Back in the Saddle

Hey, gang...yeah, it's been a while, and yeah, I've got my pants on. Anyway, if you want to know how I spent at least 45 minutes of my summer vacation, click here.

More later. Got stuff to say.

Out of the Office: Update

I put on pants today.

For those of you taking part in the pool...

Out of the Office

Hey, gang. Sorry it's been a little scarce as of late. I'm on vay-fucking-cation. Yeah, baby...off for the whole week. Not doing a goddamned thing with it, either. Some days, the sum total of my ambition is pants.

Oh, and introducing the wife to Battlestar Galactica. Which has been fraktastic. That's what summer is for, at least for guys like me, who don't give two shits about the beach and read enough for my job that doing it on vacation isn't a "treat." No, summer is for boxed sets...novels for the lazy who don't want sand in their cracks.

So, y'all be good, and I'll check in on yous later.

Report from the Metro Beat

So, I saw this movie the other day. I liked it, but didn't love it. It has moments of real grandeur and sweep and emotion, even though it plods a bit in places and ends 30 minutes before the last reel is up. And it's very, some would say slavishly, beholden to the movies that came before it—sometimes that's cool and nostalgic, and sometimes that smacks of a lack of inspiration.

But the thing that was rolling through my mind as I left the theater was, "Margot Kidder really was something special."

I Wish I Was Taller

Not by a lot, mind you...but a few inches wouldn't be bad. Then again, I'm sure everyone who isn't tall enough to play pro ball wouldn't mind a little boost. But I've got no control over that. Isn't in the cards--though I will never forget my grandmother telling be to just go over to the jungle gym and hang from a high bar for a bit. This was the same grandmother who tried to tie one end of a string to my loose tooth and the other end to a door...and then slam that door. Not much for letting things take their own course, my grandma.

As for things I do have control over...I wish I could draw. Always have. When I was a kid, I thought I could. I'd draw dinosaurs and lightsabers and birds of prey and the Flying Pheonix from G-Force (or Battle of the Planets, depending on what shitty local TV station it was on). When I got older, I would take my favorite comic panels and blow them up to fill a huge piece of oaktag paper and make my own Wolverine posters. And I thought I was halfway decent at it, until I met people who really knew what they were doing, like my friend Roger.

Roger could just draw, in a way that I couldn't. He went to the School of Visual Arts in NYC for advertising design. He hated it. He wanted to be a screenwriter, and put his ad portfolio away, even though he could've made a perfectly plummy life for himself as an art director. I always respected him for that, but at the same time I always envied the fact that he could sit down with a pencil and paper and make something cool.

But I've never wanted to be able to draw as much as I do now that I'm "working" in comics. Because for as much as we're in an writer-ascendant phase in comics, it's still a writer-artist's medium. Comics can be a collaborative medium...but it doesn't have to be. In no other form of visual mass media can a piece of work be the product of one person and not suffer for it. (Hell, books are the only mass media period you can do by yourself. Guitar- or piano-based singer-songwriters need not apply. Everything sounds better with drums.)

The potential for one-man-bandness in comics is somewhat unique...and while I'm completely digging seeing the wonders that a good artist can do with our words, I can't help but think that it wasn't quite meant to be this way. One man (or woman) with an idea and the skill to realize that idea: there's something primal about that and some of the great artists--in the larger, artiste sense--did it that way. Eisner, Miller, Crumb, Otomo. (Of course, the list of ground-quaking writers or artists is just as long, but you get my point.)

So, I wish I could draw...just to know what it's like not to have to fear nuance getting lost in translation, or power drained by signal degradation. Plus, artists get the chicks.

Mea Culpa

Sorry for the lack of real posts, but it's gotten a little crazy ovah heah. Many of the things that had been in the hopper are hopping right out and turning into real honest-to-goodness opportunities. The manager has asked me to take another look at Hero Unlimited, with an eye towards two things: 1) Freshening it up for, perhaps, another go on the spec circuit and 2) maybe turning it into a TV pilot—which can be done, but would require telling a totally different story (luckily, I already know what it is) with the same characters.

Bad Medicine, the other TV pilot that Adam and I finished last month, has hooked both his agent and my manager, and things may heat up on that front later in the summer.

Then the comic book stuff: Wildstorm wants to move forward on a 5-issue limited series that we pitched them in February and there may be a kernel of interest on some Batman ideas.

I'm thinking about a children's book—either a graphic novel or an honest-to-goodness illustrations-and-text picture book. A story I've been kicking around in my head about autism.

And then, finally, the screenplay that Adam and I have been intermittently working on for the last eight months, which, sadly, ends up taking the back seat to whatever is the most time-urgent. (For most of last year, that was Monster Attack Network, then it was regular old day-job stuff, then Bad Medicine, all on top of our respective parental/husbandly duties.)

Oh, and suddenly there's an animation window opening up that we need to figure out how to take advantage of.

And the Vertigo pitches we need to work up...

And, eventually, sleep.