What's new?
Incremental progress on work. Readying a new STRANGEWAYS sample for another comics company, one that most everyone is bound to have heard of. Until the submission is all settled, no continuing work on that particular project. I'm hoping that a resolution will present itself shortly, but it's largely out of my hands, and there's not much else to do given that the works are basically ready for press should I go under the mighty Highway 62 banner. The waiting game is in full force. I've had a great deal of practice with it, so it's not the end of the world.
Though it gets aggravating pretty quickly.
Work resumes on THE WARD, once the last design I need gets cleared up, that is. Still, no date set up for publication. Not sure that anything other than OGN presentation makes sense for this project and at this point only 1.5 chapters of 6 are done, so there's still a long way to go? What's THE WARD, you ask? The closest jumping-off point I could name would be something like a modern day take on THE AVENGERS meets TO CATCH A THIEF with a touch of superpowered goodness in there.
Finally, working on preliminary designs/plotting for a project tentatively titled MY WINGS ARE BLACK, which is an Old Testament Judgement meets gangsters story set in a 1920s that never happened. I've lucked out and gotten one of my favorite artists signed on for designs, and I think he'll do a spectacular job with them. I may name him once the agreement gets signed, or I may just leave you all in suspense. I think that this one may turn out to be something really special. I just need to convince editors of the same thing. Easy, right?
Lots of planning, not a hell of a lot of actual writing. I find that I get ahead of myself, latch onto a project and spend a lot of time writing the WHOLE DAMN THING when it's only necessary to get the barebones out and get sample pages together. Hard habit to break.
Musicwise, that new Yeah Yeah Yeahs is really outstanding. Easily album of the year so far. I'm not sure there's an earthshattering single on it like "Maps", but I think the whole works a lot better than FEVER TO TELL did. The new Neko Case is pretty great as well, though not perhaps as great as BLACKLISTED is. But that one's a tough act to follow. Sadly, the latest Calexico hasn't grown on me as much as their last couple of albums have. Should probably go back and give it another spin or three.
Oh, I'm not talking about comics, am I? Mostly because there haven't been that many great ones lately. SEVEN SOLDIERS and BATMAN: YEAR 100 have been exceptions to that rule. Paul Pope's take on Batman is both compelling and exciting, taking the character back to the roots that Frank Miller established for him back in the mid-80s, with YEAR ONE, but avoiding the crazed extremities of DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. And surprisingly enough, this is a timely book, in our world obsessed with security and wars against shadowy foes who may or may not be there at all, Pope's Batman manages to mirror a lot of folks' concerns without preaching or offering easy answers.
Okay, so there was kind of an easy answer, when the head of the evil conspiracy got punched out, but that didn't magically solve the issues of privacy versus security. Pope tells a story that leaves other possibilities open before us, and more importantly, doesn't seek to explain every motivation so that we actually will want to come back to this place sometime in the future. And, as always, his visual imagination is something to behold, grounded in a familar reality and still fantastic. Nobody, but nobody portrays action as well as Pope does on the page. I can only hope that artists just learning the ropes today take a look at his work and learn from it. I've seen enough Lee/Silvestri/Liefeld clones to last me a lifetime.
I've also come to the conclusion that books like INFINITE CRISIS just can't be good. That they'll be sketchy and incomplete by design. Books like this exist to solve editorial problems, not to tell stories. It's just not what I'm looking for.
Hopefully stuff like the upcoming CASANOVA will tickle my funnybone a little more.