This is LITERALLY the Opportunity I’ve Waited Most of My Life For

My very first comic was Superman v.2 #50, “Krisis of the Krimson Kryptonite Pt. 4” I was nine when I found it in the storage area underneath the basement steps, and I have no idea where it came from. The back cover was gone, the front cover was ripped, and it changed my life forever. It pretty much defined my relationship  with Superman, who/what I expect to Superman to be, and created in me the first job aspiration of my life that would last longer than a week and didn’t involve dinosaurs.

Now that chance has finally come.

I’ve wanted to work in comics since that day, with varying degrees of commitment as the years went by, but always comics. (I’ve had one other dream job in my lifetime, working in the movies, and that’s all thanks to the behind the scenes featurettes of the extended DVD edition of the ‘Fellowship of the Rings,’ but we can talk about that later.) And not just comics, DC comics. I’ve dabbled with other companies, Image when I was a teenager because it was the mid-90s and who didn’t love Image back in the day? Marvel for eleven issues of the Ron Lim-drawn Silver Surfer. (Lim was my first ever favorite artist.) But DC has always been the dream.

There was a group of us semi-aspiring amateurs once. Talking about how great we were and all the wonders we would accomplish if only given the chance. Every time in one of those conversations, someone threw out the question, ‘If you could work on anything, what would it be?’ Pfft, that’s an easy one, my answer hasn’t changed since ’91, Superman. Then this other guy in the group, is all like ‘Wouldn’t you want to work on your own book?’ I almost, almost changed my answer, but didn’t. At the time, I was still updating ‘Buster’ regularly, I’d already started writing down some initial ideas and doodles for Merunga, there were about five or six other projects taking up space in my head, I was already working on my own stuff, which was fun, but what I wanted, was Superman. I don’t bother trying to defend or rationalize it anymore, it’s just the job I want more than any other job. To some extent, I think of Merunga as an extended application for that job. At some point I’ll take a collected edition into a con, wave it over my head, and beg for a job.

So I spent most of last week thumb-nailing and re thumb-nailing pages to draw up, and I spent most of this morning pecking away at a keyboard hoping a personal statement would appear. Six-hours on Saturday disappeared into this perspective nightmare:

pg01

Now my old man bum shoulder hurts and I’m not sleeping well because I’m giddy with excitement. It’s not a terrible place to find myself in.

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I’ve Fallen into a Rat Hole and I Can’t Get Out

If I used my DeviantArt account more I would have put this there, I might anyways, but I wanted to share it quickly and with a larger audience than the zero people following me on DA.without pencils

I do these kinds of things when I’m trying to avoid doing other kinds of things. It’s for a secondary project I’d like to get off the ground someday. It’d be a daily strip like Merunga used to be, but it would be better suited to a daily strip, something Merunga never was. All told, this is probably four hours into it, and holy cow it felt like forever. Plus I’m pretty sure I did a lot of it wrong. Not in that it looks wrong I guess, but if I needed to change something here or there, it would be a colossal nightmare instead of a simple fix.

I’ve got the first week and a half inked, and ready to be scanned an lettered, and I’ve got the rest of the month penciled and ready to be inked. When I do start running it, it’ll be at the bottom of the page here, it’ll get it’s own home much later.

So for now, sneak peek, the cover for an adventure of the Phantom Ghost, titled, Tower of Ghosts, starrring more ghosts.

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I Need a Better System

While uploading the current page I realized I’d let the archives slip. I hadn’t added this story to the list, or the last story, which ran it’s entire length without a page about it. Not that not having a page really matters. I’m not 100% happy with my archive system, and I never have been, I’m just not sure what I want to replace it with. I was thinking you could go to an overall archive page and just look at a list of story titles, without all the individual page titles, and then click on the link to go to a page where you could find all the individual pages, in addition to relevant cast members for that story, and that’s almost the setup I have, but not quite.

Frankly, I’m not sure what I want out of the archives pages, or how useful/relevant they are. In all likelihood they’ll fester along as they are until whatever inevitable change comes over them will be a major undertaking instead of a minor adjustment.

I’m going through a similar issue with my old strips. I forgot to save high-quality versions of past strips when preparing them for the web, and now here I am trying to put together collected editions. If you ever ask yourself the question, if I put it off until tomorrow, how much more work could it be..? The answer is always too damn much.

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Too Much Bad TV

I remember distinctly when I purchased what would be my first copy of ‘Sword of Shannara.’ I was in 6th grade, it was a paperback at Wal-Mart, the cover was the Hildebrant brothers, and I had not yet read Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit, thought I had seen the Hobbit cartoon. I wasn’t sure what to expect, my only fantasy experiences at that time were ‘A Wizard of Earthsea‘ and the first two books of Brian Jacques’ Redwall series. I still don’t know what to expect, I must have read the first forty pages six or seven time, eventually lost/threw away/sold the book, I’m not sure. Waited a few years, bought another copy that I never read, and then I think I gave that copy to a brother, or it was also lost/thrown away/ or sold. Clearly it was a very memorable experience for me. The Earthsea series in the meanwhile I’ve read through at least four times, and I made it through 15 Redwall books before I feel that I aged out of that particular genre.

But now comes this series on MTV of all places. I’m just old enough to know that MTV used to show music videos. At the time I was a child, I recall watching MTV but mostly VH1 at my aunt’s house and there being about an hour of music videos everyday then non-stop showings of ‘I Love the (insert decade here)’ show. I also remember being bored at my aunt’s house a lot, which was in no way a fault of my aunt’s.

So anyway, this ‘Shannara Chronicles‘ show on MTV, I like it, but I like a lot of bad TV. I can’t tell objectively if it is good or not, but it will most likely work it’s way into my very tight TV watching schedule. It isn’t anything unexpected, stupidly good-looking young adults doing stupid things and trying to take their clothes off alot, that’s not really the part I like. Manu Bennett, he’s always fun to watch, actors trying to rattle off long names with an odd distribution of vowels and consonants as if they talk like that every day, that’s fun, but none of it is particularly exciting, I don’t love the show, but I’ll watch it.

There are some shows that I do love, but stopped watching. I only kept up with ‘Vikings‘ for a season, ‘Hell on Wheels‘ lapsed after two seasons and 3 episodes. ‘Ripper Street‘ and ‘Copper‘ also only for a season, and I did really enjoy those, way more than Shannara. So why am I drawn to terrible television? I know I said I can’t tell, but I assume the shows I like are all terrible, my wife tells me so.

Maybe because it’s easy to watch? I got quite a bit of drawing done while watching ‘Shannara,’ I get almost none done while watching ‘The Expanse.’ Who knows? But two years ago there was only one must watch show on my list, and even though it was essentially a Batman rip-off I had to watch ‘Arrow‘ because it was DC. Now I’m up to four of DC’s seven series, ‘The Expanse,’ ‘Elementary,’ and this damn Shannara show. Not to mention binge watching ‘Murder She Wrote,’ and ‘Supernatural‘ at night with the wife. Where has my life gone wrong that I’m watching this much television?

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Syfy is Making SciFi Again!

The Expanse is the show I wanted Ascension to be, actual for real fake spaceships. I love spaceships. They are probably my first favorite thing in the world. I was bitterly disappointed by Ascension, Tricia Helfer not withstanding. As soon as they had their first take on Earth, I knew what the gimmick was, and I no longer cared about what happened. There might have been great characters there, but there wasn’t the character I was interested in, the spaceship.

This show has spaceships, and interesting characters, it’s a win-win. I’m sure we’ll get our usual helping of tropes and stereotypes, but right now it still has that breath of fresh air about it, where ti could go anywhere, and I’ll just have to hope it does.

On the other hand, the new Star Trek trailer came out the other day and that was a bitter blow.

My guess is that the Enterprise is dead in the first 20 minutes, the crew ends up on the planet, possibly with the remnants of other crews from other swarmed vessels, whoever survives wins, and Kirk makes out with the Stargate: Atlantis extra. I think I’m going to hate this movie, and only partly because the spaceship gets blown up.

I feel the same way about spaceships as I do about superhero costumes, if they’re not in the movie when they should be, then I don’t care. It’s why I’m not a fan of origin films, they usually only wear the costume in the final boss fight, and that’s not what I want to see. I want them in the costume all the time. It’s one of the things I liked about Man of Steel. Once he put on the outfit, he didn’t take it off again for maybe two or three scenes.

The other thing I already hate about ST:Beyond is that base on my impression of it’s story, it would be fine as a boring episode of Enterprise of Voyager, but I don’t want to watch two hours of it. I will, but I’ll hate myself for it.

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