Michal Wojcik's Blog, page 6
April 9, 2019
Cities as legitimacy
A long while back, I wrote a short essay called “Writing the city” that I never published, yet the misgivings that went into that essay keep stirring my brain. The main question is this:
In literary criticism of fantasy, why are long descriptions of the natural world and farmland or villages often labeled as boring, but when China Miéville fills page upon page with adjective-laden descriptions of architecture, this passes without comment, or even gets praise?
Picking on Miéville is unfair; it...
March 31, 2019
Middle Earth in art
No other imagined world has generated as much illustration as The Lord of the Rings. Considering the sheer amount of artistic material to draw from, however, even before the live action adaptations came out in 2001, we already had a consensus “look” for Middle Earth in John Howe and Alan Lee’s paintings. Why the collective consensus for what Middle Earth should look like coalesced around these two has a host of factors, one being how prolific they were, how often they appeared on book covers...
February 26, 2019
Episode 39 – A Natural History of Two Maries
Marie talks about Marie Brennan’s Memoirs of Lady Trent series, which begins with A Natural History of Dragons.
I am also present, largely to provide colour.
https://ia601500.us.archive.org/21/items/OLSP39NaturalHistory/OLSP39_NaturalHistory.mp3Download the Podcast (archive.org page)
Marie’s blog (Podcast Marie, not Brennan Marie)
February 23, 2019
Ra-Ra-Rasputin
Rasputin’s Bastards (2012) has a promising start with a giant dying squid. It’s a squid-filled novel, though David Nickle does not go the expected route and delve into the cosmic horror of Lovecraft, his imitators, and the other tentacle-obsessed. Rasputin’s Bastards centres on much more personal horrors of being unable to grasp your own identity and humanity.
Take Alexei Kildovich – a thug-for-hire for the criminal underworld. Or that’s what he thinks he is, until he finds out that’s just...
January 29, 2019
This is the way that the world didn’t end
I wonder what it even means to review this book in 2019. You won’t find The Perennial Apocalypse: How the End of the World Shapes History (1998) in stores or online shops. The author, John. J. Reilly, passed away in 2012 and much of his work has disappeared in the years since. The publisher, Online Originals, was one of the first ebook-exclusive publishers and shut down some time ago, taking their whole catalogue down with them. The only way to get hold of it is if someone who has the PDF ha...
January 18, 2019
Arctic ravens
I really enjoyed painting this one – mainly because of the ravens. They’re my favourite bird by far, and also the ones I see the most day-to-day. Process below the cut.
Click to view slideshow.
January 1, 2019
December 26, 2018
Farewell to 2018
It’s been a long year, hasn’t it? But despite that, I don’t feel like I’ve personally done much of note with all that time. The house I started building this summer had to go on hold for the winter months, unfinished; I’m still working the same job; and I made a single short story sale this year – an important one for me, but I can’t yet announce where. I also learned, once again, that the tortured publication history of Zeppelins are What Dreams are Made of will remain tortured, after signi...
December 15, 2018
Side-scrolling on amphorae
A while back I wrote an article about how The Secret of Kells told a medieval Irish story through the idiom of medieval Irish artwork, and how this acts as much more than an aesthetic exercise.Unfortunately, we haven’t seen much of that sort of historicized film-making in animation since then. Cartoon Saloon’s follow-ups Song of the Sea and The Breadwinner do not reconstruct their worlds in this way; the only other example I can think of in the years since is Studio Ghibli’s The Tale of the...
November 11, 2018
The Sky Roads
Despite all associated tribulations, airships will always be my first love.
Done with MyPaint.
