Clearly Collapsing Cleveland
Due to some incredibly personal and devastating personal issues, I’ve been flying solo at the store for the past few, and it looks like I’ll continue to do so for the next week or so. I don’t mind it, per se, because I know how hard this is for Tony, but its exhausting being there by myself for 8 hours a day. Not only that, it’s just…lonely. Sure, there are the customers and some of them are really fun to talk to, but it’s not the same thing as talking to your partner in crime, who you can say anything to, screw around with and just have a good time during the workday. Travis will be coming in the next two days, tomorrow especially to help with the comic shipment, and that would be nice.
It was funny when we came back from Chicago, after spending four days straight with each other, when we all went back to our separate corners, the next time we saw each other we’d be like “Hey, where the hell have you been? I missed you!” Very funny. It beats the alternative of us coming back and hating each others guts.
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Dawn made a good point when she asked me about seeing Warren Ellis in Chicago. I did, and it was a real blast. I bought a copy of his book and got him to sign one for me, and then on Friday night was the reading/q&a session which was made far more entertaining by the fact that there was a cash bar. Oh lord, am I not going to be able to live that night down. in the hotel parking lot after about 4 or 7 Jack and cokes, I remember Travis calling his work to say that he wasn’t going to come in the next day (a pre-arranged lie) while I was dragging a wooden saw horse over to him, shouting that I had a present for him. I remember this because he won’t let me forget.
Ellis, frankly, is far more robust and energetic than his usual “I’m a creaky old Englishman” emails and blog posts make him out to be. Don’t let him fool you, although I did avoid shaking his hand as he complained mightily over email about how much strain signing and handshaking for 8 hours a day can be. That would be brutal on anyone.
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Kenzie and I started watching “Dexter” these past few days and just finished up season one tonight. I wasn’t that impressed with the first novel, but I must say that the show is more than quite a bit of alright. The changes they made, from what I can remember, are almost all improvements. Of course Kenzie weaseled the identity of the killer out of me, so I’m glad that I can sit back and just enjoy season 2 and not try to remember what happened in the book.
I was also pleased today to find out that THE EXTERMINATORS, a really fine comic series by Simon Olivier and Tony Moore (among others) that’s ending before its time, is going to be developed for Showtime as well. We sort of looked at each other and said “I guess we’re going to have to get Showtime now.” THE EXTERMINATORS, when it first came out, was often touted as going “to do for the bug killing business what SIX FEET UNDER did for the funeral business.” I don’t know if they’re going to go into the crazy semi-supernatural stuff that the comic got into, but it has a really interesting cast of characters that TV audiences are going to dig.
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I’ve started hanging out on Standard Attrition, the message board home of really cool superstar and superstar-to-be writers and artists Jason Aaron, Brian Azzarello, Cliff Chiang, G. Willow Wilson, David Lapham, Jock and Brian Wood.
I try not to get depressed that the budding geniuses on there that are now breaking into the next level of comic stardom are almost all exactly my age, or in its close neighborhood. I try to think of it as “This means my work is going to start paying off now” and not “if it doesn’t happen RIGHT NOW then the ship has sailed and its time to pack up this particular dream.”
But that could just be the exhaustion speaking. Or the guilt about being exhausted, when I know that people are going through so much worse.
