While reading Dr. Menlo, I ran across a link to a wonderful website about political street posters, called Visual Resistance. It's the hub for various artistic efforts, including a gallery of street art, a network of activist artists and fundraisers for various causes.

I wrote previously about the twin Batman art exhibits that are going on in Palm Springs this month, but a visit to the girls's site prompted me to revisit the m gallery, and they now have a nice preview of their Gotham show up. There's a really a lot of nice work, although I especially liked this painting by Brad Vancata of Batman looking rather louche while smoking a cig. I wonder what brand Bats smokes?

There's also an article in the L.A. Times that discusses Adam West's solo show, Beyond Batman, and his relationship to the Batman character. I mentioned in my earlier post that West was going to be at the show opening, but according to the m gallery blog, Julie Newmar is now expected to drop in as well.

While we're on the subject of superheroes, I thought I'd announce that I did indeed go see , and I thought it was excellent. I don't know why so many critics are finding fault with it. I only have one minor criticism (NO SPOILERS). In one of the ship scenes with Lex Luthor, the duet from the opera Lakme is playing in the background. I would have expected the Superman Returns director to know that ever since the Sarandon-Deneuve Motion Picture Film Act was unanimously passed by Congress in 1983, the Lakme duet is not be used as background music in any movie unless two women are making it on screen. And to think some people said this was a gay film.

Over the past two weeks, I've occasionally heard the sound of firecrackers and amateur fireworks going off nearby. The crackling and popping sounds reminded me that July 4 was on its way. Never mind that Los Angeles is experiencing an "extreme heat advisory" and that fireworks are illegal in L.A., it is an established fact that there is no better way to show national pride than to light a fuse.

I don't mean to suggest that I dislike fireworks, I just haven't gone near them since the sister and I had an accident with some firecrackers. I was a teen, she was a child, and we both lost our hearing for several minutes when she mistakenly picked up a firecracker we'd lit, thinking it had exploded, only to find out, as she went to drop it into the bucket I was holding, that it was not so. As it turned out, the sister's hearing only partially recovered.

Still, I have many happy memories of fireworks. My first love--and the first fireworks I can recall actually lighting myself--were snakes, as seen here in this colorful packaging photo. I don't know the details of how they work or what they're made of, but they are sold as pellets in a matchbox-size box. When you hold a match to the pellet they quickly grow to long snaky lengths while giving off a noxious cloud of smoke that tends to attract attention. This can be a problem, because snakes also leave a long sooty stain behind them, guaranteed to anger the adult whose driveway or patio the snake was lit on.

I was also fond of ground flowers, spinning fireworks that use persistence of vision to create the illusion of a flower image. However, I was usually attracted to a certain type of fireworks first by its packaging, and only later by its display. These paintings inspired by firecracker labels show some of what I found appealing about fireworks packaging. But it was not just the graphics I was attracted to, it was also the inventive product names, like "Inferno" or "Delerium Fountain."

While perusing this online gallery of fireworks packaging, I was taken aback at how indiscriminately racist some of the older packaging was. No group was safe, apparently, as the advertising for the "Geo'gia Cracker" attests. Of course, stupidity seems to go hand in hand with fireworks. One past July 4, while visiting relatives in a rural area, I insisted on "staying with the truck" while an older male relative traipsed off into the dry brush with a squadron of kids and several handfuls of bottle rockets.

"Oh no," I protested, hanging out of the cab, "I'm comfortable right here."

If you're part of a particular fandom, you've probably encountered the frustration of trying to talk with a non-fan about your fan interests. You may have also had the positive experience of having your partner or spouse try, in a touching and sweet kind of way, to become part of your fan world.

Recently, I downloaded one of Lou Romano's fabulous series of Star Wars character drawings and made it my desktop wallpaper. The Cute Little Red-Headed Girlfriend peered at my monitor and cried in joyful recognition, "Oh look! It's OB2CP-Pah!" I appreciated the gesture for the outreach that it was, but was left wondering what she thought R2-D2's name might be.

Speaking of geeky fandom, you should also take a look at Lou Romano's drawings based on Dungeons and Dragons Monsters. The Black Dragon and the Purple Worm are especially good.

Lots of folks on my blogroll have mentioned this contest (although I think Boing-Boing was the first), but if you haven't seen it you should check out the Superhero ModRen contest over at Worth1000.com. The rules of the contest were to incorporate a superhero in a piece of fine art. There are many fine, fine entries, but my favorites include the several renditions of Nude A Descending Staircase and, of course, Mona Xena's smile.

(Edit: I just received written permission from worth1000.com to use this image from their site, which I asked to use in accordance with their terms of service. Thanks guys!)

I was browsing the girls website and ran across this painting they're contributing to a Batman tribute show scheduled for June. I love the image of Alfred diligently holding a tray in the background.

I visited the m gallery web site for more information, and it seems there's actually two Batman-related shows coming up in June. One, "Beyond Batman," is a solo show of works by Adam West, who is scheduled to attend the opening. The second, "Gotham," is a tribute show with contributions from what the gallery calls its "most popular artists." I can't tell who the gallery represents from their website, but if it includes any of the artists they sell prints for, then it should be a really happening show.

The end of the year has come, which means it's time for reflecting back and imagining what's to come. I feel comfortable making this bold prediction: 2005 will go down in history as The Year That Sucked. I won't rehearse my reasons, as it's still a little early here in Pacific Standard Time to be breaking out the traditional New year's Eve alcohol. Instead I shall pass on to you this hopeful sign of the future. While perusing my favorite Judy Garland fan site, The Judy Room, I saw in the latest news section that the U.S. post office is issuing a Judy Garland stamp for 2006. Indeed, we can expect a bumper crop of excellent commemoratives from the U.S. post office in 2006, with Favorite Children's Book Animals and DC Comic Super Heroes scheduled for issue in the year ahead.

While stumbling around on the Internet last night I happened across an exhibit called, The Pony Project. The exhibit is sponsored by Hasbro, maker of My Little Pony. For the show, Hasbro gave blanks of the My Little Pony statuette to female artists from "the fields of fashion, fine arts, illustration, photography and grafitti" and asked them to customize the figures.

Among the participating artists there are several that have been discussed here at In Sequence, including Dame Darcy and Isabel Samaras. As I look at the Pony Project's online gallery I am reminded of the famous question posed by Sigmund Freud, "What do women want?" At long last it can be answered: they want My Little Pony, in as many styles and color options as possible.

Francie Prose has written an interactive essay on the connection between madness and drawing. It's based on her viewing of an exhibit called Obsessive Drawing at New York's American Folk Art Museum. Her essay is nicely produced and nicely written, and manages to steer clear of some of the more cliched takes on outsider art. Instead of focusing on the psychology of the artists, Prose examines why art by non-professionals rose to the forefront at the same time that unabashedly commercial artists were being lionized by the art world. I found the drawing samples interesting, too, since most of the outsider art I've seen has been representational in some way or another, and this collection is mostly non-representational art.

I think doves are beautiful birds, but for the most part, the white dove as a symbol of peace is too saccharine for my tastes. I think I've seen too many "peace" holiday cards, too many white dove ornaments perched on towering white wedding cakes, too many birds on the wing in celebration of Michael Jackson's not guilty verdict. I think it's the white-on-white or white-on-pastel color scheme that gets to me.

Picasso made several line drawings of doves on white backgrounds. They seem like quick drawings, and some even have a cartoonish look to them. The drawing pictured here is my favorite among Picasso's dove pictures. The black background makes the white dove, and the promise of peace that it symbolizes, appear fragile and endangered. The dove is not flying joyously, but stands still and distant against the dark smudges of background.

In times of war, I think this is what peace looks like.

I've written before about the fantastic artwork on Magic: The Gathering Cards. Now someone's mocked up an amazing parody set of Magic cards based on U.S. politics. I've checked the site over the last few days and, as is the case with authentic Magic cards, the size of the deck just seems to keep growing. What's incredible about this deck is how well matched the play rules are to the graphic in each card. It seems like you could actually play a game with this deck.

I chose to show the Rumsfeld monster here because he's the one member of the Bush line-up who elicits a "person you ove to hate" feeling in me. The rest of them I just hate. I don't know if it's Rummy's ties to the Nixon administration, his poetic leanings, or his eerie typological resemblance to Robert McNamara, but at least he's an interesting villain.

I was flipping through this month's copy of Westways, the Southern California AAA member magazine, of all things, when I ran across a feature on vintage automobile stamps. I was attracted to the images from my favorite period in U.S. automotive design, the 50s, but then I saw a link to something called the Postal Art Gallery. This site, operated in conjunction with the U.S. Postal Service, offers framed display-size images of U.S. stamps.

There's some pretty damn cool stuff there. Like check out the train, man, or the retroid Space Fantasy, or the suggestively titled Space Exploration: Probing the Vastness II. I searched to see if they offered framed displays of the Richard Nixon stamp, but it was nowhere to be found.

If you like stamp art, you may be interested to known that John Lennon was a philatelist. I heard a news report just this week stating that John Lennon's stamp collection is going to be on display at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.

I love DIY stuff generally and DIY art stuff in particular. Lately, I've found a lot of DIY comics links for the artistically impaired. For example, there's a new Mac program called Comic Life that lets you easily create comics from photographs. Over at Mac Merc, there's a tutorial on achieving a "comics art look" from photographs using Photoshop. Via Boing-Boing, I found two interesting community-oriented web sites: one allows you to create and share comic strips online and another uses game screenshots to create comics.

The game site seems like an interesting extension of the "fan media" movement, in which fans use a commercial property such as a TV series as a jumping-off point for fiction, movies, songs, and now comics based on but extending the original premise. I just read through the archive of The L Ward, a site that uses comic strips based on screen shots from The L Word to comment on the series. I imagine programs like Comic Life are going to make this type of fan media much more prevalent.

While perusing the most recent issue of Wired, I came across a reference to an interesting exhibit on display at the Japan Society Gallery in New York. The exhibit is called Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture, and it explores the roots of the kawaii or cute aesthetic in Japanese art and culture.

According to the gallery site, the name "Little Boy" refers to a nickname given to the atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima as well as to the innocence of a traumatized child, an emblem of post-war Japan typified in the oversized eyes of manga and anime characters. I noticed this show is a follow-up to the Superflat exhibit, also curated by Takashi Murakami, that I saw here in Los Angeles several years ago.

The Cute Little Red-Headed Girlfriend surprised me with a gift of the original Candyland board game, which has a wonderful graphic map at the core of its gameplay. It was such a relief to know that the original version was still being made, even if it's being marketed as a "vintage" item to oldsters like me.

I first became aware that the Candyland board had changed after a child asked me to play the game and I eagerly responded "yes." Only then did I discover that the game board I fondly remembered, with its lollypops and gumdrops, had been licensed to include name brand candies like Reeses' pieces and Mars bars.

It never ends does it? I mean the colonization of living--oops, I mean unbranded-- spaces. Just the other day I believe I mentioned my gravestone and what I would write on it. Now there's a space that is ripe for branding. If I'm ever really hard up for cash I'll have to remember that--maybe I could auction off the area in advance to some company, like 1-800-Flowers.com. That would be what the advertisers call a good fit.