lil' while back will have it's premiere this upcoming Friday night (May 22nd) at 7PM at the Nepean Creative Arts Centre (35 Stafford Road, Nepean...aka...Ottawa). Admission is $5.00.

Attack of the Giant Leeches is director Brett Kelly's re-make of the Roger Corman produced 1959 drive-in cult classic. A film which also got the MST3K treatment in 1992:

Dr. Forrester: Ah! Robinson, Servo, Mr. T. Robot! Our invention this week is inspired by this week's experiment, "Attack of the Giant Leeches". In ye olden times, alchemists believed that leeches served medicinal purposes.

TV's Frank: So do we!

Dr. Forrester: Uh, yes um, we found that the common fresh water leech uh, can serve the same purpose as a nicotine patch, and being neither food nor drug, there's no pesky FDA regulation to impede your progress and I can experiment at will. Frank?

TV's Frank: At your service.

Dr. Forrester: Our subject, Frank, has been trying to quit smoking for quite some time. He's a three pack-a-day man.

TV's Frank: No I'm not!

Dr. Forrester: Yes you are, shut up. Now this leech, we'll call him Patches...

TV's Frank: Yah!

Dr. Forrester: When applied to the neck or head area, will suck any desire to smoke out of Frank.

TV's Frank: No, no, no, no! No! No! No, I'm the sum of my vices! I have my pain, my happiness, my losses, my love! My struggles, my hobbies, my lent! I want to live! I want to live! I want to live! And love! And learn! And live!

Dr. Forrester: But this won't hurt a bit.

TV's Frank: Oh, Ok.

Dr. Forrester: Uh, there you go. Now, Patches, I'm depending on you, ya slug!

TV's Frank: Say, this is the most action I've ever got.

Yay for Free Comic Book Day!!!

This picture by Eric Talbot has nothing to do with me or Batturtle Productions. Except for if I had thought of it, I totally would have gotten him to draw me something like this one of the couple of times that I met him.

As I've stated on here in an earlier post, I prefer to add some form of picture along with my little blog updates. Alas, I don't have any photographic or art related stuff from the past month or so. Not that I haven't been busy. Work plows along on a couple projects that I can't really talk about just yet. Believe me, I wish I could gush about them but have been sworn to secrecy.

One (which I think I'm allowed to say is a comic book) is painfully close to hitting some form of maybe finding a publisher. It's such an insane uphill battle though. And I can't even say "but I can't complain"...'cause oh boy, could I ever complain about a couple of things that have happened to us in regards to finding a home for this thing and having it become an actual for real on paper comic book.

A couple posts ago I said I wanted to do something a bit more long form this year (like a feature length film). Which I would. But, out of nowhere (as good ideas have a tendency to often come from) a project that would be in a definite non-feature type format is on it's way to becoming a reality. As with that other project that's mentioned above, this too also involves comic books. Except they're more involved in the characters workplace location. I usually am extremely hard on my own writing...and I wrote something for this project that I think is my favorite thing that I've ever done. And that's a lot for me to fess up to considering my normal state of self deprecation.

On the weekend, crewed for a lil' bit on a comic book based shoot titled 'The Scarab'. Would've liked to have worked on it more, but had to ditch out 'cause I was already booked elsewhere. Anyhow, will contribute more work towards it in upcoming weeks.

Above is a shot of one of the costumed characters from the picture, The Woman in Red.

I guess this image could count as Blast From the Past #3 (I don't have drawers full of cool sketches like the TMNT blog has at it's disposal). That's me with a clipboard holding the lined shooting script, looking at a video assist monitor. This was taken during the shooting of one of the Villains shorts, which if I remember correctly was somewhere around 1950. Seems that long ago anyhow.

In more current news, am busy trying to get a few projects going:
I just wrote an 8 page back-up story for a friends comic book mini-series. The series that I co-wrote with Howard Wong is in the limbo of being shopped out to publisher's. In other writing related news, trying to figure out what to do with a trio of finished feature length scripts I have. Using them to sell out in some way would be just grand.

Also possibly re-tooling the ole' Comic Book Connection idea after having been inspired by a couple feature length doc's. Might be easier (well...easier is probably the wrong word) to focus the idea into a documentary with a beginning, middle, and end instead of a series straight away.

Basically, in 2009 I hope to do a longer project in some form. Fiction or doc... maybe both. If I can fit ambition and productivity in-between time spent at the Mayfair watching movies that is.

Will 2009 be awesome?
Magic Eight Ball says..."YES"
The Magic Eight Ball never lies!!!

From our home town of Ottawa...Kodos, Kang and I hope that all of you Quantum Presbyterians out there have an excellent Holiday season.

My good deed of the day (or week...or month...possibly longer) was to walk around my neighbourhood for a bit today, getting the new Mayfair schedules into some places of business and into people's hands. When I first saw the schedule a couple days ago, I became a little spellbound. On this one month of movies alone, the first of many schedules to come, the Mayfair has I think become one of the best movie theatres not just in Canada, but anywhere.

Check out the Mayfair website for more details on the screenings. And be sure to come out on January 2nd for the grand re-opening, featuring a free screening of some local shorts and the classic film 'Metropolis'.

The Killer63 screening is tomorrow. Go see it!

I have three things that I love about Halloween nowadays:
1) There's the eating of all the candy leftover from my friends house 'cause there's hardly any trick-or-treaters.
2) All the great old horror movies on TCM.
3) Girls in skimpy super hero costumes.
Happy Halloween!

In association with the comic strip PVP , there's a Flickr site about Skull the Troll and his travels around the globe. Where-in fans of the comic and owners a of Skull (doll? stuffed animal?...not sure the proper term) send in pictures of their toys travels.

A friend of mine recently made a trip to St Petersburg, Russia. And seeing as she is a fan of PVP as well, she was cool enough to drag along my Skull with her on her voyage. I submitted the picture to the Flickr site ages ago, bit seeing as it hasn't been updated in a couple months, thought I'd post it here.

Been horribly busy the past six weeks working at Cirque du Soleil here in Ottawa. Which was great, but very time consuming and distracting from other stuff that I should've been working on. So, now I'm back to work on various projects, mainly getting the Killer63 Fest, and my short film contribution for it all done and ready.

And, another important endeavor, is an attempt that I'm undertaking to bribe a friend of mine into naming his soon to arrive new baby son 'Optimus'. It began with me jokingly saying I'd give him $20 bucks to do so...word spread, more folks chipped in, and now I'm suddenly up to $400 big bribery dollars. Now that my time has slightly freed up a bit, I'm going to try to raise that number to as big a dollar amount as I can manage. If you'd like to contribute to the cause, lemme know. There's no better bribe you could possibly donate to.

Mayfair marquee for Killer63 year one

It looks like the Mayfair Theatre is closing in November. I spoke today with someone doing an article about the theatre (since I've shot movie stuff there and screened Killer63 events there). The news saddens me to no end. Especially so if it's destined to be replaced by another Starbucks or set of condos.

I have endless Mayfair stories I could tell. The first time that I went to the Mayfair, my uncle brought me, and introduced me to Monty Python. And since then, I've seen hundreds of movies there, double bills for the most part. I've happily wasted the day there watching a Star Trek marathon, shot cap guns at the screen of John Woo films, experienced horribly offensive Japanimation and classics the likes of Wizard of Oz.

It's awful that repertory theatres nation wide are destined for extinction it seems. The Mayfair is one of my favorite places on earth, and I will miss watching movies there very much.

Catwoman (Darwyn Cooke style) at the Fan Expo

My friends, this image above is prime example number one why comic con's are awesome. This was the view from behind Howard Wong's table on Sunday afternoon at the Fan Expo. If you can pry your eyes away from Catwoman for a moment, you'll notice his 'After the Cape' comics there at the bottom of the picture (both trades currently available from Image Comics...go buy 'em now!) .

A fun weekend was had by all. I got to see a bunch of comic con friends and acquaintances, got a bit of schmoozing in, got to chat with some geeky heroes of mine the likes of (Commander) Rick Green, Keith Giffen, and the folks from Mirage Studios amongst others. And went see 'Evil Dead the Musical', which I'm pretty sure was the greatest thing ever produced by human beings in the history of the planet.

I filled up my second sketch book (well, exept for two pages that are on reserve for friends that I have to get in there). So, I'll get around to a scanner sooner or later and show off some of the new highlights of my collection soon.

This is rather old news I'm afraid...the old complaint of being horribly busy and not having enough hours in the day (plus my internet connection was down for a week...horrible stuff). But I wanted to put up a little bit of a comment on the most awesome of film festivals in all of the land anyhow. Lat week I hit Montreal for 5 days of an overdose of genre bent movie watching madness. If you're a movie fan, if you love obscure martial arts movies, horror, bizarre documentaries, and the like, then this be the fest for you.

Seeing as the thing runs for a staggering 19 days, and I was there for 5...there's plenty (dozens) of movies that I didn't get to see. Without even making a stop over to drop off luggage or anything, headed straight to the theatre to meet up with friends and watch 'Akanbo Shojo'. An evil twin tale featuring a cleverly demonic little baby monster. The most fascinating of a documentary I saw, featuring train-wreck human beings as subject matter was 'I Think We're Alone Now', which was about Tiffany stalkers (yes...former teen pop star Tiffany). The best thing I was was a Thai horror anthology called '4bia' (which if I remember correctly translates to 'Crossroads'). I thought all 4 chapters were just great. It's so new though that it doesn't even seem to be on imdb as of yet. The worst thing I saw was not so shockingly enough, the new Uwe Boll opus, 'Tunnel Rats'. Within the first 3 or 4 minutes, I was in a haze of denial, thinking "Hey...this isn't bad, maybe the bastard's finally done it! Maybe this is gonna' be ok!". Things quickly went downhill from there from average to terrible to horrendous.

So, the festival has come and gone. Do go and check out the website for the 2008 Fantasia Film Festival though for a long list of movies well worth tracking down.