This week we review Dreamworks’ How To Train Your Dragon, which is very much Tweeks Approved for all ages, even if it caused us to rant about movies so loosely-based on our favorite books that we suspect the rights to only the title were bought (Yes! We’re talking to you too, The Giver, Percy Jackson, & Insurgent)! 

So our national fingerwag has found its way through the mire of newsprint and cable television and into the Land of Comics. If you don’t know what I’m talking about you won’t hear it from me because I’m not joining the fray, my children, but it’s Obama’s fault.

Just like that rewarring in Iraq is Obama’s fault – obviously a plot to distract us while his armies of Kenyan invaders gather for the Big Strike. Or this global warming bushwah… more distraction. I mean, global warming? Last winter – that long and brutal season, remember? – as you were struggling to start your car in sub zero weather, did the globe seem warm to you then? Yeah, I thought not.  And those pictures of melting ice caps: in the first place, do you really care if some ice melts? Doesn’t it happen every day in your lemonade glass? And in the second place, how do we know it’s really happening, even? Anyone actually believe that the White House doesn’t have access to Photoshop?

Of course, Obama’s real triumph was the destruction of Pompeii in 79 CE. How can that be? you might ask. Wasn’t Pompeii destroyed when a volcano, Mount Vesuvius, erupted and buried the city under tons of ash and rocks and stuff? How, youmight continue with just the tiniest edge in your voice, could our monster-in-chief be responsible for that?

Ah, the innocence of the naive! You underestimate the power of the monster’s evil – an evil so great that it shattered the constraints of time and hurled back through the centuries until it emerged by chance, unless Obama had something against the locals, in the heart of Vesuvius, arriving with the momentum gathered as it veered through the millennia, again shattering time. Obviously, the unexpected arrival of a gigantic lump of malevolence from the future upset the area’s cosmic balance and the poor volcano had to do something! I mean, wouldn’t you erupt?

By the way, none of this is depicted in the recent Pompeii movie and I don’t remember any of it being part of The Last Days of Pompeii, which I saw when I was a little kid. Of course not! The recent film? Well, You know Obama and Hollywood! As for the earlier movie, the one I must have seen in rerelease in the 1940s…maybe the backward-speeding malevolence stopped in 1935, the year the movie was first shown, just long enough to obliterate any traces of the truth that may have been lying around. Or maybe the movie guys just didn’t know about the Obaman meddling with geochronology.

I mean, we’re reasonable people here. We can’t blame everything on Obama.

How do I know about all this? Well, I’m not making any claims, but just suppose an angel came to me in a dream and told me what I’ve been telling you and maybe I believe the angel because I believe in angels.

Can’t quarrel with that!

Sure, you’re on a deadline. You’ve got more deadlines than you have socks. So what are you going to do about it? If you are a genuine comic book professional, or you hanker to be a genuine comic book professional, you’ve got to learn how to procrastinate like a genuine comic book professional.

Please note, these tips apply to freelancers of all stripes and not just to cartoonists, artists, writers and/or sloths.

1. You find yourself thinking you should wash the dishes.

2. You find yourself thinking you should take out the garbage.

3. Your abode is not going to paint itself.

4. You’re fiddling through your DVD and DVR library looking for “reference.”

5. You are convinced your editor won’t get around to your assignment for a while anyway.

6. Your cat ate your Internet connection.

7. Your quarterly estimated taxes were due a couple days ago. You really need to find an accountant. Ask around.

8. Damn, if you don’t read these 78 comic books in a pile on your nightstand, you won’t be up on continuity and you’re script/artwork/whatever will have to be completely revised anyway so instead of working, you really should be reading comic books.

9. You realize you haven’t backed-up your computer since Jack Kirby invented the Mother Box.

10. You find yourself wondering, “What would Barry Windsor-Smith do?”

11. Hey, that crossword puzzle isn’t going to solve itself.

12. Your crack dealer doesn’t deliver.

13. You’ll get to your work just as soon as your computer’s countdown clock hits “O seconds.” You won’t have long to wait, as right now it says it will be done in six minutes and six minutes isn’t very long, is it?

14. It’s new comics Wednesday. Or, at least, it was in the past six days.

15. You still haven’t done your homework.

16. You can always backdate your Fed-Ex waybill.

17. You really should take your dog for a walk. After all, you don’t want to be interrupted while you’re working.

18. After trying most or all of the above, you’re way too depressed to work.

19. You find yourself writing a piece about “20 ways to procrastinate.”

20. You’ll start working just as soon as you come up with the 20^th item on your list.

Hey cats and kittens! I’m ba-aaaaack! Apparently from the world of retro greetings. And from the world of convention organizing. For anyone who’s wondering what I’ve been up to during my l’il six-month hiatus from ComicMix (did you miss me? I missed yooooooou!!!), one of the fun things I did was act as the Program Coordinator for Awesome Con here in D.C. And man, was Awesome Con an awesome time! We had a ton of stuff to see and do for our over 30,000 attendees, and have heard tons of great feedback from attendees, guests, participants, exhibitors, etc. I expect next year to be even bigger and better than this year (which had over four times as many attendees as Awesome Con D.C.’s first year in 2013), so if you’re in the area or like to travel for cons, I’d recommend adding next year’s Awesome Con, May 29-31, to the calendar now! You won’t regret it!

And speaking of things that have been on my calendar lately, this past Wednesday I went to The National Press Club to hear screenwriter, director, and producer M. Night Shyamalan talk about his book on closing America’s education gap, I Got Schooled. A surprising topic for a movie-maker to be writing about, perhaps – but after listening to him discuss the topic, it’s clear that this book was a passion project for him, and it was fascinating to hear him talk. In his own words, “celebrity activists make my stomach cringe – you don’t automatically get the right to give advice about something because you are successful at something else. But you do have the spotlight on you sometimes. In my case, [this is] something I’m really sensitive about, so I’ve always said, graciously, ‘no,’ to being asked to promote this or that, charity-wise. So this situation [of being a charity advocate] is very unusual for me; and in fact came about really organically.”

Shyamalan then described an experience he had visiting two nearby schools in his home city of Philadelphia while scouting locations for The Happening. One he described as “this incredibly vibrant school,” in which “these kids came rushing over, saying ‘Oh my God, are you making a movie here? Can I be in it? Can I die in your movie?’ …and the possibility of a movie being made there was right on the tip of their tongues, and they were ready.” The other “was just the worst thing you could imagine. You know, [with] metal detectors, the lights really dim, and the kids just not in a good place. In showing me the classrooms, the janitor had to unlock the classroom doors. There were bars on every classroom; literal bars. The theater had been burnt down because someone had set fire to it. It was like animals; it was damage control. And in this other school, a kid walked up to me, looked at me, kind of recognized me, and decided, ‘That’s not possible’ and kept walking.” Shyamalan felt this experience was very symbolic of the differences in how these children were being educated. This inspired him to seek knowledge on what system would produce more effective inner-city education for low income kids.

For two years after that, Shyamalan said, he gathered information on “what works in education,” and eventually ended up with thousands of studies on the table, which turned out to be “a big blurry pile of information, half-knowledge, insinuations, and anecdotal movements. … You could cherry-pick anything you wanted,” he stated, “and whatever your confirmation bias was, you could find confirmation for that.” At that point, Shyamalan wasn’t sure what move to make next; but then a doctor friend noted that there is a system of best practices in health care in which if patients do five things – sleep eight hours a day, eat a balanced diet, exercise regularly, pay attention to mental health, and don’t smoke – the chances of getting all diseases drop to an incredibly low level. If a patient doesn’t do one of these things, however, those chances buoy back to the norm. Shyamalan hypothesized that this might be analogous to best practices for education, and set out to see if the data supported this. “Is there a group of things,” he asked, “that when done together, always work to close the education gap – the gap that exists in every state between inner city, low income children and their white suburban counterparts?”

It turned out that according to his studies, there is. After two more years of analyzing the data, the pile of “blurry information” the M. Night Shyamalan Foundation had gathered became organized into five consistent groups. The Foundation then checked its hypothesis by going to every school that was closing the education gap, and “lo and behold, they were all doing these five things.” The five keys to closing the gap, Shyamalan says, are used by all the schools that achieve, and are: leadership by principals and staff and a consistent empowering message; teacher training that specifically focuses on how to approach inner-city schools and students; data on best practices in curriculum and how to teach that are then implemented; more time spent teaching the children; and smaller schools.

Shyamalan discussed each of these key points further, and stated the conclusion he finally reached in answer to his initial inquiry into solutions for closing the education gap. Shyamalan said, “If the home environment does not change, can we close the achievement gap? The answer to that is categorically yes.”

An encouraging message, considering that according to Shyamalan, inner city low income schools represent 18% of the country’s schools; and one that I hope is true. I’m a big believer in the importance of education, and it’s clear that this country needs to do some serious work to raise the standards of education for that 18%. Whether Shyamalan’s five keys turn out to be the answer, and whether they will be implemented to good effect, is still on the table; but Shyamalan has stated that the book has helped to spur active efforts towards improvement in Philadelphia and elsewhere; so here’s hoping that out of that original blurry pile of data have come some focused answers, and real methods that can be used to improve kids’ lives.