Update: The Crudest Month

This last week's been a wash as I went from getting a steroid shot for my carpal tunnel to dinner with my family on Sunday and then coming down with what I assume was the flu. Built up a small mountain of tissues and throat lozenge wrappers by my bedside over the past few days, lost a lot of sleep but got a lot of reading done while going through the chills, coughing and insomnia. I shake very badly when I get a flu or fever, uncontrollably, like I'm getting tased. It's kind of wild, sometimes my teeth actually chatter and I make stuttering sounds like in a cartoon. I can say Winky the Pirate Cat is not a fan of this when she tries to lay down in bed beside me.

Anyway, I'm up and about and am sorry I've been away from posting so much this month. Between my carpal tunnel flaring up, getting sick, a number of unexpected business zoom meetings and some equally unexpected job offers, August didn't go as planned. I've been overwhelmed to the point where I turned down work for the first time in ages, two cover gigs I could see I wouldn't be able to fit into my screwed-up schedule (I also left the house a few more times than I usually do, saw the Descendents, went to an excellent dinner at a friend's house, had a family dinner when my parents were in town. And I saw friends and family at my signing. Felt like a human being!). Most of the work I managed to get done was "invisible" stuff, EC script revisions and dealing with some problems that cropped up in the production of "Necronomicomicon". And I pitched a new story to try to keep that going.

And the concrete wall collapse didn't help any.

I hope to return to more regular posting asap. Before I got sick I scanned some art to post, made PDFs of some art to post as prints, and scanned some World's Funnest pages (Jay Stephens' Super Friends segment) for a new retrospective post. I'll try to get those rolling soon. I'll be posting the "Red Blend" script next month for the PDF tiers.

I also hope to be posting two very nifty updates in September. It looks like a few things are finally coming together and I'm looking forward to some announcements being made.

I failed at getting much drawing done in August, and need to make good on my commissions and a pitch drawing for a project that should have been done earlier in the month. This was a bad month for income, as well, but it's not an emergency and hopefully September will play out very differently. I got asked to pitch something to an anthology, literally one page, probably just a script, but it pays, so maybe that'll kick off things nicely.

As always, a lot of stuff's floating around that I can't talk about in any detail. Like, three non-comics things. Of course, these are also the things that never actually come to anything, but they do suck up time while they go from "Hey, we love your work and we were wondering if--" to "Sorry, wishing you the best in your future endeavors". And sometimes you get ghosted after they contact you.

Speaking of which, I've had no success in getting anywhere with the convention organization that invited me to do one of their shows. So I guess i'm not traveling later this year after all. There's nothing quite like being asked to do something and then being ghosted. It happens more often than you'd think.

I am set to do another signing at JHU Comics in November for Catacomb of Torment #5.

Oh, nearly forgot: I'm briefly interviewed in Back Issue #162 about Mad Dog, a TV tie-in series (to a Bob Newhart sitcom) I worked on for Marvel back in the 90s. I'm only quoted a few times in a fairly long article, I'm assuming because I had mostly negative things to say about the experience. I mostly disparage my own writing, to be fair. But it was a gig I didn't want to do, it was a split book, with a fun and funny "Silver Age" story and a serious "Modern Age" story. When editor Fabian Nicieza asked me for it I asked if I could write the funny half, but he asked me to take on the serious arc. I did it because I felt I owed Fabian for his giving me such a great break on the Bill and Ted series, as well as Epic Lite (I don't remember if Fight-Man happened or was happening at that time, too lazy to look it up and try to figure it out). Anyway, I found it difficult to create a character, world and satisfying storyline with pretty much only the name "Mad Dog" and 66 pages to play with. And having to play it seriously didn't appeal to me. In hindsight, I should have turned the job down. Going in to a project without enthusiasm is a bad sign. There has to be at least soemthing to hook you, something to latch onto that you can build off of. I wasn't a Bill and Ted fan, I hadn't seen the first movie when I started the sequel adaptation -- but there were aspects of the story and the characters I could get my teeth into. And it was supposed to be funny, so that's always...well, fun (usually). Anyway, I honestly tried, but like I said in the interviews, I did a rotten job. The plot mechanics were sound -- generic and goofy, but things happened in order and made sense and were resolved in the end. But I blew it in every other way, sloppy character work, terrible and terribly cliched dialogue, dull action and fights. Just stiff, generic junk on my part. The scary thing is I was trying! But it was awful. In the interview Fabian says I asked to do the serious half to try my hand at it, which is not at all how I remembered it. I wanted to do the funny story but he asked me to do the other half. Beyond all that, and being honest about my opinion of my work on the comic, I do wish that they included my positive comments in the interview about the funny half of the book, which was done by Ty Templeton, and was worth the cover price by itself. Wonderfully drawn and funny, which is typical for Ty Templeton. It made my work on the series even more embarrassing to see in print.

Okay, the hand's telling me to stop typing. Thanks so much for being here. I'll be back with more stuff soon. Maybe tomorrow. Take care, everyone.