J Michael Straczynski, whom we all know and love as a comics scribe and the creator of Babylon 5, has been nominated for the British OSCAR, the BAFTA for best original screenplay for his film The Changeling.

There is much dancing and singing and the fatted calf will be slain. But alas, the BAFTA Awards are the same weekend as New York Comic Con. Can you say scheduling conflict?

I won’t resent the Great Maker if he ditches to go swank at the BAFTA Awards. I know we are all pulling for him!

BTW: Changeling got noms in EIGHT categories, including a best actress nod for Angelina Jolie. Well deserved.

Note the best non-English language film nods for TWO animated films based on graphic novels.

I can’t believe I actually promised myself I would blog less. Am I blogging less? No.

At least I have a huge inventory of blog entries from the old site which I want to reload here, but dang, I can’t help myself. There’s something interesting going on every day. Especially with regards to happy news about people I like.

Dang. It’s creepy.

Made of Wrong…Filipino Batman movies.

This is obviously not an officially licensed work. Sometime between the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, several Batman features were filmed.

Here we have a bunch of Amazons menacing a young woman. Fear not, the Dynamic Duo will appear any moment!

Despite the fact that these young women are all scantily dressed, there’s not a lot to see. They have the figures of young boys. If you stacked them up, their combined breast measurement wouldn’t match Mamie Van Doren’s.

If these were officially licensed, the foreign rights department at DC should have been lined up and shot en masse.

Utterly, mind-bendingly bad Alyas Batman and Robin below! Gird your loins!

Wait! Where did that coconut come from?

Batman asks: “Would you like Bat-tea? Or Bat-coffee? Or Bat-milk? Bat-juice?”

And in this hideous, and yet oh-so-memorable clip, The Joker and The Penguin do a song and dance number in front of the Smith and Wesson Dollar Exchange.

Is there such a thing as a Smith and Wesson Dollar Exchange?

Hey, babe. He’s Mr. Joker!

The Penguin character’s name in Tagalog is, apparently, a reference to oral sex.

This is what happens when you do not jealously guard your intellectual property rights. The Penguin blows.

Here’s a great list of ten tips for starting and running a small business that also apply to freelance creators. Remember, freelancers are small business people. No matter how iconoclastic you are in your art, it doesn’t hurt to exercise some discipline when it comes to your studio.

At the top of the list, is Set Work hours and Stick to Them. I used to be a lot more disciplined about time management myself. Nowadays, I’ve been working 6 hours one day, and 14 hours the next. Not so good. I pulled out all of my time management training tapes and motivational tapes, and have been a lot more disciplined since January. But last year was a very disruptive one and I eroded my time management and personal discipline skills. So, it’s back to boot camp for me!

A rule I used to break all the time: Even when you really need the money, don’t take just any assignment. While I thoroughly reject the psuedo-mystical explanation provided in the article that “…the universe will take cues from your behavior and provide for you accordingly”, the Occam’s Razor explanation is simply that taking any old job for a buck is depressing, demoralizing, and likely to lead to more bad jobs simply because you won’t do your best work, and the best clients won’t see the work of which you are capable. If people only see second-rate work from you, then you will get second-rate jobs.

The longer you can keep your expenses low, you will be able to afford to take jobs that inspire you until you are on your feet and self supporting. Moving out on your own or getting a nice studio is great, but hold off on acquiring the trappings of success as long as you can. Keep your surroundings modest and try to only take work that allows you to do your best.

This is a REALLY important one: Communicate with clients to keep them happy, even when you mess up. When you are running behind schedule, or overbooked, or your cat died, it’s important to let your clients know if you are going to screw the pooch. They need to know where the project stands, so they can make other arrangements. Editors aren’t ogres. Many of them can squeeze a few extra days (or even weeks) out of a deadline, if you really need it.

What they can’t stand is the freelancer who simply drops out of sight, or, worse yet, the freelancer who treats them as if they are some kind of confession booth. Your editor is not your friend, they are not a psychiatrist. Don’t share every problem and setback. Just let them know you need more time.

If you are too open with your personal problems, the editor will begin to see YOU as the problem. Don’t run to your editor with every little thing: your annoying neighbor, the flu, the car had a flat, etc. These are things that happen in the normal course of everyone’s life, but when that is ALL the editor ever hears from you, they will eventually hear your name and think, “What is up with that loser, now?”

I used to be a lot more chatty about minor personal problems with my editors (and even online) but people have long memories, and they often remember only the bad stuff.

For example, sometime in 1994 or so, I had an accident and got chemical burns in my eyes. I am blind as a bat and picked up swimmers ear medication thinking it was my contact lens drops. The problem cleared up in about three months and there was no lasting damage. However, last year, an editor with whom I have never worked inquired about it, wondering if a twelve-year-old injury might impede my ability to get a job done! I had almost forgotten about it, but 12 years later, that editor had not.

And last year when I postponed a meeting with an editor by one day so I could get over a migraine, the editor’s first question was “Do you get those a lot?” Well, actually, no, but an editor is going to want to know if you have a lot of health problems or personal problems that will make meeting deadlines difficult.

Don’t tell your editor anything about yourself they don’t really need to know. If it’s not relevant to the job, it probably isn’t any of their business.

Editors can be great people, they may even be friends, but in the end, they are talking to you on company time on company matters. Behave accordingly.

Reposted and updated from the old blog. Hope it’s of use.

c

The producers of The Simpsons are distancing themselves from a voice mail ad by Nancy Cartwright, the actress who voices the character Bart Simpson, on behalf of the Church of Scientology.

…she advertises her current auditing level “new OT VII” and invites recipients of the message to the church’s Flag World Tour event Jan. 31 in Hollywood, at which Cartwright is scheduled to speak.

Don’t have a cow, man.

Slow news day.

Don’t neglect to click the link, because there are a number of related goofy Simpsons stories that will be of interest to those who are net surfing while at work.