Princess Leia Sketch by Dan Nokes

I picked up another Princess Leia sketch card from the Topps Star Wars Chrome Perspectives: Jedi vs. Sith set. This one was done by artist Dan Nokes, who has put out some self-published comics and seems to be quite active on the convention circuit. I thought it was a nice different take on Leia, capturing her character in a style that reminds me of Underground Comix. I don't know a lot about that genre so I could be way off, but that's what I thought of when I saw this sketch. I was pretty happy when the auction ended and I came away as the winner. In digging around on his website I saw a notice that he is transitioning out of doing fanart of the big corporate-owned characters (Star Wars, Marvel, DC, Disney, TMNT, etc.) in favor of doing his own work with his own characters as well as ideas that are in the public domain. It seems like a pretty courageous move, as self-publishing seems to me like an incredibly grueling and difficult task. It's hard to put yourself out there in a creative way. I don't know if I would be able to do something like that.

A lot happened over the weekend. My wife and I attended a marriage workshop put on by the National Guard. We had a pretty good time. The big world news was the terrorist attacks in Paris that left many people dead. There were attacks in Beirut as well, although they didn't get as much press until after the Paris attacks when the press wrote articles asking why the Beirut attacks didn't get any press. I have some thoughts on the attacks and the press about the attacks, but I don't like to get too political online.

It was also an interesting weekend in sports. The biggest sports news is probably Ronda Rousey losing by knockout to Holly Holm in UFC 193. That was somewhat unexpected. I have yet to watch the full fight, but I did watch a clip of the end of the fight. For teams that I follow, the Houston Rockets have managed to lose their way to a 4-6 record so far on the season. And their losses have been pretty ugly. In football the Denver Broncos followed up a loss to the Colts with a horrible loss to the Chiefs. Peyton Manning completed 5 passes for 35 yards to break the all-time record for passing yards, but he threw four! interceptions and got benched in favor of Brock Osweiler, who played reasonably well and led a couple of scoring drives to make the score a little less embarrassing. Denver is 7-2 on the year, but based on game quality it seems like they should be 4-5 or 5-4. New England looms in two weeks, and they also have games against Pittsburgh and Cincinnati as well as divisional games against Oakland and San Diego. The Broncos will probably make the playoffs, but I can't see them moving past the first round unless they find some offense somewhere.