Sarah

slg_news @ 8:02pm:

• 14:57 Doris Danger Volume One is now available at the SLGCOMIC.COM store. bit.ly/1zxZd0 #
• 15:05 Here is the trailer for Doris Danger. Watch it, then go order it. That was not a request. bit.ly/1oSvZn #

jdeguzman @ 11:34am: The Range of Light

Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.

Recently, I went to a reading given by San Jose State University’s Center for Literary Arts of Early Days in the Range of Light: Encounters with Legendary Mountaineers by Daniel Arnold. Dan graduated the same semester I did from the university’s creative writing program, so I was really excited to see the success of my grad school colleague. I was fortunate enough to be able to read some of it in workshop, and I was certain then that Dan would be the first of the gang to get his book published.

Early Days is luminous, as the title implies it should be, but also down-to-earth and solid. It tells the stories of the men and women who were the first to climb the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, that formidable, often impassible, 400-mile-long mountain range between California’s Central Valley and East Basin. But Dan doesn’t just tell you the history — though he does do that, vividly, with original research that is a testament to his scholarship; he also walks in their shoes. He reproduced their climbs without any modern equipment — what he calls in the introduction “a mess of carabiners, cams, and pitons” –a testament to his physical and mental strength. He recounts his experiences sleeping in the open air without a tent and scaling cliffs without rope so vividly that I recall fearing for his safety, even as he was sitting across the room from me in workshop.

John Muir called the Sierra Nevada “the Range of Light,” and one of the chapters of Dan’s book that made a lasting impression on me when I read it in workshop was the one about that great naturalist’s scaling of Cathedral Peak. Other chapters are more dramatic, but this one in particular shows the deep meditation that can take place on a great spire of rock:

The landscape here is profoundly still. This is high alpine terrain and movement is limited to a few squawky Clark’s nutcrackers and butterflies and gusts of wind. The gnarled dwarf pines that dot the meadows and find toeholds on the mountainside do not change from decade to decade. In this stasis, time ebbs and stops. All around, bare crags and stony peaks cut the air, the raw stuff of the earth frozen in place after breaching the top layer. Though I can’t locate God, I do feel an absurd closeness to the stars, a sensation that comes from pressed up against a thinning and blueing sky.

Squeezed between the mountain and the stars, it is the age of this place that calls me back. The difference in age and size between the mountains and me is nearly infinite, a quantity that is hard to locate in cities. Here, the scale of the universe is more visual, more visceral, the human creature at its least significant. It is both invigorating and humiliating to ride the back of something so huge, to look up in a whirlpool so deep. Muir’s God lives here somewhere, in the cycles of rock and snow and woody growth that far predate man’s self-consciousness and need nothing from him for their continuation.

It was a fine reading, and I hope Dan’s book gets the attention it deserves. It’s a unique and important work.

On a less reverent note, here is a Kate Beaton comic strip about John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt:

slg_news @ 8:02pm:

• 12:13 SLG to publish Animal Crackers: A Gene Luen Yang Collection in January 2010: is.gd/4TBfE #
• 13:16 I'll be listening to the Comics on your Phone A Moment with show by SLG Radio on #BlogTalkRadio - tobtr.com/s/774594 #
• 13:19 We will be talking iPhone comics with Comixology's David Steinberg on today's SLG call-in podcast. bit.ly/2RGAsd #
• 13:40 RT @evandorkin Starting today @5pm EST, I'll be a regular on Dan Vado's SLG Radio/Blog Talk Radio show: tinyurl.com/ych6jfe #
• 14:17 We're publishing a collection of two Gene Yang graphic novels in January! bit.ly/kcvZe #
• 14:52 On our Blog Talk radio show, Evan Dorkin just said, "Oh, crackers! Did you hear what that Jew said?!" tinyurl.com/ych6jfe #
• 14:52 And Dan just said, "I don't know, what would you call it? Right now, it's you and me arguing." #
• 15:16 The archive of today's SLG radio show is now available for your listening pleasure. bit.ly/1XrB0F #
• 15:43 @evandorkin Of course. I forget that not everyone knows you're "that Jew, Evan Dorkin." #
• 15:43 RT @evandorkin
  
  @SLGPublishing I would like to take a moment and point out that I was the jew in question. Thank you. #

slg_news @ 8:01pm:

• 13:57 A few Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer reviews have come rolling in. Here's one from Paradox Comics Group: is.gd/4SSnN "8 out of 10" #
• 13:58 From Comics & Dakine: is.gd/4SSGs A "darkly funny story that combines satire, adolescent romantics, sweetness and suspense." #
• 13:59 And from Comic Vine: is.gd/4SSJD You gotta love a review that ends with the reviewer hugging the book! "5 out of 5" #
• 14:01 At Comic Vine, one commenter balks at the $10.95 price tag on Pinocchio. It's 128 pages, the equiv. of 5 mainstream comics. Do the math. #
• 14:35 @bicyclefish Except that single issues cost about $3 these days, so really it's more than $4 cheaper than 5 issues. #

slg_news @ 8:02pm:

• 12:02 Check out Panelfly, one of the iPhone applications where you can read SLG's comics. The app is freeeeeeee. is.gd/4RYZF #
• 13:21 Chris Wisnia talks about his upcoming graphic novel Doris Danger on the comiXology podcast: #
• 15:04 SLG comics are also available on comiXology's free reader app, including some free issues: is.gd/4S6yQ #
• 15:06 Hey, the link to that Chris Wisnia interview on the comiXology podcast was messed up. Here it is for real: is.gd/4S2zc #

slg_news @ 8:02pm:

• 12:51 Comics on your Phone 22 A Moment with Evan Dorkin on SLG Radio will air 11/12. tobtr.com/s/774594 #BlogTalkRadio #

evandorkin @ 2:43pm: The Rundown For 11/8/09
My computer's been on the blink for a while, so I've been using Sarah;s, which has led to a pile of post-it notes and scribbled-on scraps of paper gathering on my desk. A lot of these were reminders to post this or that on the blog, which, I obviously didn't do. Sarah spent many hours yesterday trying to revive my ailing machine, which is more or less now acting responsibly. We'll see how long that lasts. In the meantime, I'm gonna play catch-up with a few random mentions of this, that and the other:

- The House of Fun Art For Sale list was updated after we got home from the Baltimore Convention, I just never told anybody because I'm such a savvy business person. We got hit with some unforeseen expenses (inc. a hefty car repair bill, ouch) so I'm offering up some new pieces, a few of them relatively big ticket items, a few of them relatively affordable -- pages from Milk and Cheese pages, Bizarro Comics/Bizarro World, Hellboy: Weird Tales, as well as a few pin-ups, odds and ends and the cover to Dork #6, which was The Eltingville Club issue  (a note to the reader/customer who purchased the back cover to #6 and the Eltingville t-shirt some months back - I have lost your contact info, which is why I did not write you about the front cover. If you're reading this, please get in touch with me, because I feel badly that I screwed that up. My apologies!). Also, we've lowered the prices on a number of older pieces on the list. Several pages have already sold since we added the new artwork, as a few regular customers contacted us, but the list has been updated to reflect those purchases. If time allows we'll be adding more stuff before the holidays and we'll likely put some more layouts and small pieces up on e-Bay as well.

- I am going to be appearing weekly on the SLG Radio show every Thursday, or at least every Thursday SLG head honcho Dan Vado puts a show together. My segment will be taking place in the last fifteen or twenty minutes of the show. We'll talk about comics, I guess. We'll see. So far I've mostly yammered about nothing in particular while Dan tries to get a word in edgewise. It's a live call-in show, so folks can participate if they want. Previous broadcasts are archived on the blog radio site and upcoming guests are announced on the page as well, so check it out.

- Speaking of radio, I don't remember if I posted about Jill Thompson and I having been guests on Robin McConnell's Inkstuds radio program recently. You can listen to the episode here. Inkstuds is a great comic book resource, Robin's interviewed a terrific array cartoonists over the course of its 4-yr run (Happy Anniversary, btw).

- Speaking of interviews, here's one Jill and I did with Crimespree Magazine regarding Beasts of Burden.

- Speaking of Beasts of Burden, here's a preview of the first three pages of the upcoming third issue, which is an Orphan solo adventure. While the orders for the series have been less than stellar, the response has been extremely gratifying, and it doesn't look like retailers are getting stuck with too many copies dying on their racks. We've also received some very nice comments about the series from creators like Neil Gaiman, Dave Gibbons, Len Wein, James Robinson and Eric Powell (all on Twitter), which has been cool as all hell to see, I must admit. #3 ships on the 25th, and hopefully will be a fun sort of palate cleanser after the downbeat second issue. At least that was the plan.

- Geek Alert: Universal Monster movie fans take note - I accidentally stumbled across a reference to The Universal Cult Horror Collection, a set of five lesser-known weirdies including Murders In The Zoo, The Mad Ghoul and Rondo Hatton as The Creeper in  House of Horrors. The set is only being sold through TCM.com (and one other online source, but the price is the same, iirc), it's part of a deal TCM made with Universal to release some films on demand, and hopes are high that perhaps this could lead to getting Island of Lost Souls out on DVD. The films can be bought separately, as well. I haven't seen any of these, I'm sure they're nutty jerk-fests, but I love this stuff. Now, if I could only afford them...

-I've got something like seven new Fun Strips done or almost done. I've gridded up a batch of strips and pages to work on whenever the ink's drying on another job, so who knows, I may have some Dork-type comics to show you folks sooner or later. Still trying to get more done on that Milk and Cheese strip I started and posted a bit from a little while back, but it's slow going. 

- I'm also working on a pin-up for a charity auction that has been fun, little cartoony versions of as many old Marvel Comics villains as I can remember the details for. It's a small piece but I'm trying to get as many figures in as possible, I think I have thirty or so right now. I'm trying to see how many characters I can draw more or less by memory, and then I'll get the reference out and see what I screwed up, and complete the details on the characters I don't know well. Some characters I can't even lay a single line down for, so they'll need reference. In my head I can see The Mandarin and Klaw, but on paper...nada (besides the sonic weapon -- weird!). But it looks like 80% of these bums are still floating around in my memory banks while I forget my social security number and my own phone numbers. Maybe I'll scan it as it stands and post an in-progress image. Or maybe not.

- If the November issue of Nickelodeon was the swan song for the magazine, I'm depressed. If December turns out to be the final issue, still depressed. We had a gag panel in the November Nick...what a bummer to see it end. And just when Emily started reading it, of course.

- I've been reading a lot of Spider pulps, my first Avenger pulp, old horror short story collections, some Fritz Leiber SF short stories, some Robert Bloch, some recent young adult fantasy series (The Magic Thief and The Last Apprentice), some David Goodis crime novels, some lesser-known (to me, at least) Black Lizard crime reprints (The Vengeance Man, You Play the Red and the Black Comes Up), some Jim Thompson, and some Blackjack manga. Nothing heavy, nothing too depressing.  The Lawgiver is planning a house move, and is culling his library, so I've been hauling bags of old paperbacks over here to digest and then donate. I'm keeping the Spider paperbacks, though. It's been a lot of fun, and a lot of it is research for projects, so it's sort of work, as well. Some days I just want to stay in bed and read until I fall back asleep, like when I was a kid on a rainy day. 

- I'm doing a lot of stuff for Bongo right now, and for the foreseeable future --, and it's time I got back to that. 

Latersville, all.

slg_news @ 8:01pm:

• 21:43 Dan Vado will be at the Vegas Valley Comics Festival on Saturday November 7th. Stop by the SLG table and get a free... bit.ly/4mX67j #
• 18:05 We are opening a new show tonight at the SLG Gallery. bit.ly/1cFurn #

evandorkin @ 4:33pm: They're Publishing More Comics I Want
Apparently the first volume in the IDW King Aroo reprint project has been solicited in this months Previews eyesore --  this is a series I'm really looking forward to as I find Jack Kent's strip delightful (there's a word I rarely type) and an example of great pure cartooning chops. And my daughter might enjoy it, as well. Maybe. I'm basing this on the character designs, all the cute creatures running around in the strip, and the gentle nature and humor of the strip. And the puns, she's getting into corny old gags in the way most of us did when we were little. I never know what comics she's going to respond to, to be honest. For a long while she wouldn't read anything with people in it, Dennis the Menace was out for that reason. Now she has taken the Toon Treasury away from me and has gone through it multiple times, without missing funny animals, kids, gag pages, even the Briefer Frankenstein pages, which I thought might turn her off. Then again, she read print-outs of the first issue of Beasts of Burden #1 in black and white, while we weren't around, and startled us at the dinner table one night by quoting the "eat 'em up frog" (as she put it) demon (she also calls it the "eat everything frog"). She quoted the frog in a funny kid monster voice, and it was very funny, but Sarah gave me the "I thought we agreed not to leave those pages lying around" look. And we did agree not to let her see the pages because some of them are kind of nasty, and as it turned out, Emily was bothered by some of the events in the first issue, and told me I wrote it "wrong", because the deaths of two animals in it upset her. We have since never admitted the existence of Beasts #2, for reasons some of you might understand after reading that issue. She knows #3 exists because she's seen pages on the computer, it's the "Orphan goes looking for his girlfriend" story (as she puts it), and while there are some gory bits, it's an adventure and not a downbeat, depressing bit of work.  There's no way she's seeing #4, because there's some horror stuff in there that I don't think she'd like.

She's also been "stealing" my copy of the first Cul De Sac collection lately, and she seems to like it, although she doesn't get a lot of the strips. But she keeps reading it. Kills me to watch her reading comics. You see, there's this kid in my house, right, and she's little and cute and she's ours and she's reading some of them there funnybooks. Who'd have thunk it? Not me.

Anyway, off tangent, what else is new. Didn't expect to be posting, but I'm taking a break in-between working on some strip layouts and so there you go and here I go and who knows where it goes. But speaking of the Dick Briefer Frankenstein comics, I read that Fantagraphics has announced a new slate of books, including a reprinting of this material. To which I say sweet, because along with oddballness like Herbie Popnecker and a few other projects, this is a cult series that many folks have wanted to see back in print. Hopefully enough folks out there are interested in order to make it viable for the long haul. Who knows.

And it gets better, or worse, if you consider your wallet and shelf space, because FBI's also doing collections of lesser-known 50's horror comics, an Alex Toth collection of his Standard Comics work, a pre-Plastic Man Jack Cole collection, a book on EC cartoonists' work at other companies, and a Basil Wolverton book. So, you folks who are into these sorts of things better start taking a few bills outta your mom's bag or your dad's wallet each and every week because this is gonna be an assault on the cents-less. So many good books, and I'm not half-wise to everything IDW is announcing (I did read about a Polly and Her Pals oversize Sundays collection, apparently a $75 "Champagne Edition" -- hell, I like bells and whistles and all, but give me a decent Budweiser Edition, fer chrissakes!), or Dark Horse, or whoever else is helping grow the pile. Hell, Captain Easy still hasn't debuted, supposedly Walt and Skeezix is getting back on track, the John Stanley library is up and running, more Harvey stuff, more DHC Little Lulu,  I mean, holy goodnight! You can't sell a comic book outside of Marvel and DC that isn't Buffy or whatever-related (I oughta know, after seeing the numbers on beasts #1), and they're not even selling a ton of the aforementioned, but somehow scores of classic comic collections are making their way into the world. Not that I'm complaining. It's just so unprecedented and unforeseen; going back a few years, that it's hard to imagine it isn't a geekanerd fever dream.

Anyway, I just hope 2010 isn't the dam bursting on the reprint trend and we're not hitting the motherlode overload anytime soon, because at some point this has to start choking shelves and bringing consumers to their financial knees, but while the gettin's good, this is a goddamned Golden Age of great comic gatherings, guys and gals. This is history in the re-packaging, and bears attention.

Or maybe it's a sinister alliance with Ikea to sell even more Billy bookcases.

So, anybody looking forward to any of this stuff? Anything you've heard about that is of interest? How about them Yankees?  

No, no Yankees, I don't really care, in fact I really don't care, anti-care, could care less. No Yankees, no NYC mayoral race, no creepy rich people sports of any kind. Just funnybooks, today. Glorious, ridiculous funnybooks. Them I understand.

slg_news @ 8:00pm:

• 10:29 Weird Fishes and Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer have been nominated by YaLSA for the annual Great Graphic Novels for Teens: is.gd/4Mbz6 #

slg_news @ 8:00pm:

• 13:29 A review of Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer at Blog@Newsarama: bit.ly/1RkVxA #
• 15:20 RT @rickmarshall "Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer" on @mtvsplashpage: bit.ly/14aiXa #