Freedom City

I’m back to one of my many odd projects; this one is digitizing all the Jesus Tapes I’ve collected over the years. Many are starting to fall apart, so every third one requires a little TLC to get it rolling one last time. Ion makes a spiff device that looks like an old tape Walkman with a USB plug and it records like a charm. Once the Jesus Tapes are done (I can manage about seven a day with the gadget), it’s on to the story tapes!

I have a lot of Koinonia House (from scenic Coeur d’Alene, Idaho) ones that I got in an eerily-organized box from eBay a few years ago. The one rolling now is from April 2000; there are no printed titles, but the original owner wrote the following on the label—Evolution Fraud Book “Tornado i/t Junkyard. | NEA Educ.

Next up: HORMONES AND WHEELS, Dealing With Today’s Teenager by Jim Fay.

and of course it’s hinky. I’ll get things fixed as I go.

This is the first issue of MONSTERS BEWARE, a neat idea Carter Allen and I had several years ago. It was a short story idea I had for the fifth (or somethingth) issue of this series that eventually morphed into LOST IN THE WASH.

In this one, a nun drowns, but it all works out.

Behold, the first comic that I’ve drawn since Middle School.

The collected Zoo Force has a wonderful preface by Brian McNeil. But before Jer and I thought to ask him to have a go at it, I wrote up this draft:

It was on a mind-paralyzing day like today that I wrote the first ZOO FORCE story. I was at work (sorry, Don) as a receptionist for a private company with an office deep in the bowels of a major hospital. Because this is the way things are in big hospitals, the reception area was all the way down a long hallway from where the techs worked. We saw patients twice a week, and the rest of the time was walk-ins. Nobody walked in. Three days a week I watched empty chairs in a cavernous room with no windows and zero foot traffic.. The old pneumatic tubes in the ceiling would occasionally knock and bang as a blood sample worked its way up to Pathology. If it happened on my breaks I would try to run down the hall and try to beat the sample before it took off upwards. I had a phone, a chair, and my thoughts.

ZOO FORCE was born either to allay these mind-altering circumstances, or it was a direct result of them. So very alone with my thoughts it seemed more than obvious…the chicken would talk, yes, and claim to be Pythagoras, like in Lucian’s THE COCK…a prairie dog/human mix, yes…six foot tongue…polar bear…what kind of superpower would a polar bear have? Ah yes, the best power of them all—reading.  I wrote the story that comprises the television screen pages in DEAR ENIKO in an afternoon and felt like I had staved off madness in an active way. I had taken charge against the efforts of this room to make me insane.

From there it was a matter of making more. The original story, “Enforcers”, appeared in ED #1 (1997) and that was that. When Candle Light Press started gearing up to make graphic novels, though, Jeremy and I had a powerful urge to revisit the story. We wanted this larger story to more fully introduce readers to the characters and get a better idea of their world, but we wanted to do it by tapping into a line of communication. In the case of DEAR ENIKO it was Snowball’s letter to the human who taught her English.  This way the story was shaped by Snowball’s urge to take what is common to hers and Eniko’s experience and help adjust it to this bizarre place in Texas. This “found” narrative appealed to us a great deal, and offered a lot of fun storytelling ideas. The deal was sealed when we gave space to Captain Cat to tell his version of events. Rather than cast you, the reader, as a perfect witness to all relevant events, we leave you with artifacts and the occasional eyewitness perspective. After all, what sounds more fun—hearing Captain Cat failed to get a Xeric, or to hear him tell the story?

Over the years I’ve watched people pick up ZOO FORCE books, land on one of the Captain’s zine pages and put it back down. A quick explanation usually got them to reinvestigate to see what the deal was, but not always. How do you think a rage-filled cat with robot arms would draw? It would be great if the world (or indeed any comic) looked like Jeremy’s art of the Arctic or of a barbecue in La Tornada, but that’s only one view of things.. Sometimes it looks like Jer drawing like a rage-fueled feline. Sometimes it seems as if it’s all on tv.

This book is called the WE HEART LIBRARIES edition, because we do indeed heart libraries. But there was a conundrum with ZOO FORCE. We really love doing things like coloring pages, puzzles and the like; but libraries as a rule have to think twice about books that invite the reader to write or draw in them. Even after hearing this, we continued to keep these elements in ZOO FORCE; but we promised ourselves that we’d put out an edition for the libraries when it came time to collect the first three books. Anybody could buy it, but the idea was to make this so that libraries could shelve it without worrying that someone would succumb to the coloring section.. So in a flip from other collected editions, we didn’t add something to make previous ZOO FORCE buyers grit their teeth and rebuy a book they mostly own. Nope, there’s less here. If you have DEAR ENIKO, BEAN AND NOTHINGNESS, and BBQ already, then you just read the only new part to this book. If you just picked this up off the library shelf, fun awaits!

It’s housecleaning time at Candle Light Press! We’re sweeping out the ol’ webspace and starting fresh. For the time being I’ve moved my personal blog to Tumblr, and we’ll see how it goes.

Wow, you know what takes forever? Deleting. It’s less dramatic, clearing out the CLP webspace, than I thought. Weird. 

The old SimplePie aggregator has a crazy amount of files and subfolders. The things you learn when you think watching files delete is more interesting than going to the bathroom.

I call the temporary site “Safe Mode”. Go forth and be functional!

Resting up from the frivolity of the weekend today. I went up to Des Moines on Friday for a little post-birthday treat before the Iowa Comic Book Club’s annual I-Con in Altoona. I drove up early and scoured two huge antique malls there. Found a few goodies, such as a couple first edition books by Alden Knipe (Captain Of The Eleven and A Maid of ‘76). After that, I went to Half-Price books and found a sealed copy of Mark Evanier’s Jack Kirby biography for 15 bucks. I have a really high tolerance for hunting high and low in these places and the opportunity to set my own pace was a lot of fun.

Met up with Carter and Rebecca, and Will later on. We kept it low-key and woke Saturday with vim and vigor.

I-Con is actually a good deal smaller than is used to be. Word is they overexpanded back when they were at the fairgrounds and now they’re more cautious with the show. That’s a shame, as for a time it seemed poised to mimic all the best elements of the Twin Cities’ SpringCon. Iowa’s inability to have a medium-to-major comics show mystifies me completely. We have AnimeIowa at the Sheraton in Coralville and it crushes I-Con in attendance. But Colorado seems to have the same problem, even though it, like Iowa, is jammed with comics fans.

We ended up dead center in the middle of the room, right across from Tony Bedard and Tyler Kirkham. Traffic was mostly steady, and the slow bits were filled with our consternation at the Iowa Hawkeyes’ performance in the first three quarters of the Pitt game. I was getting updates via my Nook Color and it wasn’t pretty. It’s become a running joke at I-Con that the Hawkeyes always seem to blow an easy game the day of the con. Even though they’re mostly Cyclone fans in that neck of the woods, they’re entirely sympathetic and kid that we’re gonna stop coming to break the jinx. Happily, Vandenberg found his last Miraclo Pill for the fourth quarter and broke the jinx.

Syphilitic Cowboys sold well and spoke with several folks who had it already and liked it. Even sold a Numbers because I always sell at least one copy of Numbers. Carter and Will did good trade in sketches and prints.

I had an interesting conversation with a young lady in a Green Lantern costume about the history of sci-fi. I mentioned that the sci-fi novel’s origins lie in a second century work by Lucian of Samosata and I think she was surprised I knew this. I only studied under David Larmour, one of the guys in Lucian scholarship. She was this close to buying a Zoo Force: We Heart Libraries but the call went out for the group photo for all costumed attendees and alas she never made it back. But I made sure she knows she can get it at her local bookstore, through our website, or even Amazon.

The dealers saw some business, but I get the feeling that if this show wasn’t close, it wouldn’t be worth it for them. There were lots of 50% off signs early and often. The show just need a kick in the pants and I think it could really make a big leap forward. Altoona is just too remote for a lot of potential con-goers. I realize there’s venue expense and all, but it would be worth it to go to an even smaller size for a while just to get closer to the center of the city. Build the excitement and interest, then expand. This is all very easy to type, I get that.

In all, we had a nice time and will of course be back next year. For dinner, we went to the East Village and ZOMBIEBURGER! This is a hell of a place to have a burger. I had a double-tap Fulci with a Tallahassee shake. Read the menu to see what’s in those. I’m still digesting it, but it was really good. Carter had the Boomstick, which has a layer of deep-fried chili. No, I’m not kidding.

Next day we went to a lovely brunch at Carter’s Mom’s place, then went bowling at Air Lanes. After a stop at Cup O’ Kryptonite (a very cool place—while not nearly the stock of Mayhem, it is the place to talk about comics that the also-very-nice Mayhem isn’t). We stood in the parking lot of Co’K ginning up more fun bits for the SPROCKET sequel until it was time to make the trip home.

In all, it was a great time, with some excellent loot acquired (comic and non-comic). It put me off a week on the Movie Somnambulist, but I’ll be back on that pony in a day or two.

Tom Spurgeon found the alternate color cover to The Cows Of War. That’s pretty satisfying. With the upcoming CLP website redesign, we’re going back to having more comics to read onsite. In all the reformatting, I even relaid out TCOW with an easier to read font.

If you want to read the original, it’s here. Yes I drew it.

It’s been a great process, one of those times a group is ready to roll on the same idea.

Off to pack for the hop, skip and jump to Des Moines for the Comic-Book I-Con Saturday. Come say hi!