So I figure now’s as good a time as any to wrap up the 2009 set of entries to this thing. Maybe in a year or so I can look back and marvel at how much (or how little) I got done. Hopefully the latter, by comparison of course. Don’t begrudge me my optimism, it is Winter Time in my Summertown Country.
As with the year prior, 2009 saw me taking on more indies as a promise to myself to build a semblance of discipline for the grind, as well as take as many shots as I humanly could. Learning how many chambers my pistol’s got, as it were. How much I learn and retain remains a work in progress. That said, DAMN that was a busy year.
JENNY STRANGE is on hold as Justin and I scout for a colorist. SOVENA RED got shopped around and may yet continue with Scholastic. Taking Christmas breather from game design gig as suits prepare second ongoing contract. Might shelf it or bow out if other ongoing book projects begin to pick up steam. Speaking of which…
JUDAH trudges on in healthy machine gun spurts. I am convinced Will is trying to see how much more he can shock me with every five-page set.
HARBINGER WAR concept art is steadily taking shape as Jad and I have poured over Moebius, Frazetta, and Ash Wood art books to see how much writing we can get done with just visuals. If that didn’t make sense, trust us… it will.
PLUCK scripts are beginning to pour in just as I do concept sketches for characters who may or may not be little more than cannon fodder. Yes, Gabe is keeping it THAT close to his chest since he knows I’ll reveal just about anything if I’m not careful. The Brothers White and myself look forward to pissing on D&D tropes on ZUDA next year!
1888 is in retool mode as Wolfgang and I are streamlining that beast of a book into a prestige-format monster and I gotta say… just because artists need to read scripts and put pencil to paper before anyone else gets to see anything, doesn’t mean all the twistedness only comes from him. Damn it, WP.
And 2010 will see me dipping my toes into new properties CLOSETWORLD — a planned webcomic much akin to Little Nemo, with Matt Yocum; and GEEK GODS — a contemporary fantasy combining sword and sorcery with the familiar charm of Archie, with Wade Alan Steele.
There’s a couple of other exciting things I really want to share but can’t yet, but suffice it to say that the ol’ work journal is thankfully going to be regularly updated for the next few months at least. It seems like a ton of work… and it’s certainly not a walk in the park. But I always take the Zen of Glengarry Glen Ross with me, and it helps to simplify what would otherwise very easily cause me to burst into flames. It’s the closest I’ll get to a mantra when trying to simply get things done — A — B — C.
Always Be Closing, Baldwin said. And as far as I’m concerned, it keeps you focused enough to not look back as you try to keep moving forward in a narrow and tricky road.
Always, all ways, be closing.
Gleep gloop, 2010. Gleep motherfucking gloop.
Posted 2 months, 1 week ago at 12:36 pm. 3 comments
I know it’s only been an hour or so since the last entry, but I can’t seem to doze off and this last slice of anchovy pizza won’t eat itself. Six days to go till Christmas hits, so it’s time for wrap-up posts and preemptive upgrades before I get crushed by babies. I’m not even kidding.
So the site’s gone through a very subtle face-lift. I don’t really plan to change the theme anytime soon, but I thought it could use a bit of color. Plus green really brings out my eyes.
The real sprucing up happened on the sidebar though, if everyone in the bus will direct their attention to the left:
By hitting the Subscribe button, which takes you to a simple registration form, you easily sign up to receive email alerts from the site every time I update. I upload trash, you hear about it. Everybody wins.
Below the Recent Comments table, I added a nifty little thing that shows posts from One Year Ago. Nothing warms my heart more than the reminder that I’ve been a pretty lucky asshole for over a year now.
Right below that douche time machine is a Pickle Player loaded with the most recent episodes of my comic review podcast with three geek friends. Hit play and TRES KOMIKEROS will assault your senses as you try your best to read and understand what’s written on the blog.
Lastly, for anyone who doesn’t particularly like responding to a blog entry but feels the need to share about gastrointestinal problems, there’s the Message Box right below the Twitter Feed.
Cool? Aside from all that extra bloggy crap, everything is exactly the same. All I need now is a real-time feed of all the porn links I get from Alex Cipriano and I’ll be all set. Get to it, Google Wave!
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 10:13 am. 2 comments
Warren Sanchez is a 3-D animator. A damn good one at that. Warren Sanchez and I used to work together at an advertising/animation studio. He knows I like to read a lot of comics and watch a lot of effects-heavy films.
Warren Sanchez knows I like to curse a lot.
Warren Sanchez has never heard me curse out of sheer awe of a movie’s visuals.
And then we saw Avatar.
2009 in Film is a closed book as far as I’m concerned. Thanks, Jim. After the Star Wars prequels, Transformers, and G.I. fucking Joe… I badly needed that.
:::: :::: :::: ::::
On the other side of the bowl of awesome sauce, I was at first worried about a project Jad and I were working on that was superficially similar. HARBINGER WAR is a sci-fi tale pivoting on the premise of cavemen battling an extra-terrestrial threat. The parallels are all there, but then I thankfully unclenched when I realized Lucas had beat Cameron to the punch with Phantom Menace, and Burroughs spanked them both with the Barsoom books decades before.
So yes, I’m good. This, as they say, is fuel for a hopeful and mighty fire. A movie hasn’t thrilled me like that in a long time, and if nothing else… it felt amazing being a wide-eyed kid again.
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 8:29 am. 7 comments
This is actually a few months old, but I didn’t realize till now that I never posted it on the journal. It’s a rough concept of the Wayne Family seal or emblem… It was totally just one of those ideas that came to me when I had a little too much time on my hands. Hope you guys dig it anyway.
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 11:44 pm. 6 comments
This is the thing with me. And it’s rung true (present perfect tense… what.) for as long as I’ve cared to notice — I do my best work at night. Set my workstation up in a brightly lit room and I will get nothing done. I don’t know how you weirdos do it. I’m like a raccoon, I’m very easily attracted to and distracted by shiny things… so a well-lit area just leeches off my productivity.
I come alive in total darkness. Oh yes. Like Batman, minus a butler bringing me vichyssoise. (What kind of idiot brings you cold soup when you’re working in a dank cave in the middle of the night anyway?) And as if I were in a cave, I like my work area to be illuminated by a singular light source, so that I am surrounded by darkness and thus almost shrouded in a cloak of indistractibility.
I don’t know if it’s an emo thing, or an eyestrain thing, or an ADD thing, or a headspace thing, or a body clock thing, or even a mixture of all of those eccentricities… but it is what it is.
And as I get ready for bed around half past four in the morning, I wait until that sliver of time between when the street lamps die and when the sun starts to rear its ugly head. And for just long enough, I find myself in complete darkness… and it stops being a moment and starts being a place. And it is a place no one can infect. Because it is nowhere. And here I revel in the lost silence of dreaming.
Posted 3 months, 1 week ago at 11:15 am. 5 comments
Sure a lotta people see Miller’s Batman as the real Batman, with its grit and cynicism, but that rendition was Bruce Wayne at the end of his career as the Dark Knight. But what about Batman at his prime? Call me out as old-fashioned, I don’t give two tugs of dead dog’s cock, but I tend to pay attention to Knight more than Dark, in Batman’s moniker. And with that medieval analogy must also come a sense of chivalry and, dare I say it, romance.
Steve Englehart and Marshal Rogers’ run on Detective Comics, and more importantly their return in Dark Detective (which I’ve just been lucky enough to flip through), definitely has its share of Gotham’s most gushingly insane criminals. No, no… this Joker doesn’t just crack jokes related to whatever evil he’s plotting, he’ll lose himself in tangents and wordplay in mid-sentence, delightfully disappearing into himself, and then somehow find his way back to whatever mischief he was in the middle of before he left. He is, for all intents and purposes, bat-shit crazy. And that’s not even counting Two-Face and the Scarecrow, who show up to give the shit a healthy gust as it hits the fan.
But as thoughtfully written as the baddies are, so too is the romantic side of the story. Silver St. Cloud, a great love interest to Bruce, assumes a pivotal role throughout the six-issue mini. And if you read into things enough, you can start to see how a lot was taken from this book and shot into Nolan’s arm for The Dark Knight. You see it. It may have a different label on the jar, but it’s there.
Strictly speaking, I’m a child of the IMAGE generation of comics, but reading this book is like discovering Frazetta when all you’ve been looking at was Bisley. And that’s not a knock on Bisley on any level, I’m loving his Hellblazer stuff, but it just amazes me how strong some of the older stories were despite having to work within classic boundaries and comics codes. Especially when it comes to Batman, it’s nice to know you can look back and not have it all be nipples and bad sets.
The night of the Watchmen premier, one of my friends asks the table if any of us thought all this knowledge of Star Wars, Marvel continuity, Mass Effect side quests, and Chuck Norris jokes actually meant anything. There were about six of us, with a beer tower in the middle. It was as close as we got to quarterlifing, and that tends to shake me pantsless. “No,” I said. Coz this stuff is important to me, sure, and I love it… but by no stretch of the imagination does it kick our IQ levels up any. What we are, are a few of many kids hanging ten on a mortal wave. I remember tossing the term Creative Zeitgeist out… but I don’t remember why.
See? (Read first sentence)
Been having fun lately. Got to travel with my girl up to one of the country’s highest peaks to help shoot her music video. Hummer was a bit cramped with crew and tech, but the view and how the music carried up there was well worth it. Don’t get a lotta chances to do that, y’know?
PLUCK won Zuda’s October competition, so now Gabe is working like an animal for you people, making sure we give you a story well worth following. I’m on creature design duty for the next week or so, that’ll probably gimme an excuse to update the blog. Also… FUCKYES!!!
Local comic scene has been gaining steam, and monthly Drink n’ Draws (bastardized DnD for you paladin-types) are proving fun and energizing, to say the least. Never hurts to be around fellow fanboys to help you feel like a real person. Oh snap. Related to this, in the Public Validation Department, I recently got talked to by a local newspaper about working in comics and the scene in general. Managed not to curse too much, so I’m fairly proud about that. Interview should run near the end of the month if they don’t misplace the transcript amid post-Manny fight analyses and 2012 reviews.
Need to see that movie.
Looking to wrap up JUDAH and a coupla other projects and commissions by year’s end, as January is already looking busy. Not quite ready to talk about the new projects yet, but it’s all pretty exciting. Haven’t gotten to finish that Glutton God piece either, but it can wait.
*****
Wolfgang Parker is polishing the knobs on a previously discussed project. Be afraid.
*****
Finally, shopping Tres Komikeros around to find it an FM radio home. Each podcast episode runs for roughly an hour, which is way too much geek talk than is healthy (trust us, we know), so we’re looking into making only the half-hour review portion air-friendly, while the rest is online bonus stuff that’s bad for your children.
Bonus. What a funny word.
Posted 3 months, 3 weeks ago at 12:13 am. 5 comments
There’s a couple of other exciting things I really want to share but can’t yet, but suffice it to say that the ol’ work journal is thankfully going to be regularly updated for the next few months at least. It seems like a ton of work… and it’s certainly not a walk in the park. But I always take the Zen of Glengarry Glen Ross with me, and it helps to simplify what would otherwise very easily cause me to burst into flames. It’s the closest I’ll get to a mantra when trying to simply get things done — A — B — C.
This is the thing with me. And it’s rung true (present perfect tense… what.) for as long as I’ve cared to notice — I do my best work at night. Set my workstation up in a brightly lit room and I will get nothing done. I don’t know how you weirdos do it. I’m like a raccoon, I’m very easily attracted to and distracted by shiny things… so a well-lit area just leeches off my productivity.
Steve Englehart and Marshal Rogers’ run on Detective Comics, and more importantly their return in Dark Detective (which I’ve just been lucky enough to flip through), definitely has its share of Gotham’s most gushingly insane criminals. No, no… this Joker doesn’t just crack jokes related to whatever evil he’s plotting, he’ll lose himself in tangents and wordplay in mid-sentence, delightfully disappearing into himself, and then somehow find his way back to whatever mischief he was in the middle of before he left. He is, for all intents and purposes, bat-shit crazy. And that’s not even counting Two-Face and the Scarecrow, who show up to give the shit a healthy gust as it hits the fan.
