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| Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 | | 8:42 pm |
Quote of the Day/Dribs and Drabs “Ideas are like pumpkins, they just float through the air, and hit people on the head”. Alan Moore, quoting R.A.Lafferty. *** Things are going neither badly nor particularly well. Lots of waiting to do, which means a fair amount of worrying. It's irritating knowing there's going to be no information coming any time soon, because anyone who might have any's going to be preoccupied with San Diego. Weather's been apocalyptic in the best way the last few nights. Lots of lightning. Terrible for the animals and my sinuses, but vaguely energizing, somehow. Energy I desperately need at the moment... Latest spec movie script is like pulling teeth. I've been putting off working on anything else while I force myself just to get a basic first draft done, after which it should get easier. For me, at least, it's easier to fix something than create it. Then again, polishing material is usually 90% of my process on any given piece, which, if this script follows suit, means I'll be finished with it sometime in 2016... It occurred to me the other day that I may be a better editor than I am writer. Then I decided that was stupid. What I am is a more successful editor than writer. At least this year, I am, seeing as I'm making money editing and, well, not from writing. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that... Tori Amos' COMIC BOOK TATTOO is really neat to look at, but it's a stone-cold bitch to carry boxes of eight copies up a flight of stairs. At least Belle & Sebastian's anthology clocked in at a manageable size... A | | Friday, July 18th, 2008 | | 10:28 pm |
Suddenly, Without Warning
What a bizarre week. Almost none of the stuff I was hoping would happen did (most of it could still happen yet, but I'd've been happier if they happened faster), and a bunch of things I didn't expect to happen happened instead.
So, while I spent most of Monday and Tuesday thinking I'd have been better off putting a pen through my eyeball and deep into my brain instead of ever putting one to paper, and Wednesday shuffling around being what I believe the kids call "emo", tonight I find myself thinking I may actually be able to make a career out of this comics thing yet.
Now if the stuff I was hoping would happen on Wednesday actually does manage to happen next week (more likely the week after, thank you very much, San Diego Comic Con, for managing to make my life miserable even though I'm not attending you this year), I could actually be on to something.
Even if it doesn't: two steps forward and one step back is still a step forward.
A
PS: Anybody who tells me anything about The Dark Knight before I get to see it will face my wrath (real scary, I know.) I already know more about the film's story than I want to. | | Sunday, July 13th, 2008 | | 9:25 pm |
Healthy Skepticism
“I don’t care what your trainer says,” I said. “A healthy lifestyle does not ensure a long life.”
“You know more about this than a professional health consultant. This is what you’re telling me,” he said, not even trying to hide the accompanying sneer.
I’ll admit it: his self-righteous refusal to consider a differing viewpoint irritated me on a fundamental level. He needed to be taught a lesson. I said, “I’ve got ten dollars that says I, someone whose idea of strenuous activity is getting out of bed to go to the bathroom, will live longer than you, with all the time and money you’ve wasted trying to stave off the inevitable.”
He stepped back and looked at me. It took awhile. There’s a lot of me to look at. Finally, he slapped a ten dollar bill on the table with all the force his heavily muscled arm could must. “Show me your money,” he said.
I didn’t actually have ten dollars. But that was OK, because I did have a shovel, the surprisingly sharp edge of which I proceeded to bury in his face.
I like to think even the staunchest believer in the benefits of a healthy lifestyle would have to concede that I’d made my point. But there’s no reasoning with some people.
A | | Saturday, July 12th, 2008 | | 11:18 pm |
An Attempted Insomnia Demon Exorcism OK, the more I think about this, the angrier I get. Not eating a cracker that was freely given to me doesn't even qualify as a crime, much less a hate crime. At the most, it's hate. And even if hate was to become a crime, well, I know a lot of people who should be getting arrested before someone who didn't eat the holy snack food. People who make death threats because someone decided not to engage in ritual cannibalism spring to mind. There are so many jokes I could make about this whole thing, but they're all coming from a negative emotional space I want to spend as little time in as possible. Hopefully this (very restrained compared to what it was before I edited it) tirade will have served its cathartic purpose and I'll be able to sleep now. *** Linda pointed out a story about a woman discovering she'd been carrying a bat around in her bra--after it had been there for six hours. Apparently, she felt it but thought it was her cell phone vibrating, which makes me wonder where the hell she keeps her cell phone. But I can't throw stones. This reminds me of the time I found a giraffe in my underwear. I felt something moving around down there, but thought it was just the kangaroo. A | | Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 | | 6:56 pm |
The Future Has Moved The Future of Comics (I) Fiona Staples has let her previous online home, Good-Lucky.net, fall by the wayside. Now she can be found at the appropriately named FionaStaples.com. Update your bookmarks accordingly. *** THE ODDEST THING I WILL DO TODAY IN THE ROLE OF COMICS EDITOR Spend thirty seconds tracking down the linguistic derivation of the term "props" (it comes from "propers", which itself is a short form of "proper respect".) This would make some kind of sense if it actually appeared in a script, pitch, outline, or really had anything at all to do with the creation of a comic. But it didn't. *** QUOTE OF THE DAY "...the new (HULK film) overdelivered, relative to its underpromise." David Davis, managing partner and entertainment analyst at Arpeggio Partners in Los Angeles. I have a new goal in life: to make only underpromises, and then overdeliver on them. A | | 10:51 am |
July Morning Rambly-Dambling I feel like I’m on the edge of something lately. Possibly a killing spree, but even that’s something, you know? There’s a lot of stuff bubbling around the brainpan lately, but nothing really coalescing into something solid, something I can build a plan of action around. At the moment, I’m resisting the urge to write a spec comedy pilot about an incompetent terrorist cell that keeps trying to blow itself and surrounding locations up and failing miserably. Something tells me it’d be a hard sell. Then again, BREAKING BAD got made…WEEDS I can understand, but I’m still trying to wrap my head around Breaking… It’s almost certainly an illusion (or delusion), but I’ve been feeling like I’m more likely to catch the elusive Big Break in Hollywood rather than comics. Maybe that’s just the scenario I’d prefer to be in, as a big break in Hollywood would actually involve money, while a big break in comics would likely involve getting screwed over by a publisher looking for their big break in Hollywood. While I wait for the Muse (or a deadline) to strike, I’ve been doing what I normally do during these down periods--shoving as much junk into my brain as possible and hoping for the weird alchemy of creation to take place. And working on a screenplay that ought to be easy to write but which is instead driving me crazy. Been thinking a lot about superheroes, for no other reason than that they’re hard to avoid right now. In a bout of synchronicity, I ended up watching HANCOCK the same week Austin Grossman’s SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE showed up in my reservation slot at the library. The Law of Expectations was in full force with both--expecting little from Hancock, I was pleasantly surprised (mostly by Jason Bateman, who’s the real heart of the film); I don’t know how I got it into my head that Invincible was supposed to be a fantastic book, but I came out of it thinking it was…OK, though I don’t really see the point. Like HEROES, both focus on skewed versions of what most people think of when they think of comic book superheroes. And, other than a really silly twist to the backstory for a near-extinct race of demigods in Hancock, neither manage to bring anything to the genre that will be particularly novel to anyone who’s even moderately aware of what’s been going on in mainstream North American comics for the last decade. Hell, the best word I can come up with to describe Invincible is “quaint”. This stuff, along with Katherine Farmar’s <a href=" http://puritybrown.blogspot.com/2008/07/tips-for-new-comics-publishers.html">tips for new comics publishers</a> and the continuing efforts of my friend George Singley to get his Chimaera Comics (including the TITUS: HEROIC FAILURE book we wrote and, quite possibly, my and Tiina’s NORTHERN LIGHTS) largely superhero-based publishing line off the ground, has me again thinking about capes and tights. Of ideas that could work in the genre, and, in a more abstract way, why, as a reader, the genre doesn’t generally excite me that much anymore (occasional collections of JACK STAFF notwithstanding.) And the answer I keep circling back to is, they aren’t supposed to excite me that much anymore, at least not the Big Two superheroes. The current target audience of 20 to 40-something males is an aberration, and ill-thought out business strategy that’s going to kill the genre stone dead if books like Mike Kunkel’s SHAZAM series aren’t successful. Which isn’t to say that I think Kunkel’s SHAZAM is the proper model for comics--though it might be, I haven’t read it. At the end of the day, it’s not the characters that are important, or even the creators. It’s the stories. And that’s the advantage HANCOCK and SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE have over mainstream superhero comics--they are stories, designed with a beginning, middle, and end. We’ve got YEAR ONE, THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, and decades of stuff that theoretically happened between them, but new Batman stories will continue being churned out long after I’m dead. Some superheroes Never End, nor should they. But in never ending, they should be outgrown by a good portion of the readership, and replaced by a new generation. Shouldn’t they? OK, enough rambling. Time to get to work. A | | Friday, July 4th, 2008 | | 9:53 pm |
Foley Revels in His Own Ignorance Because it's been too long since I blogged (outside of a Z2H prodblog in Wednesday) but I was up till all hours of the morning proofing KNIGHTCAP: NOVEMBER'S SONG and cursing my sharp alertness, or whatever it was that was keeping me awake, I shall now throw myself upon my sword and expose the depths of my ignorance to the world with a book meme shamelessly stolen from argentla. I'm already getting self-defensive about this list. I feel a burning need to preface it by stating that I read because I like reading. At least, I like reading the writing that I like to read, if you follow. There are few things in my life more enjoyable than getting caught up in the way writers like Julian Barnes, Dashiell Hammett, and Douglas Adams turn a phrase. At the same time, for me, reading a Stephen King novel is like taking a ten mile hike through 4 feet of wet concrete (I always enjoy his interviews and what non-fiction of his I've read, though. It's weird.) It's not that he's a bad writer--too many people whose opinion I value say otherwise for me to believe that. There's just something about the way he uses language that doesn't appeal to my sensibilities. Because I read for enjoyment, I won't generally push myself to finish a book that I'm not enjoying. The Lord of The Rings is undoubtedly a classic, but I don't care. There are plenty of other classics I'd actually enjoy reading; I'll go find one of them before I try and force myself to slog through a fifty page description of a tree (again.) Finally, there may well be books on this list that I read and just flat out forgot about. There are several that I know I've read, but couldn't tell you the first thing about, thanks to the deficiencies of my swiss-cheese memory. It's particularly embarrassing in the case of something like Iain Banks' THE CROW ROAD, which I know I thoroughly enjoyed reading once and will thoroughly enjoy reading again someday, seeing as my recollection of the story is limited to a single image. On the upside, I could probably get by reading the same 50 or so books over and over again for the rest of my life, and enjoy them like they were new each time. Of course, if I did that then lists like the one below would be even more embarrassingly devoid of bold text. Huh. That turned into an actual post. Maybe I'll just leave it there and not publicly expose my literary failings. 1) Look at the list and bold those you have read. 2) Italicize those you started but did not finish. 3) Underline the books you LOVE. 4) Strike-through the books you hated. 1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 . The Bible7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 1 3. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller1 4. Complete Works of Shakespeare15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks 1 8. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger20. Middlemarch - George Eliot 21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens 24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh 27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis34. Emma - Jane Austen 35. Persuasion - Jane Austen 36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden 40 . Winnie the Pooh - A. A. Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving 45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy 48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding50. Atonement - Ian McEwan 51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel 52. Dune - Frank Herbert53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth 56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon 60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt 64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy 68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie 70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville 71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 72. Dracula - Bram Stoker73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson 75. Ulysses - James Joyce 76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath 77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78. Germinal - Emile Zola 79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 80. Possession - AS Byatt 81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell 83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker 84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert 86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry 87. Charlotte's Web - EB White88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom 89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton 91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute 97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo | | Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 | | 4:36 pm |
I'll wake up in about 36 hours, and not a second before. One more day of shuffling around in a muscle-relaxant induced haze. Back still feels rough, but the sharp pain has more or less disappeared, to be replaced by a severe, but overall much more tolerable, ache. I actually managed to get quite a bit done this past week, despite my deteriorated physical and mental condition. Just not a lot of blogging. Big week for editing, as finished art for all pages of BLACK JACK O'BREEN and KNIGHTCAP: NOVEMBER'S SONG came in--both under the deadline because I am God's Gift to Comics Editing. *** FULL COURT PRESS After receiving a spate of press releases touting stuff which hasn't, and may very well never, happen, I've been toying with sending out weekly press releases of my own. Even if I don't have anything newsworthy (at least not newsworthy and true) to announce. Some prospective headlines for future releases: "Andrew Foley in talks to purchase MicroSoft for $1.00. (Nobody's listening, but he's talking about it.)" "Andrew Foley in talks with the guy at the McDonalds drive-thru window about the possibility of acquiring a Big Mac." "Andrew Foley Announces Expanded Personal Hygeine Plan with additional potty breaks on Mondays and Alternate Tuesdays." "Andrew Foley's Net Worth Estimated at $1.2 million dollars by completely independent firm Foley paid a lot of money to estimate his wealth." Why not join in the fun? Everybody's doing it (or if they aren't they oughta be.) *** QUOTE OF THE DAY "Tell Tiina to get the head-bucket." The Future of Comics (I) Fiona Staples, just after telling me the thing I told her would cause my head to explode if that's what she was about to tell me. *** I'M BRINGIN' CRAZY BACK Haven't had enough crazy today? Here's a heapin' helping of insanity to scratch that itch, a little rant by a recovering homosexual who submits to her husband's will and thinks you should do the same*, called Jean Grey is a Whore.And I thought I was scraping the bottom of the crazy barrel when it came to that "I can tell from watching Firefly that Joss Whedon abuses his wife" post a couple weeks back. This woman is wants to publicly execute fictional characters for cheating on other fictional characters. What a car crash of a blog... Via !Journalista!*I'm not sure if she wants everyone in the world to submit to her husband's will or thinks everyone in the world should submit to their husband's will. If the latter, I doubt she means that a gay man should submit to his husband's will, but it's kind of fun to think she does. A | | Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 | | 11:15 pm |
Brainzzzz From (in fact, most of) the intro to my weekly editing blog at Zeros2Heroes: Deadlines are rushing me and my fellow Z2H editors like something big and fast that you don’t want rushing at you if you can possibly avoid it. It’d be a tough week on my best day, but my best day this is not, as Foley’s Back Blowout 2008 continues more or less unabated. While I haven’t spent any more time at the emergency room, I also haven’t moved more than a couple feet from my bed for the better part of nine days, now. Even our pets think the room smells a little hinky and are actively avoiding it, and our dog thinks other dogs’ poo is the most alluring scent imaginable… One of the things I did move out of bed for was a visit to the doctor this afternoon, to tell her, in the most concise, well-considered manner possible that “I NEED SOME DRUGS EITHER THAT OR JUST PUT A BULLET IN MY HEAD I DON’T CARE ANYMORE MY BACK HURTS IT HURTS IT HURRRRTS!” She opted to add a few more medications to my already-considerable prescription list (some people treat their body like a temple; I treat mine like a pharmaceutical company waste dump site.) The upside of all this is that I will hopefully be feeling less discomfort tomorrow. The downside is that I’ll be feeling very little at all this time tomorrow, and will in fact have the intelligence, wit, and general demeanour of someone playing a background zombie in a George Romero Living Dead flick. From the sounds of it, this particular medicinal cocktail won’t make me hunger for human flesh (any more than usual), but it will leave me in the kind of semi-comatose state I used to strive for back in art college but discovered to my detriment isn’t terribly cool when you’ve got a deadline bearing down on you... A | | 11:57 am |
Arsonist Lullaby Apparently, a week or so after the Great Dial-A-Doper Sweep of '08, there was some sort of press conference this morning to announce that 20 people involved with the series of arsons sweeping our neighbourhood and a couple others in the city had been rounded up. Judging by the burning tent trailer three houses down, the fire truck blocking our garage door, and the reporters swarming the alley out back, there were at least 21 people involved with the arsons. I'm actually kind of surprised it isn't our place that got lit up--if I was an arsonist our unkempt lawn, piles of dry branches, and numerous trees in various states of dying would be an irresistible target. Stupid arsonists. *** THINGS FALL APART SOME MORE Drunkduck.com founder Dylan Squires leaves Platinum.Wowio.com--one of the few sources of real income for independent comic publishers online--has shut down for a month while it arranges to go global--and retools its content deals. As it'd be just really neat to actually make some money off my comics for a change, I'd seriously considered putting PARTING WAYS up on Wowio. The main thing holding me back (other than the hope that I can get the book into print again at a new publisher) was their hiring a fundamentalist Christian homophobe as their comics point man. I'd actually be kind of happy if they never opened up again; moral quandaries suck. A | | Monday, June 23rd, 2008 | | 5:09 pm |
Things fall apart Back's really getting irritating, now. It's not that it hurts (though it does), so much as that it makes even the simplest physical activities risky (because it could hurt a hell of a lot worse very fast). Working out? No way. Mowing the lawn? Don't think so. Closing the door? Nope. On Saturday I actually HURT MYSELF BY CLOSING A %*#&ING DOOR. I'm not renowned for my active lifestyle--hell, there are few things I like to do better than revel in my own sloth--but it's different when the element of choice is removed. And even for me, this last week has involved a stunning lack of mobility/activity. I am being driven slowly mad... *** COMICS. DON'T TALK TO ME ABOUT COMICS. It's kind of sad that I feel like I've got a better shot at catching a break in Hollywood than I do in the comics industry. Sad to me, anyway. Making matters worse: Artists, and my inability to find any that don't get better offers fifteen minutes after agreeing to work on something with me. Woe! Woe is Andrew! *** HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BRIAN GUAY Suck on that, m************! How you like me now?!?! *** THE PLATINUM STANDARD I've got to hand it to DJ Coffman. When it comes to his personal experience with PlatinumStudios, he's been publicly calling it down the middle, now, apparently, to his own detriment. I hope he does get the publishing rights to HERO BY NIGHT back, but after the mail he published on his blog, I'll be kind of surprised if he does. If nothing else, I can see where it'd be a bad precedent to set, from a corporate perspective. *** UNQUOTE OF THE DAY There's a really funny line that deserves to be Quote of the Day, but it'd get someone in trouble if it went public, so I'm keeping it to myself. You would've laughed, though. Trust me. A | | Saturday, June 21st, 2008 | | 12:36 pm |
Ring a Ding Dong Dandy My mind's still recovering from the nostalgia high of seeing The Great Gama throw fire in the eyes of Mike Avery, enabling Gama Singh Jr. to win the PWA Championship last night. And my back, which is still improving but nowhere near ready to be sitting in an uncomfortably hot gymnasium waiting for that moment for three hours, is still recovering from said waiting. Here's some stuff that's been keeping me occupied in the meantime. *** MANY MILES AWAY, MANY MILES AWAY... Scott O. Brown and Horacio Lalia release the beginning of their sci-fi epic RED ICE at Zuda Comics. Just weeks later, ice is discovered on Mars. Coincidence? Or something more? Who knows? But if you don't vote for RED ICE and there isn't an alien invasion, you're always going to wonder what COULD'VE happened, if you'd just made with the clicky... *** MAD MEX: BEYOND CHENEYDOME Die for oil, suckers. Potentially, anyway. Can you imagine how stupid you'd feel getting knifed in the back after waiting around two hours in blazing heat for what amounts to a little over 25% off a gas station trip? *** WHICH ONE DOESN'T BELONG? The Heroes Con State of the Industry panel, moderated by Tom Spurgeon, featured DC Head Honcho Dan DiDio, Image publisher Erik Larsen, Boom! Studios EiC Mark Waid, and inker and sometimes comic writer Jimmy Palmiotti. I'm sure this is just a fluke of scheduling and Palmiotti is certainly qualified to comment on the state of the industry, and it's just an interesting coincidence that his name's been making the rounds as a potential successor to DiDio lately. (That last sentence was not intended sarcastically.) At the same panel, DiDio's quoted as saying, "We have the same characters... There's only so much you can do with them. You've seen it all, you've heard it all."While I'd say this is both true to an extent--and that it being true to that extent is actually a good thing--it's kind of a stunning admission, coming from a guy responsible for the creative direction of a major comics company. Of course, the proper strategy to deal with this problem--if problem it actually be--is "simply" to invest in developing new characters that haven't all been seen and heard yet. But that would require a lot of time, energy, and capital, first to create, then to support while the "fans" get over what seems to be an aversion to concepts that aren't comfortably familiar. It's a tricky situation for a guy running DC to be in: why put money behind a book that doesn't feature Superman or Batman, when you can use that money to create a Superman/Batman book that has a built-in audience? Well, I'm depressed. *** BUTCHERING MARVEL Chris Butcher, manager of The Beguiling comic shop, finds it...interesting that Marvel's releasing an unusually high number of comics this week, including several high-profile titles (BOTH Bendis Avengers books?), the same week that DC releases the second issue of DC's big 2008 event book, Grant Morrison and JG Jones' FINAL CRISIS. *** GIVE ME MORE What've you been reading online that I ought to be? A | | Thursday, June 19th, 2008 | | 4:28 pm |
Bad to Worse, to Even Worse.
(No, it's not about my back, which is still bad, but no worse than the last couple days and absolute nirvana compared to Monday.)
THREE SITUATIONS I HATE TO BE IN
1) A situation in which I've inadvertently pissed off someone I didn't want to piss off. I don't mind pissing off people I intended to piss off (in those situations that's kind of the point), but it always bothers me when I screw up and offend someone I didn't want to. on the upside, at least this scenario gives me an opportunity to clear the air and, if necessary, apologize to the PO'd party.
2) A situation in which a third party informs me that I've inadvertently pissed off a second party I didn't intend to piss off. This is worse, because it creates a situation where I know someone's mad at me, but that person hasn't told me they're mad at me. Which makes apologizing for making them made tricky and potentially damaging to the third party they did confide in.
3) Receiving information from a third party that causes me to strongly suspect, but not actually know, that I've inadvertently pissed off a second party I didn't want to piss off. This is worst of all. It's vortex of self-doubt time. Is Person B pissed off? If Person B is pissed off, why would they tell Person C instead of me? Is Person C even referring to me, or am I leaping to the wrong conclusion and there's another guy with back pain and mostly white hair who had a birthday this week who made a mistake? What does Person C know that they aren't telling me? Why won't Person C just come out and tell me Person B is pissed?
It's nightmarish, thinking you might have accidentally done someone wrong, but not being able to deal with it because A) You might not have done anything wrong after all, and B) You aren't supposed to know the person you may have wronged is upset that you may have wronged them to begin with.
All I want to do is: apologize, or decide I'm actually not going to apologize (yeah, right); gauge whether things are OK, not OK, or not OK but possible to make OK; accept whichever is the case with as much grace as possible, and; get on with my life.
And people wonder why my life goal is to become a hermit...
A | | Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 | | 4:54 pm |
Reasons I Love My Wife, #4583
The scene is the line for admitting area for the Misericordia Hospital, just past midnight. Andrew sits on a chair, obviously in agony. Tiina hovers over his shoulder. A nurse (I think she was a nurse) is just finishing asking some questions you'd think she'd know the answer to, seeing as Andrew was here around a year ago for exactly the same thing, albeit a slightly less excruciating form of it.
NURSE: Do you still live at that place with all the drug deals in front of it?
ANDREW: Yes.
TIINA: But the cops did a sweep and arrested thirty people in the last week, so there aren't as many drug deals now.
NURSE: Oh, that must be why he didn't show--uh, birthday?
ANDREW: June--today, actually.
NURSE: Happy birthday.
ANDREW: Thanks.
NURSE: Do you know what caused the pain?
TIINA: Karma?
***
That was the only time I laughed all night.
AND IT REALLY #*&%ING HURT.
***
The nurse didn't really call our house the place where all the drug deals took place. But the cops apparently did do a sweep of the neighbourhood and arrest more than twenty "Dial-a-Dopers". I guess that explains the weird, chatty woman who started an impromptu conversation with me and T for five minutes just as we were about to drive away the other day.
***
Hmmm. I wonder what the start-up costs for a drug-dealing operation are? Looks like the area's got a niche that needs filling...
(That's a joke, BTW. I'm paranoid enough when I'm not doing anything naughty. If I actually did something illegal, my head would explode the first time I saw a police car.)
A | | Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 | | 11:30 am |
Birthday Wishes
First and foremost, I wish I didn't have to spend the hours of midnight till four in the morning in a hospital emergency waiting room, wincing, shouting, and on a few occasions crying (it's extraordinarily frustrating to realize, once you lie down on an examination table, that you actually can't--and I'm not exaggerating, I literally COULD NOT--get up. Esp. when, as far as you can tell, you've been shoved in a storage closet and forgotten by hospital staff).
The demerol shot was a literal pain in the ass, but its effect was worth it--the deep, stabbing pain in my lower back remained as keen as ever, but the rest of the back and sides relaxed somewhat and the pain stopped radiating as much and I finally, finally got some much needed-sleep. Not as much much-needed sleep as I needed, but at five in the morning, I'll take what I can get thankyouverymuch.
***
RECEIVED THIS MORNING IN E-MAIL FROM CEVYN-MY-NIECE
(probably in retaliation for the improvised birthday "songs" I've been leaving on the family answering machine for her birthday for the last several years)
"hi this is for your birthday
happy birthday to you you stepped in some poo
don't waste it just taste it
happy birthday to you
love cevyn"
***
RECEIVED ON FACEBOOK FROM WEBCOMICKER/HAPPY HARBORITE RUDI GUNTHER
"Have a not entirely unpleasant day celebrating (in theory) the day of your birth."
***
FROM FRAZER IRVING, ALSO ON FACEBOOK
"Happy birthday, Grandad!! :D"
I replied by telling the young whippersnapper to get off my lawn.
***
IN ALL SERIOUSNESS
Thanks to everyone who took the time to wish me a happy birthday. I'd like to respond personally to everyone, but I'm still in dodgy shape and I'm congenitally lazy even when I'm not semi-crippled with back pain, so...yeah. Maybe it's the drugs talking, maybe the 14 hours of sleep I didn't get last night, but the well-wishing really means a lot to me on this, the day of my daughter's wedding. I mean this, the day I was dragged kicking and screaming from my mother's womb.
A | | Monday, June 16th, 2008 | | 4:44 pm |
Monday Afternoon Ramblethon
It occurs to me that if I'd spent the last five hours feeling sorry for myself in a hospital emergency waiting room, rather than lying VERY, VERY STILL in bed feeling sorry for myself, I'd probably have gotten a shot of demerol by now.
Of course, that would require me to somehow get from my bed to the hospital emergency room, and the thought of moving AT ALL right now is positively horrifying. Just getting to the washroom right now is bad enough, the notion of a car ride--dear god, of speed bumps...I'd shudder, if shuddering wouldn't make me scream in intense discomfort.
Of course, in the middle of this an old friend I haven't had a chance to talk to properly for almost a year calls up. I liked it better in the old days, when his unfortunately timed calls would come during an all-night bender or something of a slightly more, uh, extralegal nature.
But my all-night bender days appear to be behind me, and the only extralegal things going on around my and T's house take place on the corner, in our hedge, just outside the front gate, and apparently in our driveway (which is where we've been told the Dial-a-Dopers park while waiting for a call--the garage is situated in such a way that we can't see the driveway pretty much until we're in it.)
If had a dime for every time I saw a kid smoking something from a glass pipe/vial thingie just beyond our hedge...well, I'd have ten cents. But it's not everyday you see a teenager crouched on your corner in the middle of the afternoon, sucking down something that must surely be a (poorly) controlled substance. If I had my way, it's not something I would *ever* see. Once is one time too many, esp. after we discovered someone had been using a crook in one of our trees as a home. Not that I mind, really, but a couple bucks for rent would've gone a long way. We could even have used the money to do desperately needed work on the yard, which would've made life more pleasant for us and our tenant. What a selfish, anonymous bastard he/she was...
And now I've got the hiccups. Take me now, Lord...
A | | 11:37 am |
Downey Soft Amusingly, The Hollywood Reporter tab at the top of my webbrowser reads “Robert Downey, Jr. sad…”. The full title of the article is “Robert Downey, Jr. saddles up for ‘Cowboys’”, which isn’t much more accurate. In fact, it seems that Mr. Downey, Jr. is “in negotiations” to star in ”Cowboys & Aliens”, which “derives from a graphic novel written by Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley” which in turn derives from “an original idea by (Scott Mitchell) Rosenberg.” As I’m writhing about in excruciating pain at the moment, I’m not particularly inclined to believe this movie will ever happen (or that its happening would materially affect me, even if it did). I'm actually not inclined to think I won't bash my own brains out with a spatula by the end of the day. One of the managers, however, thinks the article is “Awesome. Every little bit helps.” If that’s true--if it’s even *possible* that it’s true that the little bit of having my name in the Hollywood Reporter (dot com--no idea how related the website is to the print version)--then this is one more little bit of progress on the path to my ultimate goal (making a reasonable living off of writing.) And it strikes me that that’s a little bit of progress that, under its new online manga pilot program, the co-writer of a Tokyopop comic that becomes the basis of a potential tentpole movie franchise could be denied. I’m strung out on a liver-disintegrating quantity of codeine right now--my lower back’s doing the thing where its usual ache is replaced by a sensation comparable to having several fishhooks twisting in it from the inside--so my comments here are basically going to be limited to, “Hey, my name’s in the Hollywood Reporter (dot com) and it might not have been if I signed the sort of contract that’s becoming increasingly common for new/young/desperate comic creators these days and oh GOD MY BACK HURTS SOMEONE PLEASE MAKE IT STOP THE PAAAAINNN…!” But it did seem worth noting. A | | Sunday, June 15th, 2008 | | 6:45 pm |
More Sunday Night Rambling This week...this #*&%ing week...It's been one long sinus headache, and it only seems to be getting worse. My teeth are now throbbing, and I've already taken double my daily codeine dose and maxed out on sinus meds as well. All I've got left to help me deal with my discomfort now is a sharp blow to the back of the head... *** HAPPY FATHERS DAY If you're a father, I hope you had a good day. If you're not a father, I hope your day stunk. Joking. *** I WANT MY COMICS NEWSSITES BACK Is it just me, or do the (relatively) new sites for the comics bulletin, Comic Book Resources, and Newsarama all look: 1) Disturbingly alike and 2) Less utilitarian than their previous incarnations? It's like all comics newssite design is now coming out of Stepford or something. *** LINKS O' INTEREST (FREE COMICS!) Two comics previews I'm looking forward to reading when this headache eases up: -Fifty pages of Ray Fawkes and Cameron Stewart's long-awaited THE APOCALIPSTIX graphic novel, and -A 24-page preview of Barnaby Ward's SIXTEEN MILES TO MERRICK collection of comic stories. Something I read even though I had a headache, because it seemed like it might be relevant to someone who's currently making more money editing comics than writing them: Greg Hatcher on some of the things comic editors are SUPPOSED to do, using FINAL CRISIS and Chuck Dixon's abrupt departure from DC to illustrate his points. Dixon shows up in the comments, too, talking about how DC is run these days. "Directionless gladhander with a ouija board" strikes me as a very apt description of many, many people involved in comics these days. Of course, most of the ones I know about personally are involved in the small press--it's a little depressing to think that the situation might not improve as one reaches the upper echelons of the industry... Canadian Professor Michael Geist's iOptOut website--which will hopefully give me and Tiina some peace from goddamn telephone solicitations that have been coming with increasing frequency this last month. I try to be nice to the people calling, on the assumption that they're not total asshats and are just people doing a job and trying to get by. When someone's trying to sell me something, I usually ask if they're on commission or an hourly wage. If the latter, I let them give me the spiel, if the former I tell them they'd be better off not bothering because it doesn't matter what they're talking about, I'm not buying. But my patience is wearing thin (this headache isn't helping), and I may yet be reduced to trying something my father suggested years ago, which is blowing a referee's whistle into the phone every time someone I don't want to talk to calls. I'd feel really bad about that, but part of me would also get a LOT of satisfaction from it. A | | Friday, June 13th, 2008 | | 9:09 pm |
Bob Dylan is The Last Cylon
There, I said it.
Next time I come to a good show late, someone please remind me to wait until the whole series is over before starting it. Now I get to go from 2-19 episodes a day of Battlestar Galactica to none, for the next 6-10 months. Hell, by the time the second half of the "season" (could someone tell me the difference between two seasons of 12-13 episodes is different from a 24 episode season with a bloody great hole of more than half a year between the first and second 12 eps?), I won't even care what happened to--
Well, some of you might not have watched it yet, so I won't spoil the last 2008 episode for you. -koff-ApolloisaCylon-koff- I will say it has not, as yet, gone where I thought it was going to go--not that it ever has, really, which is one of the great things about the show. But with a limited number of episodes left and a mystery to solve, I'm wondering if it's actually going to end the show's entire run where I thought they were going to go...well, with this episode, leaving the potential for a spin-off sequel (as opposed to the tentative prequel they're working on) series or movie.
Then again, there is still half a season to go--a full season, if you're a show like Dexter. So maybe we'll still get the conflict I've been anticipating ever since Dean Stockwell yelled the immortal words, "Say what?" Now we just need one of the Cylons to say "Take me to your leader." and I can call it a life.
Actually, someone on the show's already done that, haven't they? Baltar...?
Anyway. I will now probably turn my attention to Mad Men, which everyone seems to think is the bee's knees, but which didn't do a whole lot for me in the episode I actually caught.
And then, someday, I'll actually do some work of my own.
A | | Thursday, June 12th, 2008 | | 1:15 pm |
Stuff and Nonsense, 12/06/2008 Scott O. Brown offers his choice for the greatest sentence ever . I still maintain the greatest sentence ever is something like "Here's your five million Canadian dollars, Andrew Foley; no, seriously, I'm not joking, this is real money and it's all yours, please take it." Over at Nick Johnson's blog, Nick Soup, he's been showing off some designs from the upcoming second episode of THE HOLIDAY MEN. Steven Grant talks about small press publisher warning signs creators should be wary of. A must-read for anyone thinking of getting into the business. Potential McCain Vice President Candidate Bobby Jindal apparently experimented with spontaneous exorcism in college. Fill in your own "An exorcist is just what the White House needs right now" joke here. *** MATURE SUBJECT MATTER Two e-mail subject headers that have shown up in the ol' inbox over the last few days that amuse and frighten me: "Visual Gifts to Stimulate Your Rods and Cones!" - which somehow sounds much naughtier than it actually is, and "I hate comics with my penis!" - which doesn't. A |
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