***
*
Only with COMMERCIAL SUICIDE would you get email from an artist saying "...And I may want to re-draw the kosher deli panel to get a better look at the dead prostitute". Also, Jamie McKelvie's wonderfully demented back cover image:
Bad Kitten.
To Ninth Art, one and all, for my write-up of new offerings from Last Gasp, including Crumb's ZAP COMIX #15, THE GANGSTA RAP COLOURING BOOK, and THE JOURNAL OF MODOK STUDIES. I heart Last Gasp.
And go here to download a lovely hour-long secret mix tape from The Earlies.
I didn't sleep last night. Regular readers of this blog will be aware I tend to get quite animated on the subject of comics (or the lack of them) for young girls. Friends of mine will be aware I'm more the type to do things than talk about them. For nearly a year, Federica Manfredi and I have been working with a top publisher to create a series featuring strong young female heroines who solve mysteries using math and science. You know, those things that the President of Harvard said us girls were genetically not very good at. We've been blessed with an incredibly strong and supportive editorial team, who kept us going when the road seemed to have no end in sight. And we know this publisher more than any other can market the book successfully to the 8-10 year old girls who are its target audience.
The name of the series is KAT + MOUSE, and around 2am UK time last night, it was greenlit.
I can't give more details than that, mainly because my brain is shutting down from exhaustion. But yes, I, Federica, our female editor and our publisher are part of the solution. It's a wonderful feeling.
Meanwhile (and in small part due to an introduction from me, but in much larger part due to her overwhelmingly obvious talent), Federica has been picked up by Marvel to draw the backup story in the AMAZING FANTASY arc that I walked off. The irony may just slay me.
Happy thoughts. My inbox has been overflowing with gorgeous things recently. Igor sent me pages 13-24 of SMOKE Book 3. They left me breathless. Those pages go beyond my limited ability to use superlatives. Seb sent me cover roughs for the first three issues of FAUST. Totally different, totally fantastic. It is only a matter of time before Seb is doing big-money French work with Casterman or suchlike. And, last but not least, Lee O'Connor's wraparound cover for DEFECTIVE COMICS:
More details on DEFECTIVE here. 150 signed and numbered copies, of which 30 go to the artists, 20 are held back for me, and 100 go on sale at Bristol. We're speaking to a distinguished US purveyor of black and white indie filth, who may undertake an American printing. Or who may not. Still, great cover from Lee, who's a mere 23 years old and is now off to travel around the world with his brother.
It's true. I do. Well, I work for the business which manages Ian Fleming's copyrights. As you might imagine, I love my day job. (No, comic writing and screenwriting don't pay me enough to go full-time freelance and still pay for the Primrose Hillton.)
April 27 is the US debut of SILVERFIN, the first in a series of Young Bond novels chronicling the early adventures of the world's coolest secret agent. (Oddly, it's also the day Bonhams will auction Patrick McGoohan's Number 6 blazer from THE PRISONER. Holy cosmic superspy coincidence!) SILVERFIN has already been top of the charts in the UK and, most importantly, the 10-12 year olds to whom I gave copies called it "awesome" and "scary". Click on the image below for more information on the book.
You so know I have my quarter on the pool table to write the YOUNG BOND manga adaptation. We have lots of other incredibly cool stuff in the works at Fleming Media. I can't talk about any of it right now, except that part of it involves me writing childrens' books. Other parts involve world domination.
Back from America. Jetlagged. Head packed with cotton wool; thoughts all treacly. More later on Cannes plans; SISTER production stills; and ALL HALLOWS, yet another script doctoring job (what a surprise, it's a supernatural thriller). Until then, go read my Ninth Art roundup on the many fine European comics in English translation that are succeeding where DC did not.
Oh yes. All of you must go buy the 18 April New Yorker - the travel issue - purely for John McPhee's story, and Seamus Heaney's poem. Poetry in the New Yorker is almost universally dire. In a culture where the dominant form of popular music is hip-hop, it's just laughable that the New Yorker's poets have such a comparative poverty of rhythm and lyrical inventiveness. But not Heaney. He knows what he's doing. He understands verse's fictive music.
As for McPhee, he is (with E.B. White and Dave Hickey) one of the great masters of American nonfiction. If you want to know how to write, how to mix the general with the killing, enrapturing detail, how to bat an opening paragraph out of the park so hard nobody can resist watching to see where it will land, take McPhee. Of his many books, I am fondest of Looking For A Ship and The Curve of Binding Energy. Meanwhile, am I the only one to find David Sedaris' writing tedious and self-indulgent? Ah, the New Yorker. I love you and hate you, usually in the same issue, often on the same page.
I note also there is a new edition of Richard Feynman's letters out. There can never be too much Feynman.
I write in two hardback notebooks: a large, lined one, British A4 size, and a small, plain paper one, A6 size. Both are red. They're cheapies from WH Smith's, a British newsagents. I don't subscribe to this theory of writing in expensive, hard-to-find notebooks like Moleskines. Yes, I know Bruce Chatwin wrote IN PATAGONIA in a Moleskine. I am not Bruce Chatwin. Yes, I know that there are laptops and handhelds infinitely more capacious than my 90-page red notebooks. But I also know that I can doodle on the covers of the notebooks, or drop them on the ground, or leave them on the pub table while I go buy a pint. I can also draw in them when my attention begins to wander. Below, from the big notebook, are sketches of Robert McKee's hands, from a lecture about the genre of thrillers.
Hell, I'll write on the back of a bus ticket if there's nothing else available. Some early notes for SMOKE exist on the back of a RESERVED card from Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, written during the opening act of a Menlo Park gig. One difficult, long-growing story had its structural breakthrough scrawled all over the title page of Colin Wilson's THE OCCULT. This is slightly problematic, as that book is in London, and I am in New Hampshire, and I remember that the breakthrough was great, but not exactly what it was. But this particular story will be slow in coming, and I'm content to let it lie fallow for a while.
I had left my little red notebook at home that day, which was stupid, as its purpose is to be carried in a pocket wherever I go. It contains ideas, interesting quotes, phone numbers, bad sketches, rough page layouts, taped-in newspaper articles about memorable crimes or interesting obituaries and, last but not least, a photo of John Dillinger's corpse (it's beautiful, like a Caravaggio). Once a bunch of ideas reach critical mass, miraculously untangling themselves into rough harmony, I begin to write story outlines in the big notebook. It's not pretty:
I'm telling you all this because a few days ago I finished the latest volume of the big notebook. I'd been plotting a detective story, and I got so carried away I wrote right onto the endpaper. This particular story, an OGN called THE QUEEN OF SPADES, started as a few rough notes in the small notebook sometime in November last year. I ignored it with intent for a while, and then one day I woke up and knew where it was going. I spent a few days in March teasing rough notes onto the laptop, then printed them out to work on in America. I now know not only what this book holds, but the titles and content of the next two in the series. They sit in the notebook's biro-scrawl nest, like crocodile eggs, waiting for their time to hatch.
My next step is to put the outline back on the laptop, and shore up its structural flaws, the inevitable inheritance of any first draft. The scripting? That's the easy part. Fiddling with meaning, structure, character and conclusion is a toil of many months. Writing dialogue is the happy two-week harvest at the end.
The Downy Woodpecker spends her life longitudinal, either looking up the trunk of a tree to the sky, or down to the roots. But our bird tray forces her to tip to the horizontal. She hurriedly pecks at suet-cake. Then, made dizzy by a world at right-angles, she tilts her entire body backwards: yes, the sky is still there. Phew.
The beaver crouches on the forest path. Morning sun glistens off his walnut-brown coat, still spiky with salt-water. Pieces of chewed wood lie about him. My dog Charlotte leaps forward. A fellow who understands that sticks are treasures of boundless delight! What fun we will have together! Ugh, thinks the beaver. He drops his stick and trundles down the acute, scrabbly slope to the bay, the very picture of disgruntlement. Charlotte charges after him, going so far as to step on his funny flat tail as he plods into the sea. Oh, the indignity! He swims parallel to the shore, his eyes accusatory: My sunbeam. My stick. Stupid dog.
I want to help more people get published. Thus: The Full Tilt Boogie Artist Show & Tell Experiment. If you are an up and coming artist who wants to meet more writers for projects and/or pitches, post a page of sequentials here. I know at least two of the artists who posted are already working on things with good, published writers, so it's working. Respect the high signal/low noise ratio please, and read the rules.
I am plotting a few other Brave New Things too, but for now, it's all hush-hush. Stay tuned. It's gonna be a bumpy ride, but oh boy the places we'll go.
The surgery was yesterday morning. I spent the rest of the day in a haze of Valium and vodka martinis, listening to Flanders & Swann and Noel Coward songs. Fine? Darlings, I was MARVELLOUS.
This morning, my parents were kind enough not to mention my late-night, off-key singalong to Coward's "Why do the wrong people travel?".
I now have better than 20/20 vision. This is the best thing I have ever done. Except possibly the time I stole the "no man to man dancing" sign from that Philippine brothel.
The first dog I ever had was a black-and-tan collie cross named Peppy. That was short for Peppina, because I was reading The Count of Monte Cristo at the time and thought the name Peppino was just swell. Boy was I shocked when we went up to Maine on vacation, and the three other dogs on the island were all named Peppy. I had no idea Dumas was so popular among lobster-fishermen. But what did I know; I was only ten.
Peppy was a lovely girl, happy and loyal. We had her for a good couple of years, then one day, just after a bath when her collar was still off, she disappeared. Mom blamed herself for Peppy's loss. She should have never taken Peppy's collar off. She should have insisted that Dad look for her. (She was taking a shower at the time, and asked Dad to go look for the dog. Dad couldn't be bothered, saying, "don't worry, she'll come back". But she never did.) The gardens went unweeded, and the house descended from its usual hospital-sanitized level of cleanliness as Mom put flyers up, drove the neighbourhood streets calling her, and toured round every animal shelter in a 50-mile radius for months. It was no use. Peppy had vanished like a rainbow in dry air. Once I thought I saw her, fur rippling in the breeze and grinning happily, in the back of some kids' jeep turning onto Route 1.
While Mom had been scouring the local animal shelters for Peppy, she noticed one little red terrier who was always huddled, shivering, on his cement kennel floor every time she came back. The shelters in Pennsylvania would only keep animals for 30 days, and if nobody adopted them by then, the dog or cat would be put down. But every time Mom came back over the next three months, there was that little terrier. Mom's curiosity was piqued. She asked the SPCA chief about him. The chief said that the dog's owners refused to come claim their dog, but because the SPCA knew who the owners were, they couldn't put him down. "Do you want to see him?" the chief asked, a note of desperation in his voice. My mother, her heart melting with pity for the poor, unloved little dog, said, "sure". The SPCA chief opened the kennel door. The terrier took a deep breath, inflating with machismo, strutted straight up to the chief's desk, and peed all over it.
That's how we ended up with Ferkel. Mom was too embarrassed to refuse the dog after it had gone and done what it did. Dad was not thrilled to find we had added another pet to the menagerie (which at that time made it one dog, six cats and a couple of budgerigars), and it was Dad who named him: "piglet" in German. Ferkel snorted and snored louder than most humans, never mind his own species.
He was a trial. My mother bore with him, as if he were some karmic punishment for leaving Peppy's collar off that morning long ago. Unlike Peppy, who had never run away until she did, Ferkel had an escape obsession. If you let Ferkel off the lead, he'd make like a bullet for a neighbour's chicken farm. I was the only one who could catch him, and I'd have to hightail it, usually barefoot, across half the county until he slowed down and I could pounce on him. The years didn't quench his attempts to re-enact The Colditz Story.
Ferkel died of old age while I was at college. After him, my parents remained dog-free for a long time. We still had cats, but even those got down to numbers similar to what normal families had. Mom was then working at Dad's company, on top of keeping the house, cooking, and gardening, so she was pretty tired most of the time and I don't think she had the energy for a dog.
The next dog in the family would be the first animal I had ever taken care of completely by myself. Sure, I'd had pets before that were "mine", while living with my parents. There was Holly, my first cat, the Lady Snowblood of the feline set. Holly's jaw had been set badly after she had played chicken with a '75 Pontiac on Route 276 (she lost, but not by much). This war wound gave her a lifelong drooling problem, but didn't stop her bringing us gifts of the slaughtered corpses of all God's little woodland creatures, up to and including weasels. Perhaps her ability to take on weasels was augmented by her getting my left-over cereal milk every morning, milk laced with the teeth-jangling amounts of sugar that only a six-year-old can appreciate.
Then there was Willy, a starving grey and white kitten that Mom and I and a carpool full of kids found at a convenience store when we stopped off to get Tasty-Kakes. When we took him in, Willy was a bag of bones, and throughout all years with us, he addressed every meal as if it were his last. Willy grew to be a ponderous, affable, Pennyslvania Dutch farm-boy of a cat, second to none in the art and enjoyment of sleep. And of course Peppy was "mine", and the budgerigars were "mine", in that childhood sense of "mine" which actually means "Mom does all the work, and you get all the affection".
But in Hong Kong in autumn 1996, I sorely needed affection. I had just broken up with a real beaut of a boyfriend, and was moping around the office grumbling that I needed to meet a new guy. One of my colleagues fixed me with a calm, level stare and said: "Alex, you don't need a new boyfriend. What you need is a good hunting dog." I decided this sounded like reasonable advice, and went down to visit the RSPCA shelter in Causeway Bay near the Yacht Club. Just to look, I told myself. Wasn't going to rush into this. No siree. Just. Looking.
Twenty minutes later, I came out with an armful of little red hound. Enter Charlotte. I reckon she wasn't more than 12 weeks old. Her long nose and big floppy ears lent credence to the shelter's claim she was half Dachsund, but she grew to the size of a small Labrador. Her other half was probably wild Hong Kong pi-dog, but for years her graceful demeanour led Mom to insist that Charlotte was actually some exotic purebred, like a Hungarian Viszla. Recently I've been able to negotiate Mom down to admitting that Charlotte might be more like a Rhodesian ridgeback mix. I haven't been able to budge Mom on her fondly-held beliefs that a family great-grandfather was a cousin of the pretender to the throne of Spain, or that we are related to Samuel Clemens. Someday I'll convince her that there's no shame in being part pi-dog.
I'm consumed with guilt about the way I raised Charlotte. I loved her, but I didn't really know what I was doing. Sometimes I got so frustrated cleaning puppy-shit off the carpet that I wanted to scream. But somehow, despite all my hamfisted care, she grew up to be a great dog: quiet, affectionate, happy. We went running together on Bowen Road, and I started spending nights at home with her in preference to the desperate, clandestine competition of Lan Kwai Fong's club scene. There is something about the unequivocal devotion of a dog to its owner. Even though having a dog is time-consuming and expensive and stops you from doing whatever you want when you want, it means that always, on some level, you have a friend and companion who, whatever everyone else may feel about you, and however much you fail in other things, thinks you're just great.
In late 1997 when my company unexpectedly moved me from Hong Kong to Manila, I sent Charlotte home to my parents. I felt like this was an admission of defeat, but Mom was more than happy to take Charlotte. She spoils Charlotte, giving her corners of toast in the morning, tucking her into her basket at night. In return, Charlotte patiently listens to Mom explain the nuances of her garden: how this rhododendron needs to be moved over there, and why those rudbeckia really weren't such a good idea. When I come home to visit, Charlotte still remembers me, and gives me a huge welcome. She regards me now, lying on the cool floor with her front paws crossed, elegant and sphinxlike.
Now I share my life and my flat with Hebe, a Sussex Spaniel who combines the dual virtues of single-minded loyalty and utter slothfulness. My ex-husband and I got her, a chubby, sleek seal of a pup, after our first year of marriage. He wanted a gun-dog, so Hebe was technically "his", but I ended up doing all the work. That year was like stumbling through some secret, one-way passage into the sour part of adulthood. I'd always wanted a car, a house, a good job, a church wedding with a white dress, a husband. You know. The stuff girls are supposed to want. And one day I found myself the possessor of all these things, along with a mountain of dirty dishes, a garden to weed, a dog to walk, dinner to cook, mortgages and loans to pay, renovations to do, and no help with any of it. But I think I did a better job raising Hebe than I did with Charlotte, and in that year of death by inches I clung to this little success.
When we separated - an inevitability ironically triggered by his broken promise to take me to visit a rescue dog I sponsor - I ended up with Hebe. Not through any nefarious plan, just that a dog requires a lot of taking care, and my ex was busy with other things. He got a new girlfriend pretty quick. I still have the hunting dog.
[Durham, New Hampshire April 2005]
For the next two weeks I will be in America, recovering from laser surgery on my eyes. I will not be on the internet or updating this site during that time. I look forward to the flight on Sunday with mixed feelings. You see, I've always been very blind. My vision is -6.5 in my right eye, and -8 in my left. That means, without glasses or contacts, the world to me is like a giant Mark Rothko painting: big, fuzzy squares. I've had to wear my retro NHS-style spectacles all week ahead of the operation, and it has been like having a thick sheet of safety glass between me and life. I feel so... disconnected. And tired. And apprehensive.
Be good while I'm gone. And if you can't be good, be very very bad. To keep you busy, I've posted a synopsis and two-page preview of my and Ed Ocana's forthcoming Humanoides series, MESSIAH COMPLEX, over at Full Tilt Boogie.
Normal service resumes April 18th.
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 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 January 2008
& FOR HER NEXT TRICK:
ADAM 1
21 August 2007
ISBN-10: 2731617845
EUR12,90 / All Ages
AGENT BOO 3
3 July 2007
ISBN-10: 1598168045
$4.99/ All Ages
***
RECENTLY:
KAT & MOUSE 2
January 2007
ISBN-10: 1598165496
$5.99 / All Ages
AGENT BOO 2
January 2007
ISBN-10: 1598168037
$4.99 / All Ages
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