| | The Democratic Convention that is to be held in Denver continues to snowball into a total fiasco. The latest sign that it will be a complete disaster is the emergence of a group called Recreate 68. The name, the group states, stems from the "spirit of revolution" that existed in 1968. Nevermind the fact that the Democratic Convention of 1968 was the most violent in history. It should be great fun to see the chaos this group, and others like it, manage to cause in downtown Denver. Which, I assure you, is much smaller than downtown Chicago.
What amazes me is that many people still hold onto the illusion that the protests against the war helped end the Vietnam conflict. A quick look at the facts will show you the opposite. Yes, you read that right – the Vietnam protests actually extended the war. If the Democrats had gotten a president elected in 1968 there's a very real chance the war would have been brought to an end within the term. However, due to centrist Americans negative attitude towards anti-war protesters and the counter-culture, Richard Nixon was elected on a "law and order" platform in which he promised "peace with honor". This led to some of the bloodiest years of the war and some of its dirtiest operations. When the protests became louder, many Americans' resentment of it became stronger, to the point that Tricky Dick was elected by a landslide in 1972.
Public protests don't accomplish much of anything. If you want to make a difference, get involved in politics. That's the way this nation changes. While the grass roots portion of the Democratic Party was outside protesting how unfair everything was, the Republican Party was creating a political machine to kick their collective ass.
Now look where we are.
So, I hear you saying, "Matt, then why aren't you involved in politics?"
Because I don't give a fuck. I write comics. The lettered Page 1 of Mirror Man is up. Enjoy. |
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| The first page of Mirror Man is up. Lettering is next.
I've taken over editorial duties at Silver Bullet Comic Books so things will continue to get busier. However, this site will continue to update three days a week. I would encourage anyone with even a passing interest in comics to check out SBC, though.
Meanwhile, here's a picture that I found that must have taken extraordinary timing. | |
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| So they've come across a way to simulate out of body experiences in a laboratory. This throws into question what many individuals regard as proof positive of the afterlife; near death experiences in which trauma victims become disembodied. Everyone's heard the story of walking down the tunnel towards a bright light or the accident victim that later testifies to floating above their body.
I don't find this nearly as challenging to faith as the recent letters of Saint Teresa that report she rarely, if ever, felt the touch of God. There was a woman who deserved to have the peace of faith above anyone else, but it eluded her. And yet, she continued to do what she felt was the Lord's work for decades. While that is an incredible testament to her character it also sounds like some sort of sick, twisted joke.
All of this brings up the question, is that touch of God some people feel (and others don't) some sort of deific inspiration, or is it just diodes and switches moving in the brain to simulate something? This question, and others, are things I hope to touch on in the Mirror Man project. Louie Climaco has agreed to pencil and ink for the work. You can take a look at his first sketch for the main character, Deuce, right over there. |
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| Like so many others before me, not long ago my Xbox 360 started flashing three red lights. While I'm certainly glad that I don't have to pay to get it fixed, I was a bit distraught as it happened just a few weeks before BioShock was to be released. While this game certainly has gotten its share of press, I've been looking forward it game since it was announced as the "spiritual successor" to System Shock 2. So in that sense, I've been looking forward to playing the game for three years.
In a different way, though, I've been waiting much longer. I've been there since the beginning. I was one of those lonely souls that kept telling his friends to quit messing with Doom and check out this new game called System Shock. It was better, I would tell them, frothing at the mouth, than Doom in almost every conceivable way. Better controls, better environment, better bad guys, better plot – cause, ya know, it had one. Eventually, spittle and drool would cover the front of my shirt and they would back away slowly. I may be personally responsible for the poor sales of that game.
Regardless, I got my Xbox back today, so I'm off to play BioShock. Here's the final page for Project Menagerie. I suspect that I'll be busy all weekend, so see you on Monday. |
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| Well, surprise surprise, it looks like people aren't willing to sit still and be hijacked anymore. It seems that two hijackers in Turkey trying to take an airplane made a few errors. The first was underestimating the amount of fuel they had. The second was underestimating the gumption of their victims. Once the airplane touched down for refueling, the two men lost control of the passengers who immediately broke out of the plane by the emergency exits.
I was doing some research for the Mirror Man project when I came across the above piece (mentioned in a blurb on page 20 of my local paper). It's refreshing since so much of the news coming out of the Middle East is bad news. However, one piece I came across was particularly disturbing. It involved the kidnapping of a German aid worker. Sad to say, kidnappings aren't irregular in that part of the world. What was odd, though, was that reading over the article, it sounded like it could have happened anywhere. A man and wife, sitting around in the middle of the day, eating barbeque in a public restaurant. A man walks into the restaurant and orders a pizza. Nothing weird about that. Until said man pulls out a pistol and demands the wife comes with him. Fortunately, the woman was later freed. Still, that'd be the last time I went out for awhile.
Latest page for Project Menagerie is up. Enjoy. |
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| Well, here's another entry into Colorado Crazy Crimes. The short hand for the latest entry is that two men conspired to kill a third via rattlesnakes. The idea was to force the would-be victim's legs into a box filled with rattlesnakes and then let nature takes its course. Once the man was dead, his body would be dumped somewhere in the mountains. The reason for the scheme was an alleged $60,000 debt. So apparently these days you can get James Bond plots without super-villain budgets.
If this highly improbably idea had actually worked, I'm not sure it would have ever been discovered as foul play. While some people would agree with me based solely on the quality of the Denver police, I'm just not sure that investigators' minds would work that way. I mean, you find a guy on a mountain trail with his legs covered in rattlesnake bites. I'm sure the number of bites might be suspicious. Also, there'd probably be signs of struggle. However, would you really take those two things and make the leap to, "This guy obviously had his legs forced into a box filled with deadly vipers." Yes, I know rattlesnakes aren't technically vipers, but you get the point.
Page Six of Project Menagerie is up. The total package for this particular project will be eight pages, so I'll be posting the remainder this week. |
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| Say what you want about Colorado, but we do a good job of making the crazies. At least we don't go around tasering babies.
A few people have remarked that the art I've been posting for Project Menagerie has been from the concept script rather than a complete issue. This is true, so I present to you the script for the first issue. The concept script actually proceeds this (more or less) so for those of you keeping track of this mess, you'll have a better idea of what's going on in this first issue than anyone else. Don't you feel special?
Over at Silver Bullet Comics there's a review with industry professional Steven Grant. We mostly talk about his new series 2 Guns. |
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| PAGE FIVE! PROJECT MENAGERIE!
I've been pretty repetitious lately, so I figured I'd just cut to the chase. On a different note, a few days ago the item below was found on a European beach. No one took credit for it and no one else knows why they did it. Protest? Absurd fun? I don't know, but I say God bless 'em, whoever did it. | | |
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| Another page (the fourth) for Project Menagerie is up. If you're the least bit curious about the change I had mentioned previously about it, it is probably clearest if you take a look at the updated cover. J.C. did a great job on both, in my opinion. Of course, I'm biased.
Project Menagerie, in some ways, is a story about what people are willing to do to others in order to amass wealth. It's a fascinating subject to me. There's a great scene in the movie Johnny Dangerously where he tells his young kid that, "crime doesn't pay", right before he jumps into a chauffeured car and is driven off with his beautiful, mink wearing wife. Unfortunately, the truth is quite a bit harsher. Of course, the same glorification of the criminal element extends to more serious media, particularly literature. If you're a fan of the stately evil represented in The Godfather, I would highly recommend checking out a book entitled Gangster City. It does an excellent job of charting the lives and careers of the men and women who ran New York's underworld in the beginning of the 20th century. While the reality may be far more grim, in many ways it's also more interesting. |
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| The third page of Project Menagerie is up. Hopefully, things will begin to make more sense soon due to the work of Jaymes Reed.
I do have a couple of things from the WTF file to share with you. The first one is truly funny only if you own ferrets. The other, I think is something everyone can marvel at. | | In case you were wondering: Yes, the car was driven into that space. |
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| Page 2 is up for Project Menagerie. Art by J.C. Grande and lettering by Jaymes Reed. Hopefully, it will all be coming together soon. We've got some last minute changes, so in the near future you'll notice a slightly different cover.
I was going through yesterday's paper when I came across an article on how scientists have regrown bacteria that is over 100,000 years old. Not only are the bacteria incredibly old, but they were recovered from ice in the Antarctic, so it's safe to assume that they were under incredible pressure as well as extreme temperatures.
So this got me to think, if terran bacteria can survive under these inhospitable conditions, isn't it possible that other types of organisms could survive even harsher conditions? Possibly even the cold and vacuum of space? Just when I was about to congratulate myself on my astounding imagination a little research discovered such things already exist. In fact, the idea of microorganisms traveling through space has been previously hypothesized and taken further than I had considered.
While there are people of much greater knowledge and imagination than myself out there, I don't think I'm alone in this. Unless something changes in the near future, people my age may be the last generation that can remember when science fiction writers were actually thinking ahead of actual research.
It's a fascinating time to live in. |
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| Thanks to Jaymes Reed, Project Menagerie is getting lettered. You can check out the first page right here.
While doing research I came across two images that I thought I would share. The first is the USS New York. | | What makes this ship interesting, in addition to its ability to carry nearly 700 combat ready Marines, is that it was forged from steel exhumed from the World Trade Center rubble. I suppose you could call that practical symbolism.
This other boat is a bit older and formerly the pride of the Soviet Union. The Kiev is now a floating museum in China. | | There's just something about the idea of the tourists eating lunch on the deck of an old Soviet battleship under Pepsi umbrellas that makes me smile. Stalin is twisting in his grave. |
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| It seems this week is the week for cover art. In the Mojo Smith & Grandma Crow section you can now find concept art for the first cover. Art by Rodolfo, logo by Brant Fowler. Still working on a few details, but you'll get the general idea.
As I had mentioned earlier, I forgot my camera when I went to San Diego. However, Dan Forcey was kind enough to share some his photos with everyone. Below are a few images from the day of the pitches. | | Some folks got into the spirit of things and showed up in costume. I was too much of a wuss for that, but these folks made it look good. | | I missed this gent's pitch and I regret it. I really want to know what that bear is about. | | Donald Faison was by far the most famous person there. Here's a picture of him looking...bored. That was pretty much his default expression. | | If you became the slightest bit suicidal, the site of the Platinum party was the place to be. Fortunately, everyone had far too good a time for that to be a concern. |
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| During the San Diego Comic-Con, Rick Remender was kind enough to sit down for an interview. You can find it at Silver Bullet Comic Books. There's also the concept art for the cover of Project Mengarie up right over there.
I've been having some very lucid dreams lately, so I've taken to writing them down. They don't make a great deal of sense to the awake mind, but fascinating in their own way. Here's an example:
I'm walking down an alley in a city to which I've never been. As I walk, I see black smoke pouring out of a basement entrance in a perpendicular alley. I run and enter the door to see if anyone needs help. I end up in a restaurant that looks like a combination of a McDonald's and a seedy bar. This can't be right, but there's the golden arches, so there you go. But the smoke is gone. I look around to see a man slouched on the bar. It looks as if the top of his head has been cut open, his brain and a good portion of his spine spilled out onto the bar. I turn away to cry for help. When I turn back to the bar the man is fine. He looks at me and asks, "You don't think this is real do you?"
When I was young I had terrible nightmares. After awhile I became quite adept at realizing when I was dreaming, which was good, since it allowed me to wake up when things took a turn down a particular passage of my subconscious that I didn't want to go. Lately, though, the dreams aren't really nightmares, but I don't seem to know they are dreams until I wake up. Weird, but at least it is entertaining. And cheaper than cable. |
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