scribble scribble scribble

Last night I went to bed early and scribbled out a couple new scenes of LOST IN THE WASH in the big red (and frankly fabulous) Barnes and Noble sketchbook. You can find them in the bargain books section for ten bucks. It's essentially an unprinted book, a clever product considering B&N has gotten into publishing in a big way. The cheap section is no longer the home of remaindered or overpurchased unreturnables. B&N has the rights to a lot of odd books that they reprint and sell themselves--the history of Masonry couldn't possibly have had the initial print run it would have needed to sit around stores in the quantity they do.

Characters are shaping up, the plot rampages on, and I like too many of these people to kill too many of em. Well, we'll see.

The Newest Ayers

As Coach said below, the newest Ayers was welcomed into the world Saturday at 3:10 AM--John Michael Ayers was 8 lbs, 5 oz at birth and by all accounts does not possess superpowers. (There's always puberty!)

Congrats from the whole Candle Light Press family to Mike and Rachael Ayers on the new addition to their family!

Okay, okay, I saw it....

John Ira and Coach Carter finally got me set down and had me watch the Reefer Madness musical last night.

It was, as expected, excellent. My faith in the genius capabilities of Alan Cumming was rewarded by a dozen or so dazzling performances. Ana Gasteyer... no words suffice.

Oh, and there is a half-naked Hawaiian dance orgy at the foot of a volcano.

More drawing today. Later!

The wheel in the Sky keeps on turnin'

The Future is Now in Candlelightland...

J-dog is hauling Night Angel through the world of greasy-spoon dinery. John and Will are concocting new ways for characters to get killed. Ian's new strip, Monster University, is in the Northwestern U newspaper. Meanwhile, I click-click-click away at ATSTW. I have a new companion in my efforts: music trivia. Instead of my usual diet of movies playing in the background to keep my sanity in check, yesterday I watched/listened to a huge block of music via the cablebox. On the upper channels of the box there is a chunk of 'stations' dedicated to specific genres of music. For example: Jazz, Easy Listening Jazz, Contemporary Jazz, Easy Listening Contemporary Jazz, Fusion Jazz, Jazz for Dummies, Adult Jazz and Metal. Anyhoo, long story short, while they play a particular song they also show a cover of the album from whence the single came as well as little music factoids about that band. Did you know that Frankie Goes to Hollywood had their biggest hit in 1985 and then broke up in 1987? Did you know that Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart were in a band called Catch? Well I do now!

What the hell does this have to do with anything, you ask. Well, it illustrated one universal truth about all of these artists: it took a long time before they made the big time. With the exception of Glass Tiger, most acts were around at least 5-10 years before they had anything resembling a hit! It gives me heart that this banging our heads against this wall that seperates the obscure from the famous is not uncommon and is starting to yield some results! We are getting press from here and there, mostly positive, some bad, some great. But I feel there is some barrier that is about to yield to our years of inking, dreaming and clicking. The future rushes along and years lumber by, the present is in flux and new life arrives! For example:

Congrats to Candle Light founder Mike and his wife Rachel on their new baby boy!

The wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'
Don't know where I will be tomorrow

Reflections in a Dragon's Eye

What made me think of this today, I don't know.

Back in 1997, I was (along with Jer and Coach) involved in the making of ED, a 48 page monthly anthology, for 3CG. One issue got out fine, but #2, well, that's today's story.

After a hair-raising experience with our first printer, we went shopping for a new one. The first printer we wanted to use was a John Nordland up in Minnesota. At that time his outfit was called Blackbird Press. We'd talked with him, Carter even visited him and took pictures of the setup (have to find those...). But suddenly, we couldn't contact him. There was a flurry of rumors that the building had burned down after SyCo's attempts to buy the outfit fell through (no causality implied). Nordland was unreachable, so we went with an outfit called Domino Printing out west.

The job on ED #1 was good, not great, so we went shopping again. We get a call from a fellow named Marcos Guerra, who introduced himself as the fellow who took over the reins of Nordland's operation. He was Nordland's assistant before whatever happened happened, and he was now calling people off Nordland's customer list to see if he could do any jobs for them. The price was the same, but much much closer to us, so we went with him.

Hoo boy, what a mess followed. Deadlines came and went, and it started to get very very close. The book was to be distributed by Diamond, and they give you several weeks to get your books in after the purchase order. We were assured that it would be a quick turnaround, no problem. Well, deadlines kept passing.

In the midst of this I came to know Chris Gronlund and Cynthia Griffith, at that time working together as Foundation Comics. They too had a book percolating at Marcos' Dragon's Eye Press: Second Rate Heroes. We exchanged many many emails and co-ordinated out strategy to get our books made. The lies and delays piled up from Marcos, and our worries shifted from ever getting our book or our money back to getting the art back. He must have been very close to being done on SRH because that did eventually ship. ED #2's ship date (extended by Diamond when we explained our situation to them) was ultimately missed.

The times I got Marcos on the phone, conversations would go:"So when will the books be done and shipped?" "Oh, soon. Two weeks." One convo went: "You know when Diamond sends an order, they cancel it if you don't get it to them within two months." "Oh, no, I don't think that's the deal. You can just send it in."

So, we sicced the Sheriff on Marcos. Memory is starting to fail me, I believe his name was Tony. Anyways, Tony had a few talks with Marcos and right about the time Tony felt confident that we could go ahead with a stolen property charge, Marcos sent back our art and the films he'd produced. Imagine that. He'd shot barely twenty pages in two months. Our payment of 200$ was not returned. We went to file a Better Business Bureau complaint, but Dragon's Eye Press had ceased to exist by then. The then Candle Light Press (Mike Ayers and Will Grant) had also been approached and lost $400 to Marcos. I was able to get their art back as well.

For a long time (so long in fact that I realized today that I hadn't transferred the page into the new web page setup at CLP), I had a page warning people off Marcos Guerra, Dragon's Eye Press, and John Nordland. Why Nordland? Well, Marcos dropped his name at every turn...using Nordland's facilities, was Nordland's assistant, "oh, it's ok, John's coming in to help me with the backlog", called us from Nordland's customer list...on and on. So in our attempts to get Marcos moving, we repeatedly tried contacting Nordland, but it was clear we were being avoided. So we let Marcos' claim stand, since we had nothing else to go on.

Years pass. Then I get an email from a young lady (I promised her I wouldn't use her name) who was very upset; she'd read the page (Captured for posterity here) and felt Nordland was being unfairly characterized as, well, at worst an incompetent printer and a thief. She was a friend on one of Nordland's kids, she explained; she felt she knew him well, and that there was no way he could be dishonest. I replied and patiently explained how the page came to be. "If you can get him to pick up the phone and answer my questions about Marcos, great. Or if you want to ask him if he really had anything to do with Dragon's Eye Press, great also. He receives blame for this because he hid from us like a guilty man. If he says he had nothing to do with it, fine. We're willing to take his word on it." (not the exact quote, but you get the idea)

A day or so later came the response, that she had asked and he'd said no, he had nothing to do with it. So I thanked the girl, writing "Thank you. You were brave and forthright when others were not." So I changed the page to this. And I'm going to put the page back up again, I think. I wasn't going to, but cautionary tales are a good thing. Plus Marcos Guerra might actually do a bit of ego-surfing one day and get a little reminder that comics people are crazy enough to remember being screwed out of $600 for a pretty long time.

Perhaps I'll add some other details to it, just in case he ever does read it; Marcos even might go thank Sheriff Tony for talking us out of driving up there to add the personal touch.

"Lost" (Not the show)

Had one of those wonderful class-war encounters this morning. In my day job I deal with University personnel at all levels--from food service to regents. A professor was in this morning and he had to fill out a form indicating that he'd lost something (to get a replacement). When he hit the part where he had to explain why it got lost he said as he wrote "Well, it's lost because it's lost." and he wrote "lost" in this space.

I tell him "You need to expand on that; describe the circumstances in which it was lost". He gets a bit more cranky, starts trying to throw a bit of weight around and I tell him "Look, they don't like facile answers on these things." There's a dead stop. I look up from what I'm doing and realize he's puzzling out whether he's been insulted or not. Hedging his bets, he turns friendly, after a last "well, if they don't like that, they can take it up with [the university president]."

But he's not done with "facile": "That's a great word. I should use that on some of my students' papers. Some of them read like they've been translated from Russian." I smile and nod. The rest of the encounter is brief and to the point; and now he's gone, ready to tell his students that their poor writing skills are facile.

With a job like this, why would anyone want to make comics, I ask ya.

Dangerous new toy

Okay, so I didn't even really want a cellphone in the first place.

I have a bare-bones one (as I requested) but even THIS one has a couple of games on it. I went through a brief phase of constantly playing Tetris on it. That is thankfully over (and my eyes have recovered from the strain).

But now I have discovered the primitive little drawing program, Doodler. It is more fun than a game, AND it is drawing. My gosh-darn raison d'etre!

So I slip down the slimy walls of cellphone addiction once again. I shall climb free.

Hay, I think I'll draw a picture of that on my.... oh, no.

Dub Trub Hub Bub!!!

Go check out the great new review of Carter's sci-fi epic Dub Trub!!!
Congrats to Carter... a well-deserved pat on the back.
www.silverbulletcomicbooks.com

Watch the left column, scroll down, and it's under the "Small Press" heading.

Dub Trub keeps pleasing. Fun story. Clean, catchy art. Heartfelt tribute to the spirit of sci-fi adventure! Check it out for yourself @ www.candlelightpress.com.

Table Building and why zines ain't the same anymore

Got confirmation that we'll be attending the Des Moines I-Con June 18; it'll be the debut of our new table setup. It doesn't hover or transform into a giant boombox or anything, but we here at CLP think it'll make a nice impression.

Whenever I think about the I-Con, I think about THWIP!, a zine put out by Ivan Martin, one of the organizers of the I-Con. I've read a lot of zines in my time, too many, really. Blogging has really cut into the quality and quantity of the more verbal zines, so a lot of what's left is more art-object oriented. But even in the heyday, there was very little like THWIP! If you're not into the nomenclature of comics sound effects, THWIP! is the classic Spider-Man web-shooter noise.

THWIP! is all about the state of Spider-Man today. Each and every Spider-title is reviewed, along with classic issues, and related media. Often there will be a reprint of some send-away book ("send 5 wrappers and postage to" deals) that you have no shot at finding or knowing about, even. It was hard to shake off the realization that there was a Planned Parenthood Spider-Man gimme comic; reading it created a little fold in my brain that may be alzheimer's-proof.

Ivan puts this out religiously. There's always another THWIP! How many zines make it to ten regular issues? Twenty? THWIP! passed 100 issues recently. But here's my point about THWIP! and other zines: THWIP! is the truest zine I've ever encountered. It has a singular mission (never deviating), it comes out regularly, and shows no signs of a flagging purpose.

I was at a zine conference in Iowa City a few years ago and was amazed at how little output makes a zine mogul anymore. Some zines required a staff of people to make; that one got me. I'll take the purity of something like THWIP! over the sweary rambling manifestos I see anymore.

There are exceptions on the manifesto front, though; at the conference I traded a MAN IS VOX: Barracudae to Virginia Visker for three issues of her zine--Virginia makes a great crazy zine. During the panels at the zine conference, she rose to make a few points and the much younger crowd took her as ridiculous. Virignia always knows the score. "I'm not stupid," she told them "I'm an alcoholic." They didn't get it. At ground level, Virginia's done more for the art scene in this town than anyone will ever know. It occurred to me in that moment that zines had become what its most feverent 90s practitioners feared: a clique that chose deliberate primitivism to thin the competition for Big Dog in the pack. I was pretty depressed about it. But then I bought an odd zine called CLIMAX, a diary of orgasms had by a fellow over a few week period. It was fun, because it was about more than that. So, hope returned.

Ivan likes Spider-Man; read THWIP! and find out how much.

I've got two left feet and they're on backwards!

Watched the REEFER MADNESS musical on Showtime for the third time and enjoyed it even more than the first time. I went hunting for a soundtrack, but all there's only the LA cast recording. Still, any port in a storm when the choices are playing it on the stereo or forcing my friends to harsh, direct action by singing the songs all day long.

Off-Broadway seems loaded with a lot of gimmick shows, and it's hard to separate the good from the charitably good. Hedwig and The Angry Inch is a good example--I remember reading about it and thinking "interesting gimmick". At least it made more sense than "Tony and Tina's Wedding" or "Nunsense". But I had to see the movie to really get it. How you could watch all those musicals that don't work to get to the ones that do sounds like a tough slog, more so than with movies. If a musical doesn't work out for you, that's pretty much your night, right there.

I followed the Amazon recommended links from REEFER MADNESS to a few others...ZOMBIE PROM, BATBOY...it can make you forget the ugly specter of Andrew Lloyd Webber in a hurry. Knowing as little as I do about musicals, it's tempting to dive in, but REEFER MADNESS is such a beautiful nugget of joy, I fear diluting it. Ah well.

"Bunnies?! I don't know what you're talking about, mister, but I like it!!"

Getting things done...

I actually did all the stuff I was supposed to this weekend, which is great and kinda unfulfilling all at once. Late Sunday I was floating around waiting to go to sleep, essentially. Jer was in the same mood, just a bit too distracted to ink. So we went for a walk.

We went north of CLP HQ and wandered among houses neither of us had seen before. Iowa City is one of those towns in which every house is different, most times completely different: bungalows next to houses with gothic windows next to English cottages. Well, at least that's how this end of town looks. The new stuff is all condos ("Buy my apartment, and join a small dictatorship called the 'Condo Committee'? Wow! I can't write the check, I'm so excited!").

We didn't talk about comics, or much of anything, really. We just took it all in. Walking's good for the heart, but a good walk is good for the soul.

Faster! More intense!

I've awakened from my sickened slumber to take care of a few things. I decided at this late hour to do some blogin' that I haven't done in a while. Bear with me, I'm doing this half-blind, so typos abound!

1)Tax Day came and went. It wasn't enough that the mailbox to put my return in was busted/locked, but I had a hell of a time trying to get a stamp. Thankfully, there was this kind stranger who gave me one of theirs. I guess there are still some decent people out there. Not many, but some. Thanks again, stamp-giver!

2)Bar-Krawlin'. There was a bar crawl for one of the Dub Trub girls this week and I was along for the ride. Should a man in my advanced years trying to match a group of 20-something coeds shot for shot? Mmmm, wait a minute, what kind of ass question is that?! Take your lumps and suck it up, old man!

3)All Things Come to an End. I've been working on the final chapter of Dub Trub recently. It's been a lot more bittersweet than I had anticipated. I've been working with Red and Black for the last 3 years and it's been one hell of a ride. I'm going to miss Rex, Roka, Commander Jones and Special Agents Red and Black. Sure, I've got 6 chapters to complete before this end sees the light of day, but it's coming soon.

4)ACT DAMN IT! Episode 3 is just around the corner, and I've been doing a lot of thinking about that galaxy, far, far away. I've got this feeling that by the end of this summer, there will be a new favorite bad guy from the saga. I've gone on about General Grievous, but I think that it will be Emperor Palpatine/Darth Sidious. It just won't be from his mass kicking of Jedi ass. No, it's all because of the actor that breathes life into the two-timin' Senator from Naboo: Ian McDirmand. He is, in my opinion, the best actor in all of the SW films. Sure, there are a ton of fine actors that have graced the screen within Lucas' epic, but he's one of the few that gets what is really important to making it in these movies: overacting. You can't give understated method-acting when your backdrop is the highways and by-ways of the Old Republic. You've got to act at a grand scale of your surroundings so as not to get swallowed up by them. I'm afraid that most of the actors within the prequels are too concerned with over-doing it, looking like a fool. Shoot, how is that possible when you are acting against Jar Jar Binks? Oh, and as far as looking foolish, that ship had sailed the second you don the monk robes, got the porcupine with a rat tail haircut and whack at your fellow thespians with aluminum rods. Chew the scenery! This ain't Lost in Translation, it's frickin' Star Wars. Sheesh. Anyway, I for one welcome our new Sith Overlords. Go get 'em!

Okay so that's it for now. Back to the hibernation chamber and getting better.

All better now

Hello. All better now.

I am no less angry now, but my anger has cooled and hardened into unwavering resolve, like a glowing sword plunged into water and emerging sharp and deadly. These thieves will pay.

It's Friday. Draw for a while today, go to work with bike-helmet-stealing coworkers, then get up tomorra and DRAW ALL THE LIVE LONG DAY. Sat'day be COMIC BOOK WORKIN' DAY at Candle Light!!

So I found this great helmet...

just, uh, lying in the...er...STREET! All bright orange and grab-me pretty. Yes indeed, nice pretty AAAAAAA RACCOONS!!!!!

Actually I was sound asleep for that. Yep. I'd been writing more LOST IN THE WASH. Will's been sending me character sketches and things are starting to move in a definite direction. I've been wanting to do out and out horror stories for a while (MIV: Paingels was a great move in that direction), and moving the setting outside Texas is a nice change of pace.

Texas has been home to pretty much every comic I've done. I am a Texas expat ('85-'93), and Texas is a place where folks believe anything can happen. Many a time I've heard people use the reply "I dunno, man. You been to Texas?". But I'm a Coloradan by birth and lived there fifteen years, and that setting has its own magic, its own unreal credibility. Superheroes? Nah. Horror? Most definitely.

Perhaps there will be a story among the corn soon as well...

Some crooked F@#$*ERS.....

Some crooked motherf@#$%^&*ers stole my bike helmet tonight.

They stole the Mighty JDog's bike helmet.

It's bright orange, so I should be able to spot it easily, and WHEN I DO these sh@#$%&bags are gonna regret the day they were born.

Bike helmet thieves. Line 'em up and shoot 'em down. Shallow grave, so raccoons can dig 'em up and chew off their faces.

LEAP YEARS is here!

I just did the last mouseclick to put LEAP YEARS by Ian Bennett into print. In a couple days, it should be orderable from anywhere on this big blue marble. Here's the ultrafine blurb:

Jake's too old for an imaginary friend, but that doesn't seem to bother the six-foot frog he talks to--Longfellow High just seems more real now that Wilbur's around. In the big leap from childhood to adulthood, the lessons learned in school aren't always in the classroom.

It's 212 pages, black and white with color cover. It's 7.5" x 9.25", nice and square, and retails for $17.95 (10 pounds in UK). It's also Candle Light Press' 10th book, and we're proud to have Ian's great coming-of-age story on the shelf.

Get me outta here

I don't know what it is about this time of the year that makes me an ill-tempered a-hole, but without fail, from the beginning of April to the beginning of May, my patience with the world is stretched pretty thin, I'm excessively grouchy. Is it the change of the seasons? The shift of the heavnly bodies above? The pollen in the air? Baseball?

Anyway, that's all I have to say about this. I just want off this ride for a little bit. I'm not talking about comics or anything that I love, I just want nothing to do with the modern human existence, stuff that's just...noise. Noise that just keeps drowning out my creative mind, noise that makes me want to do nothing after I get home after an eight hour day. C'mon lottery....c'mon lottery....

Writing, ah, writing at last...

Woke up Saturday and realized that the most pressing thing to be done was to WRITE. I squeegeed my eyes with my fists and ran through the year-to-date list of stuff to do:

1) Get DUB TRUB 2: The Peacekeepers out there...check
2) Get the "why candle light?" catalog out there...check
3) Get LEAP YEARS out there...oh man almost. Once the proof is approved, then...check

Then there was 4) Write LOST IN THE WASH.

On it.

Raking it in....

It is a beautiful spring day in Iowa. If you haven't been outside today, GET OUT THERE NOW.
I have been raking in the front yard. I gashed my lower leg open on a protruding bush branch and just kept goin' , blood flowin' down my leg and sweat flowin' down my for'ead, and a smile growin' 'cross my face.
I want to get covered in dirt. I want to be stung by a big fat bumblebee. I want to be sunburned.

WINTER IS OVER!!!!!! Yay!

Shit, my leg hurts. A blister on my hand? Sweat keeps making my pencil fall off my ear. Isn't there beer in the fridge?

Goin' back in. Drawing to do. (and dishes, and cat litter, and laundry, and sweeping, and garbage to take out, and......and....)

(screen door slamming muffles the stream of curse words)

A problem...a solution...

So, I was in a bit of a spot on deciding what movie to go see today. I'm treking to a town near here and was looking for something to view during the afternoon. The theatre near where I was going to be was playing a lot of...well, things I didn't want to see. The only thing that was there that I had any remote interest in was Sin City, and hell, I'd seen it already. So, what to do, what to do. And then it hit me! I'll go to the IMAX and see Robots. Sure, I'd seen it before, but I figured it would be interesting to see an IMAXed version of a Hollywood film. Sometime from now I will tell you more of this trek, the search for a Jedi Master named YODA and other things of note. Ciao, bella.

So the piece of paper was, well...

four sets of seven dashes. ROCK THE WIZARD WORLD's code is either terrifyingly brilliant, or I dunno. Hanna was very keen to see it to make sure I wasn't oversimplifying it and even she failed to find any significance in it.

Or maybe that's what we're supposed to believe.

No, I'm not posting a picture of it. I like mystery.

Okay, so, SIN CITY...

is okay. I walked out entirely ambivalent to it. I'm not a fan of the books; the style is nice, but storywise they've always left me wanting. The word "noir" never entered my mind until I read reviews of the movie. Then I found myself wanting to see KISS OF DEATH again.

It is undeniably true that Robert Rodriguez has created the most faithful comics to movie translation ever; the question remains as to whether that's automatically a good thing or not. Now that we actually have such a thing in the world, we can ask this. Do we really think that the best thing that can happen to our favorite comics is that they become movies? It's certainly one of the best things that can happen to the creators of our favorite comics, especially when the end product rakes in 28-point-whatever extra-large in one weekend.

On the old LIKE YOU HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO radio show, we took a box of comics and read aloud a single random page from each in rapid succession. We just blindly grabbed comics, read a page, then the next fellow went. My suggestion: do this drunk. Nothing reminds you more forcefully that comics are a visual, participatory medium quite like bellowing "Damn! There goes the shipment!" or "YOU!!!!!!" or "But you can't be my sister!" or, yes, even "And then it hits me like a kick in the nuts."

Sum up: Everything I disliked about SIN CITY was inherent in the source material. The movie itself is a marvel, and hopefully we shake the dust of ONE FROM THE HEART off this method once and for all.

Burning question answered: yeah, I did like SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW more. Neither one topped stretches of THE INCREDIBLES (scenic stuff, mostly) for "is that real or Memorex?" power.

"What's that? That's insides."

Interesting news from Foreword Magazine today: MAN IS VOX: Paingels is among the finalists for Book of the Year, Graphic Novel category. The website says: "A jury of librarians, booksellers and reviewers are selected to judge the categories for entry, and they select winners and finalists based on editorial excellence and professional production as well as the originality of the narrative and the value the book adds to its genre." We'll hear who won in May.