You Q'd, and I A'd.

TALKING TO MY WIFE (Part One)

We were arguing about something completely random.

Jenny: You are so wrong!
Me: I am NOT! I am totally right.
Jenny: Wrongzors!
Me: You can’t just say “wrongzors” and win an argument.
Jenny: WRONGZORS!
Me: In fact, just by adding “zors”, you lose. It’s like when someone brings up Hitler.
Jenny: HITLERZORS!

INQUIRYS AND REPLYS

I put the call out for questions I might be able to answer, lest I be tasked to actually come up with a blog topic out of my very own brain. My good friends at the Brian Michael Bendis board on Jinxworld.com were goodly enough to provide the following:.

Evan the Shaggy asks: What's your favorite band story from your past days of rockin'?

Monday night I went to see my friends Jerry and Andrew Morgan doing standup at Cafe Nine’s FISTFUL OF JOKES night. I got to hand out with a couple old friends, including Burke, one of the guitar players from my old band SaveFace. It reminded me how much I love hanging out with my punk rock friends, and swapping stories - Especially when those stories always involve lines like, “Oh yeah! Her dipshit boyfriend is the one I sprayed with that fire extinguisher.”

Anyway, I don’t know if it’s my FAVORITE story, but I do like this one.

SaveFace was an east coast punk band. At the same time we were playing out, there was another Saveface (no capital “f”) from Bakersfield, CA. They were a Christian rock band. Every once in a while, there would be a massive miscommunication with someone booking shows, and one of us would end up at a gig intended for the other. Which is how my band of functioning alcoholics and potheads ended up playing at a Christian teen center.  

I knew immediately what had happened when I saw all the paintings of bible scenes hung on the walls. And then I heard a cute girl quoting Leviticus and I knew we were officially screwed. But we decided to just try to power through it. We figured if we kept our heads down, played real loud, and tried to refrain from swearing, we should be in good shape. I didn’t think it would be a problem, as out songs, unlike most punk bands, didn’t have any swearing in the lyrics. (I actually sat in our van with our lyrics sheets asking questions of our drummer like, “Can I say “bastard”? I’m using it in a sentence.”)

Three songs in we ran into trouble when our lead guitar player broke two strings at the same time. One broken string we could handle. Two meant the song ground to a screeching halt, and we had to kill a minute or so while he tuned his back-up guitar.

I thought I’d try to warm up the crowd a little with my comedy stylings. “So,” I said, “any of you guys want to hear an off-color joke?”

A young man in the front row looked up at me with wide-eyed sincerity and politely said, “No thank you.”

At this moment our bass player asked me for the microphone. This took me by surprise, as it was completely unprecedented. Jeff was laconic to the point of being practically mute. He NEVER asked me for the microphone. Stunned, I handed it over. Which, as it turned out, was my fatal mistake.

“What the fuck is up with this fucking town?” he began. “I went to get something to fucking eat and there’s nothing on this whole fucking block. I ended up getting a fucking sandwich from a fucking gas station and eating it on the fucking curb. And now I’ll probably get the fucking shits. It’s fucking ridiculous.”

Then he handed the microphone back to me. I looked at him and then looked at the crowd who were staring at us with jaws agape, perhaps starting to realize that we were not the nice Christian boys from California they had expected. All I could think to say was, “Dude. You can’t say “sandwich” here.”

Slewo asks: What do you think is the biggest problem facing comics today?

Lack of readership, probably. But that’s kind of the nature of the beast. I know that it’s semi-heretical for me to say this about my beloved comics, but I’m not sure that we will ever see what we want, which is for the medium to be as popular (or at least as ubiquitous) as other forms of entertainment.

Reading in general seems to be on the downslide. A few years ago, I was sitting outside of a public library, waiting for a friend to meet me for lunch. I saw a trio of high-school aged girls walking by. They were having one of those conversations that are at a volume where you cannot help but hear it. You’re not eavesdropping, you’re just not deaf.

Girl #1: “Omigod. I was at the mall with April yesterday. And she bought a BOOK.”
Girl #2: “Ungh. Who READS?”

What do you do with that? Short of following them to their cars and clubbing them to death like baby seals.

Now add to that the difficulties in starting to read comics if you don’t already. Jenny brought up a really good point to me recently that for us, it’s completely reflexive and unconscious, but for strangers to the form, it can be difficult to follow the art, the word bubbles, and the flow of the panels. It’s like jazz, sometimes. You have to LEARN to appreciate certain aspects of the art form. And who has time for that when there’s shit like “Jersey Shore” to watch.

But I’ll still keep trying, man. I support the “April”s of the world.

Thatguyfromsyracuse  asks: How much are you looking forward to NYCC? I mean, you ARE going, right? PLEASE!

I am pants-wettingly excited to go to New York ComicCon this year. I missed last year because my eyeball issues had JUST started, and I couldn’t see a thing. But this year I will be there come hell or high water. Grayhaven Comics is fixing to have a booth at the show, and I have already volunteered to pull a couple of shifts, so I will be there hawking issues of the Gathering to all comers.

Even though I missed last year, I still had one of the nicest experiences of my life as a result of that show. Pat Loika drafted up a get-well poster featuring me as eyepatched superspy Nick Fury, and all of my buddies from the Bendisboard signed it. Including Bendis himself.



He signed it, "Ha Ha! Loser!" I love this guy.



And of course, I also got this gem in my email. A show of solidarity from my brethren.

I have some of the greatest friends in the world. I don’t say it enough.

Ryudo says:  I would also like to hear you talk more about small press, your graphic novel, and your involvement with the Gathering.

The graphic novel is coming along. The artist has most of the script now, and I am finishing up editing on the last quarter of the book. It should be around 100 pages or so. We’re working to put a pitch together, and I will probably have it in hand before NYCC. Once the pitch is done, I’ll feel comfortable talking about details. Watch this space for art previews down the road.

The Gathering is one of those things that makes me love comics. Nobody involved is trying to get rich or sell a movie script. It’s just good people making great comics. People who want more exposure to the industry and to hone their chops among their peers. Andrew has really grown this thing by leaps and bounds, and I am delighted to be a part of it. It’s certainly given me the courage to go after my creative goals in a more aggressive manner. I wouldn’t be writing a 100-page graphic novel had Andrew not given me that first shot at getting something published.

I was very fortunate to have Andrew invite me to be part of the second volume of the Gathering. And double lucky to get to work with Pat Loika on the art. I like doing short form stuff a lot. It’s a unique challenge, to make those 2 or 4 or 6 pages contain the body of your story. I tried to make something in that issue that would be fun for Pat to draw (crazy Kirby-esque space giants) and also to create something that could completely stand alone. I think some writers use short form stuff to try to pitch a larger idea, and that just kind of leaves me cold. I’ve never read a short prose story that was trying to audition to be a novel. If you have two pages, the whole story should be in those two pages.

In Fear Itself: Home Front, Howard Chaykin is doing these little one page snippets, and they’re brilliant. Just these tiny little emotional gutpunches of human cost in the middle of a larger story. Good stuff.

Now how succesful I was at making a good two-page story depends on who you talk to. a lot of people seemed to like it. Andrew said he liked it. My mother said, "Is that it?" The one professional review I saw basically called it "stupid but harmless". The nice part about being in a painfully obscure punk band in the era of the internet, though, is how it thickens your skin to bad reviews. Just by virtue of nobody calling me a "fat faggot", it was still one of the nicest batch of reviews I have ever recieved. :)

And honestly, I watched some guy go apeshit on Twitter last night and threaten to "slap the shit" out of poor Stephen Wacker over the decision to cancel Uncanny X-Men. I can handle "stupid but harmless".

I have one more bit of business coming out from the Gathering this year, in the “Big Book of Horror” issue. Then in 2012, I have stories running (hopefully) in the Sci-Fi and Western themed issues, plus possibly one more. Watch this space for that announcement  

Ryudo also asks:  What are your favorite Disney World attractions?

Tower of Terror and the Aerosmith coaster are a lot of fun. I love the dinosaur ride in Animal Kingdom. Haunted Mansion for sure. Magic Kingdom is for certain my favorite of the parks. I kind of want to be buried there.

Artimoff asks - H0w's y0ur eye d0ing?

Coming along nicely, thank you for asking. I should be getting new glasses in the next few weeks that should hopefully put my left eye vision at 20/60, which is a huge improvement over the 20/400 I was at. The right eye is “quiescent”, which I thought was a fabulous word to hear.

Thanks, guys!

I also got a couple questions on Marvel versus DC, particularly the DC relaunch (which I think I covered pretty well last week), and Marvel’s “Fear Itself” event. I’ll get to talking about Fear Itself soon (spoiler alert: I fucking love it).

TALKING TO MY WIFE (Part Two)

Jenny is sitting next to me while I play “Mass Effect 2”, a major portion of which involves scanning planets for mineral resources and then plundering them.

Jenny: “Commander Shepard is a dick.”
Me: “No he’s not! He’s the hero of the galaxy.”
Jenny: “He’s raping all of the natural resources from all of these planets.”
Me: “I never leave them “depleted”. I always stop when the resources are just “poor”. It’s okay.”
Jenny: “You leave the planets with “poor” resources? You’re a monster.”
Me: “Look, all of these planets are uninhabited anyway!”
Jenny: “Why, what happens when they are inhabited.”
Me”… Well… usually I end up going down there with two friends and killing everything that moves. “
Jenny: “Commander Shepard is a dick.”

A little while later…

Jenny: “You should scream “I drink your milkshake” while you’re doing this.”

HELP US MAKE MORE COMICS

GrayHaven comics is running another Kickstarter campaign to continue to help fund publication of the Gathering, and other small press titles. The original goal was $1,000, which we managed to blow past like it was standing still. Now there's a whole new set of challenges. For every extra thousand we raise, Andrew will put another issue on the schedule for next year. Contributers will have first dibs on pitching to those issues. If you're an indie comics enthusiast, and would like a shot at writing a short story of your own, this is a great opportunity. even if you have no industry ambitions, get in there and throw a couple bucks at the project so we can continue to make amazing anthology comics and continue to give new artists and writers a chance to show their stuff.

That's all for now. Tune in next time when I talk about my newfound appreciation for the UK's national superhero.

Hugs and kisses, (The)Travis