Comic Book Industry Ambitions

Talking with my wife…

Jenny has been burning the candle at both ends lately, and has been going to sleep early to try to make up for it. The other night, I tucked her into bed, with the intention to then go play Skyrim for a few hours.

Jenny: “This is nice. It feels like you’re tucking me into bed in your house in Whiterun, and then you’re going to go out and slay dragons and have adventures.”

Me: “You would HATE that, because it would mean my housecarl was sitting in the corner, watching you sleep. That’s creepy.“

Jenny: “It’s cool. I’d be like, ‘BITCH! Get me a sweet roll!’”

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Been busy this month, and not just because I have been swapping out all of the time I normally reserve for sleep and food intake for hours logged in Skyrim. (I have been considering marrying my housecarl in Solitude, not because I love her, but because she has been sleeping on a pile of hay in my basement, and it makes me feel really guilty.) I’m doing research for a couple projects, and realizing that my research skills have totally atrophied since I was in college. I keep mentioning that I need to go to the library, and people look at me like I am out of my mind. “Uh, haven’t you ever heard of the INTERNET?” The truth is that I don’t quite TRUST the internet. You can always tell when someone has done all their research on Wikipedia. They end up writing a WWII epic where Captain America fights Chip Hitler.

(And now I kind of want to write a comic about Hitler’s slacker younger brother, Chip. He’s just as horrible as Adolf, but because he’s so lazy and unmotivated, nobody really cares.)

Anyway, if you’re a librarian, and there’s a fat guy wandering around you screaming “WHERE’S THE FUCKING MICROFICHE?”, that’s me. Sorry for the noise.

The next three months or so will see a bunch of new stuff from me. GrayHaven Comics will be releasing the Sci-Fi, Fairy Tale, and Silver Age themed issues of The Gathering, and I have stories in each of those volumes. Please check them out. I’m insanely proud of all three of those stories, and super-impressed with the artwork turned out by Chris Page, Leonardo Gonzalez, and Edward Whatley, respectively.

Also, I got the word that I will be anchoring GrayHaven’s table at this year’s MoCCA Fest with Gathering editors Doug Hahner and Erica Heflin. So come visit!

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Comic Book Industry Ambitions

Not the obvious ones. Not “I want to write Spider-Man someday.”, or “Hey, DC, I have a killer idea for a Creeper mini.” (Although both of those are true.) I mean the less obvious stuff. The little things that let me know I’ve “made it”.

When I first formed a punk band, just after college, I set a handful of goals for myself. None of them were “Get a record deal and become a rich and famous rock star”. That was on my mind, of course, but that was the forest, and I wanted to focus on the trees. I wanted to make sure I didn’t get so obsessed with the big picture goal of “making it” that I didn’t enjoy what I had while I had it. On the list were things like;

·        Play a show at Toad’s Place.

·        Open for my favorite local band, Big Mistake.

·        Open for my OTHER favorite local band, Spring Heeled Jack, USA.

·        Play a show out of state.

·        Go on tour.

·        Get a hug from the lead singer of NYC ska band Metro Stylee.

·        Rock out in front of that girl I had a crush on in high school. (The one who would go on to date Chris Carabba.)

And you know what? I did all of those things. I never became a rich and famous rock star, but I did get to do all of those cool things that, to me, were part of the process of someday BECOMING a rich and famous rock star. And they were all AWESOME.

So with that in mind, I have, recently been composing a list of my Comic Book Industry Ambitions. The little stuff. The fun stuff. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to write Spider-Man. But maybe I can get some of these other things done.

COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY AMBITION #17: Ride a roller-coaster with Dan Slott.

I love Dan Slott. He just seems like the sweetest, most fun guy. And he’s kicking so much ass on Amazing Spider-Man that it’s on my pull list again after a five plus year absence. He also does the best impression of The Thing I have ever heard. Every time we see Dan Slott at a convention, my wife is overcome by the urge to give him a hug. That’s the kind of guy he is.

(On a side note, Dan Slott was the ONE guy from Marvel I saw in the audienceat last year’s stellar “Women Of Marvel” panel at NYCC. He’s a really good dude.)

I think it would be fun to ride a roller coaster with Dan Slott. Especially if, as we crest that first rise, he looks at me and says, “Uh-oh, Stretch-o! I think it’s Clobbering Time!”

COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY AMBITION #38: Touch Jason Aaron’s beard.

Everybody talks about Alan Moore’s beard. And yeah, it’s pretty great. The standard by which all comic book beards are judged. But Jason Aaron’s beard is special. I think it’s full of secrets and wonders. Also, I should mention that Wolverine and the X-Men is my favorite X-title in forever, and I say that as a huge X-geek, so that should tell you something.

 I should note that I would never TRY to touch Mr. Aaron's beard without prior, clearly expressed, non-equivocal permission. Because he looks like one of the dudes from Sons of Anarchy, and I have no doubt he could beat me up pretty badly.

Plus, there could be a leprechaun with a machinegun in there. Or a bear trap. Just too much potential for mayhem.  

COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY AMBITION #54: Do something good enough that Laura Hudson calls me “A Good Egg”

Laura Hudson is the very sharp, very cool Editor-in-Chief for Comics Alliance. She writes articles that make me think, and she takes an inordinate amount of shit from the fanboy community at large. I wrote a blog a while back about one of her more controversial articles, and how the end result for me was a reminder to be more careful when I was writing, and to try to do justice to the women in my life with the characters I create and portray. (Also, when I’m writing women, I try to imagine that if I do something creepy or fanboyish, Kelly Sue DeConnick will swat me on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.)

I really want, someday, to write a comic that makes Laura Hudson give me a thumbs-up. That’ll definitely tell me I’m doing something right.  

COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY AMBITION #73: Write, Direct, and Co-Produce "Indie Comics Roadtrip"I had the Comedians of Comedy documentary on as background noise while I worked the other day. And I started thinking how much fun it would be to get a posse of my favorite indie comics friends together and spend a year hitting every major con. Just get in a van with Pat Loika, Jef UK, Len Wallace, Amanda Rachels, Chris Page, and any other indie comic folks I could get to join in and make a documentary on the fucking thing.

It would mostly be hours of footage of us being stuck in traffic while I scream obscenities at other drivers, me trying to get Pat Loika to do his Lars Ulrich impression, and Chris Page and me doing our impressions of Amanda Rachels when she's not around to hear us and take revenge on our flabby, weak bodies with her hammer-like fists.

I'd watch that.

COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY AMBITION #85: Continue to grow the "Indie Comics Poop Text" mailing list

Over the past year or two, a bunch of my friends have invented, and participated, on-and-off, in the "poop text" game. Fairly simple rules. When you're making twosies, you text everyone on the list and let them know. My list has a bunch of my bestest buddies in the field of woefully obscure comics talent on it. Not mentioning any names, of course.

I'd like to see this list grow, and really get some bigger name creators on this. Jamie Rich WANTS to let me know when he's pooping. He's just afraid to admit it.


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Follow me on Twitter @travisholyfield and look for the tag #comicindustryambitions for more of these, as they occur to me.

 

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My poor mother saw that AMC was going to have a show called “Comic Book Men”. She also saw that it had something to do with Kevin Smith. And because she loves me more than I probably deserve, she called me up, all excited to tell me about it.

(Let me say this in no uncertain terms – My mom is AWESOME for things like this, and has been my entire life. She doesn’t share my interests, but she has always made a point of knowing enough about them to tune me into things she sees that relate. The poor woman went through the 80s knowing the secret identity of every single member of the X-Men. If there’s an Eisner award for awesome mothers to geeky children, I’d like to nominate her.)

I watched the first episode and… Yikes. Really guys? You couldn’t make it through the first episode without talking about which superheroine you’d most like to bang? Way to not perpetuate any stereotypes. I was left just feeling thoroughly “meh”. Not for me, sadly. But thanks for trying, mom.

(Also, the show is called “Comic Book Men”, but really should be called “Let’s Be Horrible to the Asian Kid”.)

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I WROTE SOME THINGS THAT PEOPLE LIKED!

There have been a handful of reviews for Volume 6 (Further Into the Abyss) of GrayHaven Comics’ Gathering anthology. And people have been really positive in their evaluations of the book in general, and my story, “Jack, Unblinking” in specific.

“…it is end story Jack, Unblinking by Travis M. Holyfield and Chris Page that leaves a lasting impression. A creepy and sad tale that is quite the twist on a well loved children's toy.”

You can check out some reviews here:

http://therottingzombie.blogspot.com/2012/01/gathering-comic-anthology-issue-4-and-6.html

http://girlsreadcomics.com/2012/01/20/review-further-into-the-abyss-the-gathering-vol-6/

http://artbyarion.blogspot.com/2012/01/arcadio-bolanos-gathering-vol-6-further.html

Hugs and kisses,

(The)Travis

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.

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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

FASERIP Forever!

Recently, on the Bendis Board, poster Adam Greenberger started a thread reminiscing about the old Marvel Super Heroes Role Playing Game from TSR. Holy shit, the memories that came flooding back.

I started playing pen and paper RPGs in 6^th Grade. This was in the olden days, of course, so I didn't have the options available to the youth of today. No MMORPGs. It was pen and paper or nothing. At the time, I was enrolled in a parochial school, so expressing an interest in Dungeons and Dragons would have been the equivalent of yelling “HAIL SATAN!” at your homeroom teacher. I was a huge comic book nerd, though, and I kept seeing ads in the back of Marvel comics for this game that would let you take on the role of your favorite super heroes. I NEEDED this game.

Again, this was that murky time before the internet, so my options for securing game materials were limited. I had to patiently save my pennies and then con my parents into driving me an hour away to the one game store I could find; the late, lamented Flock Stock & Barrel.

For the next four years, I would spend Saturday after Saturday unleashing all manner of cosmic comic mayhem in the Merry Marvel Manner on my friends and schoolmates. Once good old Pat Coleman moved away, I was the only hardcore comic book fan in my circle, so there were some fairly hilarious communication breakdowns as I tried to wrap my friends up in the machinations of Marvel’s most nefarious. For example, an ongoing argument as to the origins of Radioactive Man’s powers (“For the thousandth time, he did NOT live on Three Mile Island!”), and a seemingly impenetrable fog of confusion as to the Wrecking Crew (“So it’s like the Village People, but they’re ALL the construction worker?”). Also, I had at least one childhood chum who could not fathom why superheroes didn’t just shoot the bad guys, ala Dirty Harry. He would spend half of his time as Spider-Man trying to buy a handgun.

In the early going I used the pre-written modules TSR produced. My favorite was FAULTLINE, where the heroes had to race against time to thwart a bombing in NYC (Not a scenario that could probably play nowadays). Also, being a huge X-Men fan, I naturally gravitated to any chance to run a mutant-centric module. (Although those game days usually collapsed in arguments as to who would get to be Wolverine. )

Eventually, I started writing my own adventures. I will admit to a certain lack of sophistication to the plots, initially. Although my friends never seemed to catch on to the whole “The Villians Spell Their Name with the Stores They Rob” scheme until it was almost too late. By the time they figured out what was going on, the Wrecking Crew was down to the second “R”.  

My favorite string of adventures came my freshman year of high school. I had purchased the Avengers sourcebook, which contained an adventure in which the players made brand new heroes and then started an “Avengers Experimental Franchise” in their hometown. (I wonder if the brains behind the Avengers: Initiative comics ever played that adventure). My players started AEF-CT, and based their headquarters in what was, at the time, an abandoned Sears department store in Manchester, Connecticut. Over the next year and change, a rotating team of homegrown heroes arrested the Taskmaster, bested Ultron, trounced the Mole Man, and handed the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants their collective asses not once, but twice.

At that point, I started devoting all of my RPG energy to the various iterations of Dungeons & Dragons. 20 years later, I still have a weekly D&D game, and I still love RPGs as much as I did. But I do miss those early innocent days of superheroism, friendship, and Spider-Man with a handgun.

For your entertainment, re-created as faithfully as I could remember, I present two of the founding members of the AEF-CT – Phoenix (originally created by Brian Wiatr), and Nightbird (originally created by Johanna Mead). (Thanks to HeroMachine 3.0 for the images.)

PHOENIX  

Fighting  - Good (10)
Agility – Remarkable (30)  
Strength – Good (10)
Endurance – Incredible (40)
Reason – Remarkable (30)
Intuition – Good (10)
Psyche – Excellent (20)

POWERS:
Fire Generation (Incredible) – Phoenix can generate flames and heat at will.
Fire Control (Amazing) – Phoenix can control existing flames and heat, shaping them, enlarging them, or extinguishing them.
Energy Sheath (Remarkable) – Phoenix can surround his body with an aura of flames, giving him protectiong from energy and physical attacks.
Carrier Wave (Incredible) – By projecting flames behind him, Phoenix can fly through the air.

TALENTS:
Computer Science

NIGHTBIRD  

Fighting  - Amazing (50)
Agility – Excellent (20)  
Strength – Incredible (40)
Endurance – Amazing (50)
Reason – Excellent (20)
Intuition – Good (10)
Psyche – Good (10)

POWERS:
True Invulnerability (Incredible) – Nightbird is highly resistant to physical damage.
Hyper-Leaping (Remarkable) – Nightbird can make leaps of up to 40 feet.

TALENTS:
Espionage; Law enforcement; Martial Arts A,B,C,D,E; Acrobatics  

This blog is for Brian, and Johanna, and Matt, Jason, Benji, Pat, Beth, Heather, Steve, Delio, Kristie, Ben, and any other members of the AEF-CT I may have forgotten.

LEONARDO GONZALEZ IS THE MAN

Leonardo Gonzalez is an insanely talented artist I am lucky enough to be working with on the forthcoming “Fairy Tale” issue of GrayHaven Comics’ “The Gathering” anthology. Everybody needs to go pick up a copy of Haunt #19, where you can see Leo’s art!

To celebrate the new creative team of Joe Casey and Nathan Fox, Image Comics ran a contest for fan art to grace the issue. Leo came in fourth overall, and then his piece was chosen by Joe Casey to appear in the book!

Congratulations to Leo, who is an awesome collaborator, a fantastic artist, and a genuinely good guy.

Here’s a preview of one of Leo’s page from our Gathering story, “The Heartbreak Tree”.

So go! Run and buy Haunt #19! Right now!

Hugs and kisses,

(The)Travis