July 24, 2007
Midsummer Night's Steam

   Dag, I wish I was goin' to San Diego, 'cause it's always such a big happening where you see celebs you may not see at any other convention, with Hollywood nearby and all... Shoot, over the course of the years I'd gone, I stood before the glorious presence of Mickey Spillane, Gil Kane, Alan Davis and Mark Farmer. I knew to keep my trap shut for a change, because I didn't feel worthy of their attention. It would also be nice to hang with my Wildstorm Editor Ben Abernathy (or even mooch a free meal), but alas, it's not to be. At the very least, I want to go to San Diego for the perfect weather!

   It's miserably hot right now, but it gives me an excuse for my lazy ass to swim in the pool. Man, I hate exercising these days, but when I'm swimming I end up feeling more relaxed. Also, when I'm attempting my forays into writing (Hotwire, coming in 2008), if I'm stuck on an idea, I can usually work it out in my head while swimming. I wonder if any other aspiring writers have similar methods?

   For some reason, no matter where set up shop in a house or apartment, it always seems to be the hottest room in the place! Just recently, I had someone add vinyl window tinting to the windows in my office (I would do it myself, but one week, I was working for no less than four publishers!) which is supposed to reduce the heat 60%, but it's more like 30%. I can tell that the vinyl has made a difference but not as much as I'd hoped. Personally, I would prefer to crank the a/c to "meat locker" setting, but the wife and the dogs would end up freezing in the other rooms, so you gotta compromise sometimes. That means fans of the oscillating type set on low to prevent my scattered paperwork from swirling around me like the eye of a hurricane!

   The late, great comedian Mitch Hedberg liked to ask his oscillating fan questions that it would wave "No" to.

   "Will you keep my hair in place?"
   "Do you keep my papers in order?"
   "That's it, I'm pullin' the pin out from your back, and you aint sayin' $#!T"

   Let's talk comics already! I'm still way behind on my trade paperback and hardcover reading, but I still enjoy the weekly single issue format, increasingly known as"floppies", much to my chagrin. I dunno. "Floppies" sounds so dismissive of the noble comic book. It's funny how twenty years ago, everybody was trying to come up with high-falutin' names to replace the term comic book, which was believed to be outmoded in the face of achievements of Alan Moore, Frank Miller et al. "Graphic Novellas"and other terms with the word graphic were bandied about, but "floppies"? C'mon! I hate that word almost as much as "meh", the consummate cool term of dismissiveness on message boards! Some stories, for my preferrence, can't wait until a collected format. A sampling of my latest haul (in order that I will probably read them): Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil #4, Captain America #28, World War Hulk #2, All-Flash #1, The Spirit #8 and Super-Villain Team-up/Modok's 11 #1. Shazam #4's the final chapter of the mini and the next two are deliberately episodic in nature. All-Flash was a book I picked up after hearing rave reviews. Plus I want to see how Bart's term as Flash got cut short and how it'll be woven into the new Flash series (which'll pick up from #230, the final pages of which I had a hand in inking!) My point is: I still dig a variety of comics read in 'chapters', which my mind treats as an anthology, hand-picked by me! Yeesh, look at me, being all clinical about reading comics!

   If you haven't checked out Gen13 #10 (and shame on you if you didn't), please bear with my gushing at the finished product: The colors and printing are top notch and this was the issue I was most worried about. Why? Because for a brief while, some of the original art paper that Carlo Barberi had sent me, while good for pencils, was really tough to ink. If I used a quill or brush, the ink would bleed like a stuck pig, so I had to ink the entire issue with a rapidograph, (minus the few that Carlo himself beautifully inked due to deadline constraints). For me, using the rapidograph solely took a much longer time than usual. I had to 'fake' brush strokes by drawing brush stroke shapes with outlines, then fill the lines in with black, also via rapidograph! IY-Yi-Yi! The result on the boards wasn't as strong as I had liked, but I beefed up the lines in photoshop before sending scans to Wildstorm. I was assured that my linework looked good, but I was on pins & needles waiting to see the printed result. Said result was a tremendous relief to me. Bold lines and great colors-whew! Good story, too! Y'know you're only as good as you're last issue! So I, like many of my ink-stained brethren, jump back on the treadmill that is a monthly book. But if you love comics as much as I do, the treadmill's more exhilarating than frustrating!

   New Art in the Commissions and Rarities section!
 
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