***
*
My family are of a mechanical sort. My maternal grandfather sketched motorcycles in his schoolboy copy of Julius Caesar, and engineered heating and water systems for his summer house that remain the envy of Ragged Island, Maine. My father's ruling passion is vintage cars. There is always at least one pre-war beauty lounging across our garage in a state of undress. (We have the only house in the county that has more square feet devoted to sheltering cars than to sheltering people.)
So when the Ford Motor Company organised a demonstration of the first Aston Martin created under Detroit stewardship, it was only natural that my father and his cronies were invited. The demonstration took place at the Radnor Hunt Club, which is a country club for people who foxhunt. It oozes prestige, and people who care about Debutante Cotillions and The Right Circles care very much indeed about the Radnor Hunt Club. Its clubhouse, stabling, and kennels lie at the edge of the rolling pastureland and large estates of Chester County, just west of Philadelphia's Main Line.
The car aficionados were met on the front lawn of the Club by cheerful, smiling public relations executives of Aston Martin, who led them in pairs like Noah's beasts, each to a new DB7. My father and his friend Fred A--- were shown to their chariot, which my father noted with quiet disappointment was a coupe and - misery! - an automatic. (Our family fervently believes that every time a sportscar is made with an automatic transmission, a fairy dies.)
The parade of Anglo-American dream cars started up, led by a red Jaguar XK120 roadster acting as pace car. They toured the rolling hills and fields of Chester County, on two-lane roads bordered by neat stone walls. The speed was quick enough for mild excitement, and once or twice they even got out of third gear. After a pleasant half-hour excursion, they were led back to the Hunt Club, where lunch was to be served and pressure applied to spread the good word about Aston Martin's new owners.
A PR person bounded up to my father and Fred as they left their car and ambled towards the lunch tent. "Well, what did you think?" he chirped. Dad and Fred looked at each other. "It's a coupe," Fred shrugged. "The transmission is kind of... mushy," Dad added. "Sorry," Fred said.
The PR person leaned in close, conspiratorial. "I know what you mean. Tell you what - lunch won't start for another 20 minutes. Why don't you take that car over there for a spin, just the two of you?" The PR person indicated a convertible, stick-shift DB7. Even better, it was a convertible, stick-shift DB7 in the One True Colour of British Sportscars: racing green, with a tan interior*. Dad and Fred looked at the PR guy like all their Christmases had come at once.
Dad drove first. He motored at reasonable speed until the road turned out of sight of the Hunt Club, and then he put the pedal down. The car roared to happy life, and off they blasted, frightening livestock in nearby pastures. The car was somewhere comfortably in the middle of fifth gear as they came up to a sharp rise in the road. The men grinned at each other, and Dad gunned the engine a little faster.
As they hit the peak of the rise and all four wheels left the ground, Dad realised with sudden, stabbing horror that the road did a sharp 90-degree turn to the left below them. They were sailing through the air, straight for a low stone wall.
Instinctively, Dad wrenched the wheel over to the left. By some miracle of nature and Anglo-American engineering, the car touched down and turned on a half-inch of front wheel tyre, squealing in annoyance but staying on the road. Dad pulled the car over as soon as he could, and looked at Fred. "Uh... you want to drive for a while?"
This is the only recorded instance of my father (the man who lists "the day I realised Ferrari made certain models of car I didn't like" as one of the defining moments of his life) voluntarily surrendering the driver's seat of a convertible sportscar. Fred took the wheel, and drove at a slightly more cautious pace back to a lunch for which they had lost all appetite.
They replaced the car amongst the rest of its flock, and slipped as unobtrusively as possible into the lunch tent. However, as they slunk towards the food queue, they were ambushed by their guardian PR Person. "So?" he asked, radiating enthusiasm like a bad smell. "How was the convertible?"
Dad stared at his penny loafers, muttering pleasantries and edging towards the hors-d'oeuvres.
But not Fred.
Fred looked the PR guy straight in the eye and said in a concerned, solemn voice, "It's got a handling problem."
The PR guy's eyes opened wide. "What?"
Fred reached for a crabstick. "Steering isn't responsive at all when the car's airborne."
*For those not familiar with the True Gospel of Vintage Sportscar Colours, I summarise it here: British sportscars are British Racing Green. Italian sportscars are red, unless they are Bugattis, which are allowed to be blue. German sportscars are silver. Classic French sportscars are French Racing Blue. AC Cobras should be dark metallic blue with two white stripes. Stingrays should be red. Acceptable interior colours are tan, with black and red as secondary choices. Your Miata is not a sportscar.
At the end of every year, the Big Two comics companies attempt to trump each other in announcements for the following year. Often this comprises exclusive signings of high-profile talent. It is easy to lose track of whom has jumped to where, and who has already jumped back.
A Winter's Tale
Come Marvel, Come DC, come Dark Horse et al!
The winter is coming and gone is the fall
The creators are restless and pining to go
And Santa is poorly and we shall have snow!
Come on, Marvel!
Come Bendis, come Millar, come JM Straczynski
A change is the thing , if you're feeling antsy -
Follow Quitely, follow Morrison, it's the Land of the Free
Goodbye to Marvel, sirs, and ho for DC!
Come on, DC!
Ho ho! For the pitches that pass in the night
Hey hey! for the projects the Big Two won't greenlight
For the moon on the crest of the new-fallen snow
And the lustre of Image deals, all in a row
Come on, Image!
Come writer, come artist, December days are cold!
If the thrill is gone and spandex grows old
Then put on the imprint of Tokyopop
And sell your stories in -gasp- a bookshop!
Come on, Tokyopop!
Come DC, come Marvel, come Tokyopop & upstarts!
Grab the top of the talent, climb to the top of the charts!
Your creators are dressed in their last year's loyalty
They'll kiss you goodbye for the first pretty royalty.
Come on, Kandora.
Several people have contacted me about today's Lying In The Gutters article. This is the only comment I will make on the situation: I had a book in development with Marvel. It didn't work out. Next!
Just added some new books to The Annotated Alex.
EB White's Poems & Sketches and One Man's Meat. You want to know how to write short stories? Read EB White. New Englander, New Yorker editor, and long-time favourite writer of the de Campi family. From "Calculating Machine", in Poems & Sketches:
"It is my belief that no writer can improve his work until he discards the dulcet notion that the reader is feebleminded, for writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar... a writer who questions the capacity of the person at the other end of the line is not a writer at all, merely a schemer. The movies long ago decided that a wider communication should be achieved by a deliberate descent to a lower level, and they walked proudly down until they reached the cellar. Now they are groping for the light switch, hoping to find the way out."
Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces. I'm a huge fan of Frazer's Golden Bough and the writers it inspired (Joyce; Eliot), so it's no surprise that I adore the natural inheritor to Frazer's mantle. It's not light going; I manage only about 20 pages at a time. But Campbell is a wonderful writer, and the subject matter is fascinating. It does help if you're a complete geek for mythology, which I most definitely am. Campbell on modern tragedy:
"...the magnitude of an art of tragedy more potent (for us) than the Greek finds realisation: the realistic, intimate and variously interesting tragedy of democracy, where the god is beheld crucified in the catastrophes not of the great houses only but of every common home, every scourged and lacerated face. And there is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed from the womb only to fail."
And on the symbolism of images of Shiva:
"Briefly: the extended right hand holds the drum, the beat of which is the beat of time, time being the first principle of creation; the extended left holds the flame, which is the flame of the destruction of the created world; the second right hand is held in the gesture of 'fear not,' while the second left, pointing to the lifted left foot, is held in a position symbolising 'elephant' (the elephant is the 'breaker of the way through the jungle of the world', i.e. the divine guide); the right foot is planted on the back of the dwarf, the demon 'Non-Knowing,' which signifies the passage of souls from God into matter, but the left is lifted, showing the release of the soul; the left is the foot to which the 'elephant-hand' is pointing and supplies the reason for the assurance, 'Fear not.' The God's head is balanced, serene and still, in the midst of the dynamism of creation and destruction which is symbolised by the rocking arms and the rhythm of the slowly stamping right heel. This means that at the centre all is still. Shiva's right earring is a man's; his left, a woman's; for God includes and is beyond the pairs of opposites. Shiva's facial expression is neither sorrowful nor joyous, but is the visage of the Unmoved Mover, beyond, yet present within, the world’s bliss and pain...
"The dance posture of the God may be visualised as the symbolic syllable AUM, which is the verbal equivalent of the four states of consciousness and their fields of experience. (A: waking consciousness; U: dream consciousness; M: dreamless sleep; the silence around the sacred syllable is the Unmanifest Transcendent). The God is thus within the worshiper as well as without.
"Such a figure illustrates the function and value of a graven image, and shows why long sermons are unnecessary among idol-worshippers. The devotee is permitted to soak in the meaning of the divine symbol in deep silence and in his own good time... in this way, the whole of life is made into a support for meditation. One lives in the midst of a silent sermon all the time."
Thinking about it, probably not a book for the Red States.
I have also been listening to Doug Young's CD, Laurel Mill, which CDBaby sent me for free with my order for Will Hawkins' debut CD. Laurel Mill is acoustic guitar noodling; deeply un-trendy but good for writing. If you like this sort of thing and don't already own John Fahey's Return of the Repressed, go and rectify this dreadful error immediately.
I thought I'd do a little year-end summary of the creator-owned projects I am working on. Most, you know about already, but some you might not. First, SMOKE:
Three 48 page full colour issues, myself on words, Igor Kordey on pictures, Len O'Grady in the corner with the paintbox. Futuristic spy noir; think THE THIRD MAN meets BLADE RUNNER. Coming out starting in May from IDW Publishing.
Next, a three-volume tween mystery manga, KAT & MOUSE, with Federica Manfredi. See sketches here and here. Should get a final yes or no from the publisher by end January. Think an updated Nancy Drew, but way more hardcore and set in a posh New England private school.
The very talented Croatian artist Seb Camagajevac has stepped in to illustrate my FAUST adaptation. His painted work looks like this:
Yes, that's obviously John Constantine (character copyright DC Comics) – this was a spec piece Seb did for Vertigo some time ago. Anyway, FAUST will be six 22-page issues, fully painted and insanely beautiful. Publisher is lined up; we've discussed the important things and are now just tying down scheduling. So, hopefully, signed (or not) by end of January.
And then my European project. I love this project to the embarrassing exclusion of others. On Tuesday night I wrote another five pages of it (pages from the middle of Album 8 – no, I don't know why either) in the mad creative frenzy that always overcomes me on long airplane journeys. It's a sci-fi epic in the grand old style. Imagine the sagas surrounding the Great Houses of the Iliad; Eugene Onegin; and the tales of the Grail Quest – but with spaceships, teenage girls, and much war. I can't really say more than that, but I think we may have an artist for it now. This puts me in the embarrassing position of owing my editor some wine, as we made a bet that whichever of us found the artist for the book would win a bottle of good red wine from the other. Projected at 9 albums, with a possible 3 album prequel if the book sells. Again, I may be able to put up a sneaky sample or two in January.
I've also dug out an old project of mine, MYTHOLOGIES, a 3-issue miniseries about demons rampaging around Miami, to re-write over Christmas. The story always had a flaw in it, and after having let it lie fallow for almost a year I'm able to return to it with a sharp knife and cruel intent. MYTHOLOGIES is a meditation on religion, the nature of creativity, Cocteau's Orpheus, Frazer’s Golden Bough, Roland Barthes and a couple of other pompous artsy things. But you'll only see all that if you squint hard. Mostly, it's demons rampaging through Miami.
So we shall see how the first quarter of 2005 treats me. Some of this will turn into vapour. So it goes. But overall, things are looking good, and busy.
Screenwriting's going well, too. Had an unexpected gap in my schedule this week so filled it doing a script-doctoring job on a short film - a psychological thriller, a genre I seem to have a good touch for. On the feature side, the supernatural thriller film I'm writing for Chocolate Chilli Films will start to take up a lot of my time soon, too. First treatment is in, and they're happy. Second treatment in January, then the heavy lifting begins. They're nice people to work with, and it's been a lot of fun. And at the end of the day, that’s all you can really ask for.
Happy holidays, and see you all in the New Year.
Departures, Heathrow Terminal 4, 17.23 14.12.04:
New York
Eindhoven
Vienna
Paris CdG
Copenhagen
Harare
Zurich
Boston
Nairobi
Lyon
Cape Town
Amsterdam
Brussels
Oslo
Geneva
Dubai
Basle
Rotterdam
Malta
Seoul
Rio de Janeiro
What a wonderful world we live in. Look at the temptations listed on a simple flickity-blue airport departures screen. Look at where we could go. All it would take is to get on one flight, and not another. I am never happier than in airports or train stations or seaports. It's the in-between places I love best. They're where the adventures start.
(I am now in rural New Hampshire, and shall only be sporadically contactable for the rest of 2004. So be patient, as emails to me may take longer than normal to get a response).
"No longer a member of the interim government, I am no longer constrained by a paranoid media team in Whitehall. I am sad to say that the provision of utilities and essential services in Iraq is now even worse than a year ago. They have less electricity and water than before the war, and still the Electricity Minister announced that they had 8,000 MW, when in truth they only have 3,200 MW today which translates into two hours on and six hours off. What angers me is that the project to deliver 32MW through four turbines to the petrochemical plant in Basra (managed by the US administration in Baghdad) has spent US$28m and they have not yet repaired even one turbine. For the same price they could have bought four new units. We also heard that the project to install 250 MW in Nasariya cost US$120m and the turbines blew up within twenty-four hours of commissioning.
"The only project that may come to fruition in southern Iraq is a 40MW project in Al Muthanna in the Japanese sector that was implemented by our team despite massive dis-agreements with Baghdad. Only now the Ministry of Electricity and Ministry of Oil have decided that there may not be gas for the turbine, nor funds to repair the gas pipeline! To add insult to injury, the Japanese aid agency that has taken months to act has decided to install 20 small diesel generators to provide 60MW when there is a shortage of diesel fuel rather than assist in repairing the pipeline. Instead they will run them on heavy fuel oil, which means that within two years the machines will be destroyed. They proudly announced that they will be installed by 2007! Furthermore the massive aid and reconstruction promised by the US administration is officially on hold until the security situation improves and re-allocations are being made from infrastructure to security measures.
"It seems that they have learned nothing. All the Iraqis want are jobs, electricity, water, healthcare and fuel for their cars. In the same time we could have planned, started and commissioned a 1,000MW power station delivering RO water, electricity and much needed jobs. My impression of the UK, US and Japanese governments is at the lowest it has ever been. It is so sad and I think the world is weary of the catalogue of catastrophes that occur daily in Iraq."
- An email from a friend who was part of the British Government's reconstruction efforts in Iraq. He has since gone private.
SEE: POINT BLANK. Often imitated, never equalled. LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF, a documentary by LA resident and film nut Thom Anderson. It is both a metacommentary on filmmaking fashions and on the changing character of the city itself as reflected on the silver screen. You'll walk away from the documentary with a laundry list of films to see, and a strange urge to live in LA. I now want to see the black neo-realist films of the 1970s: BUSHMAMA, KILLER OF SHEEP and BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS. The only people who seem to film LA from anywhere other than the Hollywood Hills are minority filmmakers. I'm also going to have to seek out some of the Hispanic-directed films set in LA: EXILES, AMERICAN ME, and EL NORTE.
LISTEN: Iron Bridge's "Essex Boyz". Real McKenzies' "Mainland". Douglas' "Skip". Soul Coughing's "Idiot Kings". Symposium's "Disappear".
My friend Andrew complained recently that there were not enough comics featuring attractive men. Andrew, these are for you:
The artist is, as ever, Federica Manfredi. The images come from a young teen mystery series I have in development. The main characters are two girls. It's written by a girl, drawn by a girl, edited by a girl, and under consideration by a publisher who is fiendishly good at selling comics to girls in bookstores. This is the future, and it feels great.
I have finally succumbed to peer pressure and am syndicating this blog to LiveJournal. I'm currently doing this by hand, so if any of you know how to make it an automatic feed, talk to me!
Boxing Day, 1799: "'Nothing Exists But Thoughts!' A quote from Davy, off his head on 57 liters of nitrous oxide, in an attempt 'to produce excitement equal in duration and superior in intensity to that occasioned by high intoxication from opium or alcohol.'" Also: An 1863 space probe! Making your own volcano! I never tire of reading about explosives.
More SMOKE pages for you. The problem with having Igor as an artist on my first book is that it completely spoils me for other, lesser artists - you know, the ones that don't draw backgrounds, or fudge the perspective, or don't bother with decent linework...
I'll post two more pages next week. We should have most of Issue 1 coloured and lettered for Angouleme, which will be great.
You have too much stuff. Everyone you're buying Christmas/Hanukkah presents for - they have too much stuff also. These people, however, can do something wonderful with that 20 quid you were going to waste on more crap that will only get thrown away by summer. Give, and help an AIDS patient in America or in Britain.
SYNDICATION: LiveJournal
ARCHIVES: October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007
& FOR HER NEXT TRICKS:
KAT & MOUSE 2
January 2007
ISBN-10: 1598165496
$5.99 / All Ages
AGENT BOO 2
January 2007
ISBN-10: 1598168037
$4.99 / All Ages
***
RECENTLY:
MESSIAH COMPLEX 1
October 2006
ISBN-10: 2731617667
EUR12,90 / Teen
AGENT BOO 1
Sept 2006
ISBN-10: 1598168029
ISBN-13: 9781598168020
$4.99 / All Ages
KAT & MOUSE 1
July 2006
ISBN-10: 1598165488
ISBN-13: 9781598165487
$5.99 / All Ages
SMOKE
December 2005
ISBN-10: 193323928X
$24.99 / Teen
***
Brief Loves:
Music: Berlin Cabaret Songs
Film: Chetyre (4)
Book: Camera Lucida
***
Friends & Conspirators:
Kieron Gillen
Alasdair Watson
Evil Genius
Paul O'Brien
Jonny Nagl
Chad Michael Ward
The Graf von Sarll
Delirium des Anges
Jeremy Love
Frazer Irving
Antony Johnston
Tristan Crane
Laurenn McCubbin
Dan Evans
Farel Dalrymple
Brendan McFeely
Warren Ellis
Dean Haspiel
Brian Wood
Igor Kordey
Kelly Sue DeConnick
Flipron
Tiny Dog Records
Admired Strangers:
Bob Mould
Popbitch
Revenant Records
Grand Central Records
Tom Phillips
The Starn Brothers
The Real Tuesday Weld
Misty's Big Adventure
The Earlies
Menlo Park
Akira the Don
Coop
***
Musical Exotica:
Planet Xtabay
Poison To The Mind