by

Wine-Book Wednesdays: Steve Conley

Steve Conley is another friend from the area. He’s done all sorts of great science-fiction comics like Astounding Space Thrills, Star Trek: Year Four, and Michael Chabon’s The Escapist, and his current big project is the political comic strip Socks and Barney. He also co-founded Comicon.com, and ran SPX for three years. On the last one, I told him not to do that, but he didn’t listen.

One of the things I liked about Astounding Space Thrills was the larger-than-life, crazy pulp-styled science-fiction ideas. So when the head of a galactic corporation has extra brains implanted into his head (the rest of the board of directors, don’t you know), well… it just works perfectly.

Of course, it’s normally brain fluid, not merlot in the tank.

by

Wine-Book Wednesdays: Alex Robinson

I’ve been reading Alex Robinson‘s comics since, gosh, when did Box Office Poison first begin?

His comics have a great mix of humor and drama; Box Office Poison juggled its cast of characters adeptly over the years, and his graphic novel Tricked showed that he could boil a story down well into a single, non-serialized unit. When Alex drew this for me at Mid-Ohio-Con in 2001, I was standing off to one side talking with his wife Kristen Siebecker about how one would put on a comic book convention.

The next summer, she did just that with the MoCCA Arts Festival in New York City. (Which was a real joy to attend, I might add, and you’ll eventually see some sketches from that show here as well.) And Alex? Well, not only is this a great drawing, but his exaggerated self-portrait still makes me chuckle.

by

Wine-Book Wednesdays: Tom Mandrake

Tom Mandrake is probably best known for his run on The Spectre, which was nothing short of gorgeous. (The fact that almost all of the entire 62-issue series is uncollected is a royal shame.) When I met him at Mid-Ohio-Con in 2001, he was working on a mini-series called Creeps, which could probably best be described as if the X-Men really were hideous mutants.

This is one of the characters from that book—Booger was, needless to say, one of the more disgusting characters from it. It’s certainly a much more rough style than one is used to from Mandrake, but you get the idea.

by

Thanks, Amtrak

You know something? I like the idea of trains. I think mass-transit in general is fantastic.

So when I decided that after the business portion of my trip this week is over I would head down to just outside of Jacksonville to visit my parents and grandfather, I figured I would just take the train there from Savannah. That way I didn’t have to rent a car and pay a ludicrous amount of money for the option of dropping the car off in a different city than I picked it up in. (It’s actually easier to fly in and out of Jacksonville than Savannah, so I’ll go home via Jacksonville.)

In my fevered imagination, I pictured getting a train sometime after breakfast, or even early afternoon. Simple, right? Well, actually there are only two trains that go from Savannah to Jacksonville, even though it’s a main line that connects the two. And the later of the two trains leaves Savannah at 6:50am.

In order to take the train to Jacksonville, this would mean taking the rental car back to the airport the night before, then taking a cab back to my hotel, then another one to the train station at the crack of dawn. And if I missed the train, I would be out of luck because the next train wouldn’t come through until the next day.

And Amtrak wonders why no one wants to use them. I guess I’m spoiled by there being regular trains up the northeast corridor from DC to NYC and beyond. But it seems like a nasty little Catch-22, where Amtrak says, “No one’s riding us! We better cut back!” when the solution seems to be to not cut back and bite the bullet for a while until people catch on that heyyyy, there are more trains running, we don’t have to set our alarms for 4:45am in order to take the train somewhere.

Oh well. Guess I better remember to bring some driving music with me.

(In a tangental annoyance, the charger for my Nintendo DS seems to have vanished, and I found some comments that seems to indicate that the DS Lite charger does not work with the original DS. So, it seems my plans to play some Phoenix Wright on this trip are all for naught since everywhere locally seems to just have extra chargers for the DS Lite in stock. I did order an original DS charger online, though, so hopefully it will arrive here by next Tuesday before I head back out of town again. Yay.)

by

It’s Already February?

Yeah, I know. Time flies and such similar phrases. But I can honestly say that I feel like I haven’t come up for air all year, and I don’t have much to show for it. Sure, earlier in January was when we saw Tamburlaine, and my friend Rob had hosted the videogame bonanza a few weekends ago, which was a lot of fun.

But since then? It’s funny because it’s hard to articulate what I’ve done but every day has just felt really busy. Some time was spent getting the reviews up and running again, and a bunch of time was spent working on different projects for the day job. (Plus one Sunday working at Big Planet, which was enjoyable but busy busy busy in terms of selling things all day long.)

This afternoon my plan was to go running, but after errands were finally finished, I had about enough energy left to… well, not run. (Stomach problems finally sealed the day on not going running after all. Bah.) So instead it was more sorting through things, some writing, more errands, getting ready for a business trip that I leave for shortly, plus knowing as soon as I get back from that trip I’ll be turning back around and heading out on another trip two days later.

On the bright side, at least one thing is in order—reviews are now “banked” all the way through February 18th, when I get back. So that’s a nice feeling to have all of that taken care of in advance, and looking at the display in WordPress actually let me give off a little sigh of relief. But while my boss very kindly gave us all Monday off as a “mental health day” (I think she knows how much we all need it!), I’m going to probably end up going in for at least part of the day so I can box up all the materials for the pilot test that I have to go run elsewhere in the country, and get that sent off. I don’t want to leave it until Tuesday because I suspect it’s going to be a busy day as is.

(Really, I wanted to get that trip to the office taken care of today… but it’s now 9:40pm and I’m just now coming up for air. Yeesh.)

Once all of this is over, hopefully a social life will start getting rebuilt. I had dinner with Butch on Thursday night and the last time I actually saw him was in November. And sadly I think that’s not even the worst “how long has it been since you’ve seen…?” but I shudder to think what the longest time gap is. Clearly, I need to win that lottery soon so I can finally get that life of leisure.

On the bright side, at least I’ve never been a football fan, so that means I didn’t have to worry about missing the Superbowl. (I’m ambivalent about it, but glad that it wasn’t a priority because it certainly wouldn’t have happened at this end today.)

Ok! A tiny bit of cleaning, maybe a tiny bit of television, but I think the real order of business right now? Just go to bed, and deal with everything else that needs to be taken care of tomorrow.

by

Wine-Book Wednesdays: David Mack

I think most people in comics know David Mack for one of two things. Either they’ve never met him, in which case it’s his gorgeous painted art in books like Kabuki and Daredevil. Or, they have met him, in which case it’s the urge to try and bounce quarters off of his chest, which is forever encased in a form-fitting black t-shirt.

(What can I say? Really buff, attractive comic artists are rare. Ones as nice as David Mack, doubly so. And seriously, the number of men and women of all sexualities who have commented on his physique is pretty darn high.)

At any rate, David Mack’s Kabuki is his life work, and his paintings and mixed-media creations are jaw-dropping in their grace and minute details. And generally speaking, when you get a sketch from him it’s of one of the characters from Kabuki. So with that in mind, I remember being amazed that he went in an entirely different direction for the wine book. (Friends later commented that they’d never seen a non-Kabuki sketch from David Mack. I suspect these days he probably also draws his creation Echo from Daredevil, but you never know.) And while I love all of the pieces of art in my book, I will give the rare comment here that this is truly one of my favorites.

by

Wine-Book Wednesdays: Pam Bliss

I don’t think one could come up with a definitive list of “the friendliest people in comics” because it would be fairly huge (it’s an industry full of great people), but if one tried, Pam Bliss would absolutely be somewhere near the top.

Pam Bliss’s mini-comics are usually full of children, dogs, and just about anyone else who’s full of joy. (I shudder to think of even the idea of a grim-and-gritty Pam Bliss comic. It just couldn’t happen!) At conventions, she’ll offer to draw a picture of your dog if you provide a picture, which just sums her up right there, really.

So with that in mind, I shouldn’t have been surprised that her contribution included a dog. But she was absolutely right in selecting just what the good things in life are, here.

by

(Re-)Finding My Inner Creative Side

One of the things I’ve really been trying to do this year is back into a rhythm of creating things. My reviews for Read About Comics the past couple of years have been infrequent at best, and it’s something with which I need to either get back up and going, or throw in the towel and call it a day. And after completing my 365pictures project in November, I’ve taken almost no photos since then.

But on the bright side, in mid-January I finally sat down and put my nose to the grindstone. I had some legitimate reasons a few years ago for the writing to have stopped, but now they’re just excuses. So my new attack was to write something, then throw out most later if you have to, but do it. And it’s worked pretty well. I’m a few weeks back into writing reviews regularly, and even better is that I’m trying to stay ahead of the game, keeping reviews “banked” one or two weeks ahead of schedule. So that way I have a little bit more breathing room if something does come up, and I don’t lose my momentum.

But looking at photography online the last day or two, I think I also really need to get back into the habit of taking the camera out again. I want to be able to take pictures that are as beautiful as this song by Patty Griffin. (Ignore strange fan visuals, just listen to the song.) It’s funny, there’s something about this song that just makes me think, “I need to craft photos that look like this sounds.” Does that make sense?

My big excuse there has been wanting a new camera, and while it’s tempting to use the (still theoretical) bribe from the government economic stimulus check to buy the SLR I’ve been looking at, it’s not terribly responsible. One thing I have been doing lately is keeping all the money from eBayed books and DVDs off to one side, with the idea being that it will be my vacation money to spend next month. So I think once that’s over, I’ll use the allure of a new camera to stay strong on getting rid of all the books that I really don’t want, and put the money there towards a camera.

(And hey, I just got paid to use one of my photos in a brochure in the UK. It’s not for a big company, and it’s not a huge payment, but it’s money! That was a nice surprise. And something else to focus on as incentive.)

Maybe in six months I can even start adding fiction-writing back onto the table, but for now, one step at a time.