The Return of Stickman #1426

You're wondering why it is that I'm posting a The Return of Stickman strip day instead of a The Comic Critic strip. The simple answer is I'm a day behind on getting The Comic Critic strip out. So I'm switching the days around and giving you this hint about how the rest of the week is going to be for Stickman.

The Return of Stickman #1425

Each of the strips I did today was inspired by a news story about snakes. There should be enough clues for you to find all of them using your search engines. No snakes next week. I promise.

The Return of Stickman #1424

The Return of Stickman #1423

It's true. I read it on the Internet.

The Return of Stickman #1422

Look for this news story in the Seattle area.

The Comic Critic Reviews Jurassic Park

I went on vacation last week where I stayed in town and just relaxed and decompressed at home. So I'm going to post an older review about a vacation gone horribly wrong. Dinosaur movies before 1993 were a lot of fun. They came in three basic formats in various degrees of quality. First, you had the lizards covered in makeup. These poor things were poked and prodded at each other with the occasional rewarding hiss or tussle for the cameraman. Next up from that, you saw the sectional giant prop, where either a large claw or a set of jaws would swoop in from off-screen. And the best were the stop-motion animations. They might have been a little jerky looking, but it was a lot easier to suspend your disbelief with them than it was with the extras from the reptile farm. Then Jurassic Park hit the scene. Its combination of full-scale animatronics (combined with highly integrated CGI) did more than carry a sense of disbelief. You wondered if your local pet store was going to expand to make way for this new inventory of potential pets. Finally, a real look at the famed giants that so fascinated us when we were little. I bet this film did wonders for the study of paleontology, inspiring a whole new generation into its field of research.

The Comic Critic Reviews Lawrence of Arabia

Every time I tried to write about Lawrence of Arabia, I found myself writing something completely different. I wrote about my childhood, the glory of the Golden Age of Hollywood, my family, and the times I spent with them watching films—and about one of my favorite actors, Peter O’Toole. After a paragraph or so, I’d find I hadn’t mentioned anything about the movie itself, so I’ve got to come back to the comment I made in the strip. This film influences you. It’s ingrained into my life to such an extent that I have a hard time just talking about it. How wonderful is it that a movie can be so good that it goes beyond entertainment, beyond culture, and practically worms itself into your DNA? Yes, I love this movie. I rarely say this, but it’s in my top ten movies of all time.