Since I am such a hip and refined urbanite, I went out to a short animated film screening at the Maryland Institute College of Arts the other day. Pulled from the past winners of some European film festival held in a tiny French village nestled away in the Alps, the films were a mix of the hilarious (David Caruso's I Am (Not) Van Gogh) to the heartwarming (some French studio's The Man Without A Head) to tedious (some Italian studio's El Bal De Minotaure) to just plain pointless (some British studio's Johnny Latex-- some kid in a wheelchair with a giant head dancing around in the dark in front of a Chihuahua, all to the music of Aphex Twin). Almost of it was animation as you'd expect, i.e. 2D cel or obvious 3D computer-generated animation; most was integrated with live-action or so subtly blended as to look real. Still, I suppose this is the sort of thing that impresses animators, or at least Europeans.

Anyways, one of the films that I saw (Jona/Tomberry-- made absolutely no sense, but man, did it look cool) was credited as "inspired by the graphic novel Mind My Gap". At the end of the movie, a web address flashed onscreen. Later, in the comfort of my own home, I went to the website and was shocked by what I found.

Apparently it's this ongoing saga that's published in some magazine in the Netherlands and simultaneously released as a Flash animation (sort of) on the Internet. It's about two guys who live on the Inside, only one goes Outside, and there's all this stuff about Then and Now, and a mirror breaks, and a baby gets shot, and there's this one guy who has a thick Eastern European accent and who I think is the devil. Anyways, if you've got nothing better to do this afternoon, and you're willing to drop into an existential crisis, check it out:

Mind My Gap

Enjoy. And, if you want to, explain what you thought it was about, and how well the creators pulled it off. (Say, that's not a bad idea, is it? We should do this with a non-DD comic every week. Like a book club, maybe.)

~IJ

Geezus christmas this stuff is weird. I mean, what was that? That was some sort of english...I dunno. Weird weird stuff.

Wait, isn't Holland the place where all the halucinogentic drugs are legal?