I submitted another color piece to Epilogue.net last night. Still going through approval stages this morning so I don’t want to write about it until I’m sure there’s something to link to.

Nizzibet and I will be taking next week as a second honeymoon. Not that we’re doing much of anything. We’re certainly not going anywhere, no budget for that. We’re going to hang out, catch matinees, get started working on the 2004 calendar and generally bask in each other’s company.

My plate is full projectwise. Always seems to be –

I finished the art for Chapter Three of Wild Nights in Oz and just need a script from Lovesettlement to get started on Chapter Four.

I’m lagging on art for Mandate of Heaven. Entirely my fault there.

I’ll be getting started on art for The Black Seal #3 shortly. Quickly followed by #4, the soon to be infamous Vietnam issue.

I finally started inking Arachne. I’d been intending to do the work in the computer but after finishing Wild Nights I realized that it will be faster and better looking to do it the old fashioned way.

I’ve blocked out the first chapter of Finnegan’s Brink. This is a new rendition of the graphic novel that Nizzibet and I started on back in the nineties. Like Wild Nights, I’m not worried about where we’ll publish it. Maybe we’ll put it on the web, maybe we’ll do mini-comics, maybe we’ll find a publisher. It’s going to take a few years to get it done so the emphasis right now will be on doing the work not on finding an audience.

There are also about a half a dozen projects that I’m waffling on whether I can get them done or if I need to just go ahead and say no to. I hate saying no to people. I keep hoping that somehow I’ll find the time or energy to devote to those “extra” projects.

And at the background of it all is Sentient 39. Another story all by itself.

B-Movie Monster Re-imagination Project

Doesn’t that just sound important and significant and hollywood dumb? I’m creating new designs for critters from the b-movies of yesteryear. Most of the costumes for the monsters in b-movies were designed and put together by people whose main concern was budget and speed rather than scientific plausibility. I’ve been playing around in my sketchbook, trying to make these beasts look more plausible while still retaining the basic ideas behind their original designs.

Between having a gallery up at Epilogue.net and TwoM having given me a new set of colored pencils I thought I’d do some more elaborate drawings. I can’t just post my sketches on Epilogue since one of their requirements for acceptance is that the pieces have some sort of background in them.

Here is my version of The Thing From Another World. My reworking here was fairly easy. The original monster looks a lot like the Universal Frankenstein monster and it’s supposed to be a kind of ambulatory plant. The biggest thing I had to think about was why a plant would wear clothes. And what would they be made of?

Alien spider silk. With the spiders still in residence. They even repair the outfit when it tears – take a look at the group working on The Thing’s right arm.

My gallery at Epilogue.net continues to grow. They’ve rejected a few of my pieces for reasons that make little sense to me. I think some of the pieces they’ve accepted are weaker than some of the ones they’ve rejected. And the link to the color version of “In the Woods” (February in the 2003 calendar for those of you who have that) remains broken.

Still, it is a free service and it does give me a place to send anyone who needs a sample of my art so my complaints are minor compared to my appreciation for the site’s existence.

I’ve set myself up with a gallery over at Epilogue.net. The site is set up with editors so only the “best looking” stuff gets published. I’m not quite clear how that works. I think they’ve already rejected one of my pieces, maybe two. They took the half naked zombie and rejected the 3rd Mi-Go? Whatever. At the moment I’m not picky. They’re free and easy to post to.

I’d say that having my work up on the net would force me to draw more but this site was intended to force me to write more and I think we can all see how well that’s worked. Heh.

http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/database/art/list.pl?gallery=6664

Happy Birthday to LittleM! Nizzibet, Jaydogg and TwoM were taking her to a petting zoo this morning.

This photo is a fake. So is this one. Why? Because if you’re sophisticated enough to take pictures of you shooting a real yeti then you’re the sort to tell the world about it. You’re not going to post it on some site somewhere hoping some internet geek will run across it.

And no, JERSEYdevilsCOUSIN, whoever faked this wasn’t faking a sasquatch being shot. It’s supposed to be a yeti. Those aren’t deer or elk. Those are some kind of goat or sheep or antelope. Not the sort of critters that sasquatch see much of.

Yeah, yeah. It’s all in fun.

The great thing about porch furniture is that you can sit on your porch. I know that seems obvious but I kind of forgot about it when we didn’t have it. Paliki is still getting more use out it than we are. There have been nights when I open the door to let her in before I head to bed and she ignores me. She’s got a nice comfy chair. She’s got fresh air. Why should she come inside?

I’d still prefer a couch out there. Except for work I prefer sitting on couches than in chairs. Couches are for lounging. They are for stretching out and kicking back. They are for cramming bunches of people together in big monkey piles. Jaydogg nixed the idea of keeping a couch on the porch though. I believe he thought it was tacky.

I sat on the porch this morning drinking coffee. Cold leftover coffee. Skook joined me (he just sit on the porch itself, his butt is too wide for the furniture) and we sat watching the dogwalkers going by. I’m always amazed by the number of dogs in the neighborhood. It’s rare to walk anywhere without running into someone and their dog.

More evidence that I’m not a dog person – I don’t feel a need to say hello to every dog I pass. I find a lot of them amusing and smile at their human companions but that’s about the extent of the greeting. I don’t pass a cat without requesting an interaction.

Skook and I made a game out of guessing when the dogs would increase their pace. They know Skook is on the porch and want to get by as quickly as possible. Most of them start really pulling their leash when they hit Dick’s property. Dick’s place is two houses to the south. I can’t tell when relax again because our view to north is obscured by foliage. Can’t tell when the ones coming from the north start hurrying either. Those heading south do seem to mellow out once they’ve hit The Bearded Guy’s place just past Dick’s.

We watched 7 human/canine combinations go past before I ran out of coffee. Skook’s downstairs now and I’m trying to figure out what to have for breakfast.

I ran across an article this morning that says that our national debt is currently 6.46 trillion dollars. That’s $6,460,000,000,000.00. This is $60,000,000,000.00 over the debt ceiling agreed to during the Clinton administration.

At first I thought this was an overwhelming amount. So I divided the debt by the current estimated population of the United States (290,686,706) and discovered that the national debt could be paid off today for only $22,223.24 per person.

Send in your money today!

On my walk to work this morning I saw a woodpecker sitting on a streetlight. He was hunkered down on the outlying metal extention that houses the lightbulb. Every so often he’d hammer away at the metal beneath his feet. Not the brightest bird apparently.

Marvel Comics is reviving their Epic line. More specifically they are reviving the Epic name. From what I’ve read so far the emphasis of the line will be much different from in Archie Goodwin’s day. What interests me is that they are actively seeking scripts from new writers. Or rather, they will be. They’re not ready for scripts yet. It’s work-for-hire stuff and they seem to be encouraging people to come up with stories set in the “Marvel Universe” and the details aren’t all in yet as to what the exact deals will be.

I mostly lost interest in working in “mainstream” comics a long time ago. It’s not as if I tried really hard to get the work. When I first started out I didn’t think my art would go over well with the superhero publishers. It was crude and unpolished and not at all slick. As I got more skilled I became better able to draw action hero types but I had less interest in doing work-for-hire stuff. Eventually I put doing comics (and drawing much at all) on hold to deal with more tedious life stuff.

In the last year, since the guys at the Black Seal invited me to contribute illustrations to the first issue, I’ve been working a lot of creative projects. Much of that is writing as well as drawing. I’ve always written. I used to write short stories for extra credit in 5th grade. I started a novel back in 7th grade that sits, unfinished, somewhere in a box in my mother’s basement. The novel’s protagonist still shows up in my sketchbooks now and then. I’ve been working with Nizzibet on screenplay and comic script ideas since we got together back in the Nineties.

When my Life Plan was to be a Comic Artist, being a Comic Writer was always part of the plan. I never imagined one job being separate from the other. So when I heard about the Epic opportunity the writer part of my brain automatically kicked into gear. It’s never been dormant for more than a few days. It only took a little bit of digging through my biological memory banks to start thinking of different Marvel Comics characters I’d enjoy writing. It did take some digging. I haven’t read any Marvel Comics in the last few years. I’ve kept vaguely current with Marvel Universe continuity through comics reviews on the internet and by flipping through new comics when I’ve been in a comic store.

Once, I could have told you how many times Spider-man had fought Doctor Octopus, how many times the Kingpin had escaped death, who the Puppet Master’s relatives were – important stuff like that. But it’s been many, many years since Spider-Man #103, the first comic I ever bought and read. I don’t know what issue Spider-Man is currently on. Rough calculations tell me that the series should be nearing its five hundredth issue sometime soon. I don’t know if Doctor Octopus is supposed to be alive or dead. I think Norman Osborn, the original Green Goblin is back (and he died back in Spider-Man #122).

To part of the Marvel comics fan base continuity detail is important. I do understand that. It used to be vitally important to me as well. It’s still important to me but in a more limited way. When a series – of novels, television programs, films or comics, is easily accessible I like it to be internally consistent. If a character gets his right hand chopped off in episode nine I don’t like it when he shows up missing a left hand in episode nineteen. I remember being annoyed by the inconsistency of history in L. Frank Baum’s original fourteen Oz books. I couldn’t understand how Baum kept getting details wrong. Didn’t he reread his own stories? As a Spider-Man fan I loved knowing the history of all the characters and loved watching the soap opera of Peter Parker’s life unfold.

I don’t see any point in trying to catch up on all that history now. There are somewhere near two thousand Spider-Man episodes out there in form of multiple series, mini-series, specials and guest appearance in other characters’ series. Much of that material is out of print, available only as back issues to be purchased at higher than cover price. And that’s just Spider-Man history. There are thousands more episodes of Marvel Universe history published in dozens of other titles and most of it is out of print. Over the last few days I’ve tried researching the history of just a few characters on the internet. What a headache.

The comic book fan in me would still like to play in the Marvel Universe, especially if he could get a paying gig, so I have been playing with ideas for one shots and mini-series. Fortunately, when it comes to wanting to write MU stories, the characters that most interest me are usually villains or oddball heroes that never managed to sustain their own series. The villains can be especially attractive. It’s been said that part of Spider-Man’s appeal was that he lost as much as he won. Maybe. Things certainly went poorly for Mr. Parker much of the time. But compared to any of his rogue’s gallery Spidey was an all-star. The Lizard, for instance, has made seventy-five appearances in various comics. If those were issues of a series that would total more issues than the average comic has before cancellation. And, because he’s a villain, he always loses. But he keeps getting back up to try and conquer the world again. There’s a certain appeal to characters who just refuse to give up.

I don’t know if any of my ideas will make it into script form. If they do I’ll need to know more about what Marvel is offering before I submit. And if I submit it’s a longshot that my story would be accepted. I’m having fun thinking about it. That’s the main thing for now.

Wouldn’t you know it, it’s time for me to head home and the rain comes down. Hopefully it will vent itself before Nizz has to catch her buses. I kind of like the dreary trudge through the wet but I prefer my sweetie to stay warm and dry.