Thursday, January 5, 2012

2012: The Year In Review in Advance

Happy 2012, everyone! Hope the New Year is finding you well so far. My holiday season was appropriately joyous and wonderful. I had a lovely birthday, a fantastic Christmas, and rang in the New Year with Jenny at our friends Mike and Sarah’s house. It was a great evening, and I would describe it in greater detail, but it has been pointed out to me that the sense of humor possessed by my inner circle of friends would, if shared with the outside world, make us all look like psychopaths.
I watched the proliferation of “Best of 2011” lists last month with a sort of looming dread. Was this the sort of thing that was required of one who blogged? If so, I’m ill equipped to deliver. My attention span is similar to that of a small, nervous dog who has managed to consume a large triple espresso. I sometimes forget things that are happening WHILE they are happening.
Okay, not really, but I do a poor job of cataloging things in an efficient chronology. It’s a side effect of being tragically behind on the cultural bell curve.  Any “Best of the Year” lists I generate would, by my nature, be filled with materials that are decades old which I have JUST discovered, and have decided are the very height of French cool.
It’s easier for me to do a list of what I’m looking forward to in the coming year. I can always handle recognizing things that haven’t happened YET. So that’s a safer, and more pleasurable activity for me. Always looking forward, friends!

THINGS I AM EXCITED ABOUT IN 2012
1) THE WORLD PROBABLY, HOPEFULLY, NOT ENDING
When I was much younger, I watched a documentary on Nostradamus which ended, as so many things from the 80s, with images of nuclear missiles flying through the night, and the world ending in a massive mushroom cloud. I tried to hide under my bed for a week. Something about that trauma stuck with me. I’m phobic about the apocalypse. So the Mayan calendar debate bullshit regarding the end of the year has made me twitchy. I know it’s stupid. I know YOU know that it’s stupid. But, like most phobias, there’s nothing that rational thought or discussion can do to really break the tension. So I’m looking forward to barreling right up to, and past, December 21, 2012. Then I can breathe a huge sigh of relief and wait for the next opportunity for crazy people to promise me I’m going to die.
Best rebuttal I have heard for the Mayan doomsday comes from my buddy Joe Porto who pointed out that he has had a calendar every year that ended on that year, and so far, nothing has come of it. “Calendars are stupid” was his conclusion.

2) MOVIES! MOVIES! MOVIES!
Even if the world does end, I won’t care that much, because I will have seen The Hobbit the previous week. We’ve got The Avengers this summer, a new Nolan-directed Batman movie, the Ridley Scott is-it-or-isn’t-it-an-Alien-prequel Prometheus, and many more. I’ll be blowing a lot of my allowance in the movie theater this year.

3) COMICS!
This year: Avengers vs X-Men. Are you excited? If not, you don’t really like comics, and we can’t be friends anymore.


4) COMICS! (That I made)
Got a lot coming up in 2012.
- I will have stories appearing in Greyhaven Comics “The Gathering” five times this year, each exploring a different genre (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Super-Heroes, Western, and Romance).  
- Chris Hopkins continues to grind away at the pitch art for Wacky Zack Must Die, and hopefully we will be pitching it to publishers this Spring.
- I’m writing a one-shot for Greyhaven Comics I should have done in the next two weeks.  If the artists’ schedule allows you may be seeing it in late 2012 or early 2013.
- I will be developing a horror/super-hero pitch for Shadowline Comics with artist Leonardo Gonzalez.
- At least two new graphic novels are getting written before the end of the year. One is an historical comedy/romance. The other is a sci-fi sex farce.
All this, and my ongoing attempts to get Chris Page to co-write “THE ADVENTURES OF RAPTOR-GUN”, the heartwarming tale of an urban vigilante whose gun shoots velociraptors.
Comics. Rules. Everything. Around. Me.

5) MY FIVE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY!
This October marks five years of marriage to the gorgeous, the brilliant, the hysterically funny, the ridiculously talented Jenny Langin. We have tentative plans to revisit the site of our honeymoon, that is to say, spend a week in Disneyworld. It’s going to be awesome.

*****
I promise that I will try to blog as much as time allows. If my blog updates are fewer and farther between, I promise that it’s because I am hard at work on some awesome freelance comics stuff. And not at all because Jenny bought me Skyrim for Christmas.
Hugs and kisses,
(The)Travis

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