My cover for The Black Seal #4 is posted on the Black Seal’s homepage. You’ll need to scroll down a bit to see it.

Page six of Oz Squad is posted at Steve Ahlquist’s blog. No lettering.

Get your position here

I feel like I’m asleep. Dreaming. I get up, work on art, take the bus to work, play office manager for eight hours, take the bus back home, work on art and go to sleep. There are variations. There’s eating and cooking and taking showers and talking with Nizzibet and occasionally watching a movie and a host of other little activities throughout the day. It’s not that I’m tired (although I often am) it’s that I don’t feel awake. I don’t know that I’ve felt awake for more that a few minutes at time in … Months? Years?

It’s easy to exaggerate. I love a good story. Most stories are, if not a little exaggerated, shorn of the dull minutiae that fills up most of our lives. When telling about my life I try not to exaggerate. That’s probably why I don’t talk about myself much in company. I tend to think I’m a bit dull. My life seems to be mainly the minutiae. And, in the middle of sleep, I seem to be doing some very good art work.

I wonder what it will look like when I wake up?

In the course of our bank’s investigation of the money stolen from my account they discovered that Nizzibet and JayDogg’s business account got ripped for a couple of thousand dollars at the same time mine got hit. I don’t know how the villains did it. I don’t have access to that account. Our bank is doing a changeover in credit card companies so we suspect that someone stole the new credit cards out of the mail somehow. There are a lot of holes in that theory but it’s the only one we’ve got at the moment.

Via the Blog of Oz I’ve just been reminded that May 15th is L. Frank Baum’s birthday. His 150th birthday. That gives me a goal to shoot for for finishing the first issue of Oz Squad. Thirty pages in a little over five months. Doable.

Did a quick clean-up of my links. Every one over there now either leads to a site or page of my work or the work/writings/whatever of someone I know (and would be happy to hang out with). Eventually I’d like to put together some pages of great webcomics or smart political sites or cultural commentary by entertaining writers. But the goal for the next few months is to simplify. This is as good a place to start as any.

Nine hundred seventy-four dollar, fifty-four cents. That’s how much an enterprising thief somewhere in the Philipines managed to such out of my bank account in the last two days. Not somewhere in the Philipines – out of ATMs addressed as Tierra Nueva Muntinlupa and Alfaro, Makati City. Merry Christmas twerp.

That ATM card has been cancelled. I’m grumpy.

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. I do make plans for how I want to do things differently at this time of year but that’s more because I’m no longer planning for Christmas than because I’m making some sort of annual transformation. I figure life is a process of constant change, some purposeful, some by forced necessity, most gradual.

So what am I concentrating on? Mostly returning my attention to projects in progress.

There’s organizing and reducing our possessions. As I believe I’ve mentioned before, the next time we move I’d like it be with just the things we need and want rather than with everything we hadn’t decided to get rid of yet. So that’s clothes, books, videos (surprisingly, we only own DVDs that we intend to watch again), art supplies and general stuff. We have a lot of general stuff.

There’s Oz Squad. I haven’t been doing all those monster illustrations JUST for the fun of it. I’ve been sharpening my Photoshop coloring skills. This time last year I’d have thought that a color Oz Squad was a bad idea. I’d have said that coloring took me too long and that my color skills were too poor to make the job look good anyway. Coloring all those monsters has given me the practice I’ve needed to be confident that I can do Oz Squad pages almost as quickly in color as in black and white. And I’ve spent enough time thinking about color that I can balance it on a page so that it looks good.

Jason Levine, formerly of Comicraft, has signed on as letterer for the project. He’s been patiently reminding me of his interest for the last … year. Got to admire that. Jason, got any websites you’d like to me link to?

There’s Finnegan’s Brink, the graphic novel that Nizzibet is writing, I’m illustrating and she’s coloring. We’re digging the pages out of boxes this weekend and getting back to work on those.

There’s walking. I haven’t done enough of that lately. It’s really more a mental health issue than a physical one. I like to walk. Walking both calms and energizes me. I get some of my best thinking done when I’m walking. If I don’t walk around my life mainly consists of sitting around in boxes – the apartment, the car, the office. Nizzibet’s gotten healthy enough again to walk with me so it’s an activity we can add to our date day.

There’s other stuff. Updating my various webpages. Looking for property to own. Seeing a dentist. One thing at a time.

A writer who’s name I’ve forgotten once recommended that you should begin your story as late as possible. The sooner you get to your meaningful action the better.

I think I would have preferred it if Peter Jackson’s King Kong had hit the theatres with a leaner 2 1/2 version and then followed up with the expected four hour extended version on DVD. Once the gang gets to the island the story is pretty lively. Before that … There are characters that I’d have been happy to have learned more about – later. At the theatre spending time with those characters just slows the story down. Ultimately the important human characters are Denham, Darrow and Discoll. Everyone else is just Kong/dinosaur fodder. I loved the movie. I can tell because different scenes keep replaying in my memory. I keep seeing Kong’s scarred face. I’ll be happy to watch that four hour extended version. I think I’d have preferred to wait for the extra material.