CCF Poster, New Project and A Decade of Dancing: The Challenge

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Washington DC Counter Culture Festival has a poster:


The poster features Matt Dembicki on pencils, Jacob Warrenfeltz on inks and Evan Keeling on colors. Speaking of Jacob, he’s putting together the DC Conspiracy’s next anthology, Shear Terror, in which I’ll have a story illustrated by Chris Piers and inked by Jacob himself. Every 8-page story will incorporate a pair of scissors and the story we’re working on is sort of “Tell Tale Scissors” – should be a good time.
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We would go out dancing twice a month in Boston, sometimes more (especially Junior year when we started swing dancing). At the time I was still with R and about half of the time I went out dancing with her and her friends – the other times I went with my friends.

This particular night R and her friends were drinking heavy at her place before we hit the clubs. We were getting a little silly, having a good time, when at some point I told R to make out with her best (female) friend and to my surprise she did. It was – very, very, very, very hot. And I just sort of sat there stunned watching it all go down, mouth agape. I silently thanked God for this perfect moment and he reminded me that homosexuality is a sin and I said, “God – if these two chicks making out is a sin then I don’t want to be righteous.” He sort of took a step back and watched for a minute and blessed it as “righteous times tubular”, admitting he was misquoted on the whole “sin” thing anyway. The actual Leviticus quote, it turns out, is: “You should not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination. After homosexual sex you should talk sports and politics instead of mumbling something about work tomorrow and turning on your side.”

Going to the club that night I was like a five-year old kid, glowing with excitement. One of R’s friends (who didn’t witness the glorious kiss) asked me why I was so happy and I shouted “R and so-and-so made out!” loud enough to get R turn around and give me a nasty look. I didn’t learn my lesson, however, instead telling R’s friend that R doesn’t like to get her exit-hole licked (R’s friend, on the other hand, loved to get it licked). Now that little exchange REALLY pissed R off and she just gave me the look of death – the coldest, hardest fish-eye any man has ever seen. I was upset, thinking I totally killed whatever might have happened between me, R and her new make-out buddy, and R’s friend had to console me and tell me that at some point, she’s sure I’d get it on with two girls. To this day it remains one of the most surreal and retrospectively humorous conversations I’ve ever had.

We get to the club, pay the crazy high cover charge, and get some drinks with the fake IDs we own. The positive energy is back and we get to the dance floor and start having a good time. Whereas I am a bad dancer, I always had fun and that sort of made me a good dancer to have around. R’s friends where boring dancers. They all wanted to look cool and sexy and never really seemed to have fun. They all did this weird dance that made them look like they were riding a horse. In order to spice up the night a bit and keep the sexual energy high – I made a challenge with R.

I picked out a guy and she picked out a girl – the challenge was to get the person to dance sexually with you first. Being drunk, this seemed like a perfectly fair challenge. It also seemed like no bad come from it. She accepted the challenge.

Within five second she was grinding with the guy – I don’t think I even talked to the girl yet. I admitted defeat and took a seat in the corner while R had her victory dance. About five minutes later, her friend (the one that consoled me earlier) came up to me and told me I should “save” R. She had this dire look on her face that I’ve seen many times before – when you’re the lone guy in a group you get called on to “save” a lot of your girl friends – risking a punch in the face for a kiss on the cheek and a thanks.

I figured R gave her “the look”. Maybe the dancing was getting a little too close. So I walk over to them and she has her ass pressed against his pelvis and she’s smiling at me. I reach my hand out to cut in and she says, “I’m fine.” I think I would have been ok with that, really. I love to dance and I dance close with all the ladies – still do – so I’d be an asshole if I had a problem with my lady dancing close with someone else.

I would have been fine.

If he didn’t smile at me and say, “Yeah, just go away.”

And you know what, I probably would have been fine there, as well, if R reacted like a girlfriend should have and stopped dancing with this guy. But instead, she kept dancing. While smiling at me.

Maybe she wanted to me to get tough? So I grab her wrist and try to pull her away to which she coldly tells me, “I said, I’m fine.”

And the guy says, “Don’t you listen?” I’ve never been in this type of situation before – do I punch the guy? I’m actually quite fond of punching people when I have a good excuse but will that just piss R off and ruin my double team action? So I did what any man would do – I stormed into the bathroom and bummed a cigarette off of the first person I saw.

I was fucking fuming. I wanted nothing more than to go out to that guy and drop him. Hard. But instead I sucked down my cigarette and calmed myself down. By the time I got out of the bathroom R was off the dance floor and acting as if what just happened was no big deal. I tried to explain to her that it was an insult to my manhood and if I had any less self control I would have broken that kid’s face. She just sort of laughed it off.

And when all was said and done – I never got double teamed by R and her friend. A couple of months later we broke up.

Gulf Coast and A Decade of Dancing: Prom

The Gulf Coast tragedy is fucking me up a bit as I’m sure it’s doing to you all as well. I kind of wanted to do something to help while having a little fun and making a statement so here's what I’m going to do. These past two days of storytelling ( here and here) have gotten me all nostalgic for early/mid 90s hip-hop that they used to play when I went to teen clubs. I picked out ten of them and extracted about 8-20 seconds of each. I’m going to link to them below. The first person to get the song and the artist for each track and post them in the comments section I’ll send them there choice of the following three graphic novels: Kabuki: Metamorphosis (David Mack), The Wicked West (Livingston, Tinnell and Vokes), or Filler (Rob G and Rick Spears) (used, of course, fresh from my bookshelf) plus the first three issues of Elk’s Run if you don’t have them and donate a hundred bucks to the Red Cross Relief efforts in their name. I’m kind of assuming that someone will get it eventually. If you don’t know the answer, feel free to pass this around until someone does get it. As important as it is to donate the money, the statement is equally important to motivate people (and if the answer is posted within five minutes, the statement is still important). If I can drop a hundred bucks and one of my favorite graphic novels, each of you can take two comics out of your monthlies and drop the minimum five bucks the Red Cross is asking for. Plus, the free copies of Elk's Run are going to be better than whatever it is you're giving up. RJ and Jorge are disqualified automatically since you guys love hip-hop as much as me, but in fairness I’ll send each of you one of the leftover graphic novels.

The songs are:
1) Track 1
2) Track 2
3) Track 3
4) Track 4
5) Track 5
6) Track 6
7) Track 7
8) Track 8
9) Track 9
10) Track 10

Good luck. For now, it’s story time…

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Prom was a close call – I almost didn’t have a date. Jackie, Mary and I were going to go together – I can’t remember who got a date first. I think Mary did, causing Jackie and I to scramble for dates. My boy Paul told R that I wanted to go with the prom her and she asked me. Taken off guard and attracted to R, I said “yes” instantly.

We made our arrangements – since R and I rolled in different circles we needed to accommodate both sets of friends. We rode to the prom in my limo (shared by G and his date, Max, Jeromeo, B and his date, Jackie and her date and Mary with her date) and left the prom in hers (shared by a bunch of Asian people).

Got my tux, I went with B and G to get ours and picked out a white tux. I actually never wore a black tux in my life, always preferring the white. Even now when I go to schmoozing functions in DC I get some sort of white tux – I’ve always felt less stiff wearing it.

The night of the prom I went out to R’s house where the limo picked us, Jackie and Mary met us there. R actually made her own dress which I thought was wicked cool but now when people look at the pictures they comment “what an ugly dress”. It was functional, though – the long gown like portion ripped off and became a mini-shirt – she was innovative, I’ll give you that.

The second stop was at G’s house (which was only five blocks away from were I grew up) and the joke of the night became the complete lack of effort G’s girl put into her prom get-up. No make-up, cheesy little dress she got at the Gap – just not typical prom-fare.

We go out to some hotel in Manhattan – I believe it was a Marriot – and get down to the business of meeting, greeting, eating and partying. And damn did I party.

I don’t think I left the dance floor at any time except to eat. With R, without her – it didn’t matter. As the night progressed the jacket came off, then the bowtie, then the cufflinks, the shoes, the cummerbund. I was sweaty, smelly and had a disturbing gleam in my eyes, like a cokehead five lines down with a crisp five-spot in his pocket.

I was jumping in circles, moving down lines. Getting on the stage and dancing on tables. After the prom, looking through other people’s pictures, nearly everyone had a picture of me dancing in it. It was unavoidable – I was “that” guy.

I danced with R, too obviously. The slow dances, some house beats. But every time she complained about her feet hurting I spun her off the floor and grabbed the closest chick. I even did all of the novelty dances – the Electric Slide, the Chicken Dance, the “Cent, Five Cent, Ten Cent, Dollar” dance, the Macarena – I never do novelty dances. I mean, seriously, look at this fucker move:


After the prom I went with R’s friends to some club in Manhattan –it was dead, most of us teenagers opted to find places to fuck rather than go to some after party. We didn’t stay too long. We took the limo to Rockaway Beach, hung out for a bit with various partiers and then went back to R’s house where we spent the whole night joking around and having a good time.

We got some Dim Sum at 10ish before going back to our respective houses and passing the fuck out. I slept for about fifteen hours and woke up satisfied – it was a good prom even without getting laid.

Catching-Up and A Decade of Dancing: Busting a Move

Besides getting sun-burned badly and spending Sunday and Monday sick as all hell I managed to write this entire week’s stories and two Here’s the Thing… columns, one one called “Fan Fiction (and other ways to waste your time)” and one called “Usually” which I really like and will be going up this Friday. Also, I read the first Harry Potter book and the first hundred pages of the second. I found the first on to be incredible, the second one is a little weak in certain areas but still amusing. Just like my website, I guess. And on that note…

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Dancing was ridiculous in the early 90s. Whereas it was something you did for fun, there was also a competitive angle to it, and you had to be up on the latest moves in order to hang at the local teen clubs. In order to not look like a complete idiot (despite being dressed like one and acting like one) you needed to practice your moves while not in the club – and my friends and I would indeed get together and practice dancing.

Dave, local kid from the block, and I would practice regularly. Sometimes some of the other local kids would stop by but usually Dave and I would get together at his place, throw some Rob Bass (It Takes Two) in the box and practice our fly moves.

All of the dances that you guys made fun of when you saw them on House Party – the Running Man, the Cabbage Patch, the Roger Rabbit – those were the moves we taught ourselves. The Running Man was the first move we learned, you start slow and eventually begin really doing it hard – the legs moved in more exaggerated motions as the arms reached higher into the air – pulling down a whole lot of nothing.

The Roger Rabbit came next. One foot behind the next, sort of backwards skipping in place while you pulled your arms back repeatedly. An advanced dancer (such as myself) would occasionally do the stutter step – you put the left foot behind the right but instead of instantly putting the right foot behind the left you just sort of hop back and forth – like a rabbit – a Roger Rabbit, no less.

Once you get the hang of all of the basic moves you can start moving onto group moves. Kid and Play did this thing where they walk up to each other and tap their right feet together. They then lock hands, jump around in a circle on one foot (remember, their feet are still together) and eventually break apart – into a Roger Rabbit, possibly.

The Holy Grail for non-double jointed dancers was the ability to do the actual Kid & Play. This was where you grabbed your left foot with your right hand and then jumped in the air; put your right leg through the loop made by your left leg/right arm.

Ladies and Gentlemen – I was able to do the Kid & Play.

It took many practice sessions to perfect and I occasionally let go of my leg in mid-air no matter how good I got but chances are if I was busting a move on the dance floor I could pull off a Kid & Play.

But it gets better.

I could do a split. Still can, actually. And I used to be able to loop the leg twice and on the third time, land in a split. Come back up and go into the Running Man. It was really the pinnacle of my dance moves, reserved for the illest jam. I’d bust it out at the perfect moment – a circle forms and there are a couple of fly girls on the rim – I’d tap my foot three times, Kid & Play front, Kid & Play back, Kid & Play front to a split, come up (maybe quickly re-split) Running Man while the entire crowd shouts “Ohhhhhhhhhhh!”

When I try to Kid & Play now I tend to break my face. But at the same time, I don’t have practice sessions anymore.

A Decade of Dancing: Put On Your Dancing Shoes

No blurb today – I spent the evening burnt red with cold sweats, nausea and a major headache. The sun fucked me up so bad – God damn you, Myrtle Beach.
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I think the first time I “danced” with a girl that wasn’t a family member was in the 7th grade. My Junior High School was having a dance in the cafeteria and for some reason I thought it would be a really good idea to go. This was the JHS, mind you, where half the school was black and Latino from Red Hook, half was Italian mobster in training from Carroll Gardens and about sixty of us (including me) where nerds from all walks of life. And for some reason, I thought it was a good idea to go to a dance in the cafeteria.

Most of my friends thought I was nuts and hardly anyone else went. I made sure to go with Dwayne because he was, you know, black, figuring everything would be OK. We get to the cafeteria, grab a soda and see a circle forming on the dance floor, people shooting, “Go! Go! Go!”

We walk over to the circle and it takes about five seconds for me to get pushed in. The six-foot tall white kid with the slicked back hair and mullet, fake glasses, silk shirt and peace emblem hanging from my neck – I should have seen it coming.

I get raped on the dance floor – big black asses flying through the air and ramming into my pelvis while everyone laughs. I sort of pumped my first in the air while I got bounced around the circle, everyone on the outside chanting, “Go whiteboy! Go whiteboy! Go whiteboy!”

I eventually managed to sneak out of the circle and left the party – realizing that I really don’t like dancing.

A year later we were going on our senior trip. They only offered the yearly trips to the smart students so it was a break from the daily shit we dealt with at school and a welcomed one at that. I talked about our 7th grade trip already, to Pocono Peak. They followed-up that awesome trip involving cliff diving, soft ball and water balloon fights with a one-day trip to a Dude Ranch.

Dude Ranch and city folk is a bad combination. And to make it worse, they were having a dance for us that night, like a prom of sorts, and we all felt the need to get dressed up. So here I was – my usual fly gear – at a dirty, disgusting, shit infested Dude Ranch. I did a good job of staying clean – I choose to do indoor activities like square dancing lessons and watching old spaghetti Westerns. That is until an hour before the dance, when I decided to squeeze in some horseback riding.

City boys don’t get to ride horses. And when a pretty girl invites you along, you do it. I rode my horse across the trail and when I got back my ultra-fly khakis where caked in mud and horse shit. I was a bit embarrassed but I went to the dance anyway, albeit a little less fly.

The dance was typical 8th grade stuff – girls on one side, boys on the other. I don’t know what girls talk about on their side; the boys tend to talk about video games (Genesis being the system of choice at the time) and sports (despite the fact that few of use actually watch it – the conversation was usually “The Mets are the best.” “Nu-uh, Yankees rule.” “C’mon, dude, 1986.” “Whatever, Mets suck”).

But then something magical happened. Over two hundred pounds of love with an entourage started blasting through the speakers. Heads start bobbing as we hear, “Now that we found love what are we gonna do…with it?” Little rumps started shaking, knees started rising up in the air and mouths started spewing lyrics in effigy to the genius that is Heavy D and the Boyz.

Come on, Heavy. Come on, Heavy.

We started dancing – first on our respective sides of the auditorium – eventually moving towards the center. A circle formed, a girl jumps in. Us boys try to push one of our own in. He laughs and fights it, violently shaking his head “no”. He finally caves and begins to dance with the lady and the chants begin: “Go! Go! Go shorty! Go shorty!”

We took turns going in the circle, dancing. Heavy D turned to C&C Music Factory. C&C Music Factory gave way to Snap. And then “Let’s Dance the Last Dance” played, the stereotypical clueless DJ that follows cliché and plays disco music for a bunch of pre-teenagers that abhors it, and it was time to go home.

Ten minutes of dancing that was greatly unlike my first dancing experience. I was born anew, dancing was my new God. We piled on the bus, got back to Brooklyn. I danced home, telling G that I wish we could have stayed longer – I wish I could have danced longer.

And so begin my obsession with dancing – my love – that I’ve stayed faithful to since despite never actually learning how to do it well (or at all, really).

No Thing, My Job and On the Way Down: The Lack of Communication

I did not get to do a Here’s the Thing… for this week. I have skeletons for three articles but never fleshed them out. I was going to try to put it together but I was out drinking tonight and need to get up early tomorrow – it would be rushed. Quality, you know? Next week. I’m going to Myrtle Beach for the weekend and plan on getting some serious writing done. But, I do have…

A lot of people ask me what I do, as an editor. In an attempt to show you the superior quality of the Elk’s Run Bumper Edition I’m going to prove to you that my job is more than just proof-reading. I present my piece for the Bumper Edition, currently being solicited in previews (order #AUG053101 ). In addition to my piece the Bumper Edition also has the first three issue of Elk’s Run, a new Darwyn Cooke cover, original Noel sketches, a forward by Steve Niles, a Datsun Tran cover gallery and a piece on the coloring process by Keating. It’s basically packed with thirty-five metric tons of awesomeness. If you read the piece below (laid out by the always rocking Jason Hanley) and say to yourself “I can use something like that” feel free to contact me (for an editor) or Jason Hanley (for a letterer) and either of us would be glad to help you out.




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I’m hoping that by today you’ll see where this is going, or at least get an idea. I’ll be concluding this particular story sometime in the future, before the one year mark, obviously. Next week – back to the funny. I've decided on the theme: “A Decade of Dancing.” It will be fun.

This whole week is basically one big story that continues a longer story. You can click back if you want to catch-up. Monday has the whole collection of links. Not a great week for newbs, this is more of a pay-off week. This is like starting Watchmen at issue 11 minus Cold War fears and fake alien invasions (SPOILERS!). Feel free to check out the "Best of" to see if you like it here first. Yesterday’s story.

Uncle Alex was always a great man; he just didn’t always make the right decisions. He was a heroin addict back in the day that realized he wasn’t going to quit in New York, moved out to Arizona where his uncle straightened him out. He moved his girlfriend out to Arizona, got married and started a family. He did well for himself, cleaned up 100% and did the right thing. He was always funny, always compassionate and always there for me (he was my Godfather, by the way) – he just stumbled a little along the way.

To say that his past caught up with him is an understatement. His past ran right over him. I’ve talked before about him, about how only my father (and his immediate family, obviously) knew that he had HIV and how he always said that everyone knows what he’s done in the past - if they wanted to know if he had HIV they’d ask. It was partly his way of being strong, of not making people worry, but you have to wonder to what extent he wanted to us some type of lesson? Not a malicious one, but one that would wake us all up a little bit. Right up until the end I didn’t ask and my father respected Uncle Alex’s wishes until after he was dead. I think something needs to be said about communication and how our family always fights over stupid shit that can just be talked out. If anything, Uncle Alex proved to us that we don’t communicate at all.

I had no excuse not to ask him or my father. Especially not at the end, when everyone was going to Arizona. For the lot of you that’ve been with this blog from the beginning, you pretty much know that I’ve been through this already with my cousin Stephen. It fucked me up good and you’d think I’ve learned something from it but, apparently some lessons don’t keep the first time around.

For me, it threatened not to stick the second time around either.

Here I was. Two good friends no longer in BU (one of them finding God and calling me lost), girlfriend dumped me. The relationship between me and two of my best friends was strained because I was unable to handle a really bad situation they had to deal with. My t-shirt company failed. And a summer that started with a dream that I thought was going to come true, filling me with delusions of warped grandeur involving aliens, God and mystery girls, ended with my Godfather, uncle, roll model and great man dying while I opted to stay in Boston and blow it off as “only pneumonia”. If I was smart and learned my lesson I would have communicated. Found someone to talk to. Go home with my family that needed me. Just talked it out. But I was selfish, to say the least, and I tried to pass my problems onto everyone else.

I chomped a big bottle of Tylenol PM combined with my leftover doctor prescribed meds from my penis swelling incident, chased it down with a lot of alcohol and went to sleep.

I now know the medical reason as to why I’m here right now. The combination I took had less than a one percent chance of working (although I have a higher probability of suffering from kidney failure sometime down the line), it was such a Hollywood attempt. But that’s not the point.

The point is, when I woke up, everything changed.

Free Elk's Run, Pressers, Chapters and On the Way Down: Back to Boston

Newsarama posted the first full issue of Elk's Run for those that want to see what the fuss is about.

The always wise Matt Dembicki has posted his new Small Presser column, this one focusing on reviews. Check it out and drop some comments, you know how us blogger types enjoy discourse and proving how smart we are.

I put a deadline on myself to get my first chapter book finished and ready for selling by early December. I found a place that I’ll be able to get it printed off for about a buck-fifty. I’m going to tag it at $4.99 for bookstores, I think, but distribute it through my website for a discount. The first book looks like it’ll be around eighty to ninety pages. It’ll be self-contained but part of a larger story.

It’s funny, when I was thinking about pricing I was focused on tagging it at three-bucks a pop which would basically make it impossible for me to make money through retailers. But then I thought about it – five bucks for 80 pages of strong prose – we all pay three-fifty for twenty-two pages of decompressed story that takes ten minutes to read. Five bucks is a steal. Hopefully the non-comic world thinks so as well.
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Sorry about the weak story yesterday. It was sort of filler; I could have summed it up in a paragraph. It’s like that weak episode you get before the season-finale, it’s just there to get to a point you need to be at but you didn’t need the full time slot to do it. Eh, hopefully today’s turned out better. But first, the disclaimer…

This whole week is basically one big story that continues a longer story. You can click back if you want to catch-up. Monday has the whole collection of links. Not a great week for newbs, this is more of a pay-off week. This is like starting Watchmen at issue 11 minus Cold War fears and fake alien invasions (SPOILERS!). Feel free to check out the "Best of" to see if you like it here first. Yesterday’s story.

I get back to school almost two weeks early for RA training. I move into my dorm room in Towers on the same floor I just lived in for the past two years. The room is small, two tiny windows giving me a view of the new School of Management and hardly a drop of sunlight. I didn’t really meet any of the RAs that first day, I just hunkered down, got some dinner and went to bed early – my first night in Boston in which R and I weren’t together – it was pretty lonely to say the least.

I start RA training and all of the RAs seem pretty cool. I meet Guam for the first time and I originally thought he was gay (seriously, dude, you have that Ultimate Limp-Wrist thing going on whenever you tell a joke). I click with a couple of them, Steph is wicked cool and the exact opposite of my usual crew, I instantly fall in love with Amy because the girl just exudes warmth (seriously, she’ll melt you with a look), Kat (who ends up becoming Robin’s RA) is the fun token drunkard assigned to the German house (the German house has a long history of hiring RAs that party with their residents until they get fired – it’s tradition, really).

I start to find my groove, get comfortable. It’s still lonely at night and RAs, although fun to hang out with, don’t tend to be the “get drunk and get fucked” type (at least not when they hang out with each other). Nights out were more inline with frozen yogurt and a movie.

The training was long – it was 8-12 hours a day for around 5 days. Most of it had a fun element to it except for the suicide prevention and drug prevention training programs. At least we cracked the occasional joke with the drug prevention stuff, the suicide prevention was just horrid – if you so much as smiled you were an insensitive bastard.

Halfway through training my father calls me. It was pretty late on a weeknight, I was sitting on my bench and writing, when my cell phone rings. He tells me that Uncle Alex is sick with pneumonia and he’s flying out to see him. I find it kind of odd but my father and his brother were always close and I thought my pops found a good excuse to make it our to Arizona. He tells me not to worry, but if I want to come out as well he can fly me out. I tell him I can’t I have to finish RA training and I wish him a good trip.

RA training continues. We have this thing out on some island, a team building thing. It’s as fun as team-building can get and it’s followed by a barbeque and some volleyball. We take the boat back to Boston, hang out for a little while and break apart because we’re all beat.

My father calls from Arizona and tells me that the rest of the family is coming out to see Uncle Alex. Grandma, Grandpa – all of the sisters and brothers. My mom’s not going, neither is my sister. He asks me again if I want to come out. I don’t understand what’s going on, I ask him, “It’s only pneumonia, right?”

He assures me that it’s pneumonia but that it’s really serious. I tell him I can’t go; I still have to finish my training. He understands (like he always does) and he tells me he’d keep me posted.

The next day we have the awards dinner, the last day of RA training. We all get dolled up and go eat, dance, have fun. We laugh at the speeches and congratulate ourselves – prepare ourselves for the coming year with words of inspiration and talk of jobs well done.

That night my father calls me up and tells me my Uncle Alex died from complications caused by HIV. They’re having a memorial service later on in the week and in between sobbing he tells me I should go to it. I tell him school is starting and I can’t make it.

I hang up the phone before he can protest and RA, school – everything fades away. I tried to fight it all summer, all last semester but the severity of the situation hits me – life really hasn’t been good lately.

Land, Deb, Ignatz and On the Way Down: Ithaca

I had a wicked cool blurb set up for today but for reasons beyond my control I won’t be able to post it. So I think I’ll just ramble for like five minutes before getting to my story, post and go to bed.

I’ve been sort of fascinated with the Greg Land “tracing” thing that’s popping up on every comic message board. It’s not that I don’t have an opinion but I’ll be the first to say that if Greg Land wanted to work with me I would say “yes” in a heartbeat except it would be muffled because I’d be sucking his dick in an appreciative gesture. With that in mind I plead the fifth but I will say that it makes for some interesting reading. What do you guys think?

My homegirl and fellow DC Conspiracy member Deb Orgel started a blog recently that’s filled with cartoons and musings. Good little read plus, you know, she’s a chick and we can all pretend that comics isn’t a sausage factory boys club but you know as well as I do you’re more likely to buy her books at a con than some dude with emo-glasses and bowling shoes. So you might as well get to know her now before buying her whole catalog. Also check out DCC member Matt Dembicki’s blog, while you’re at it. I would link Chris Piers but that one seems more of a personal thing, not sure what his stance is on that. (EDIT: never mind, here it is.)

And speaking of the DCC, I haven’t pimped this yet but our Dr. Dremo Anthology is on the SPX ballot for best book premiering at SPX. DCC superstar Jacob Warrenfeltz made this little poster for us (and speaking of posters, wait until you see the jam poster Matt, Jacob and Evan are putting together for the Counter Culture Festival):


Story time.
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This whole week is basically one big story that continues a longer story. You can click back if you want to catch-up. Monday has the whole collection of links. Not a great week for newbs, this is more of a pay-off week. This is like starting Watchmen at issue 11 minus Cold War fears and fake alien invasions (SPOILERS!). Feel free to check out the "Best of" to see if you like it here first. Yesterday’s story.

My friends Jackie and Mary are two people that I’ve stayed away from quite a bit on this blog. I mentioned them twice, which is odd, because they were easily two of my best friends throughout high school and college. As I’ve mentioned, however, I really fucked that one up and feel bad talking about them. So I really only bring them out when I have to and although the final chapter in the Jackie and Mary story really doesn’t take place until after college, thus making it an eventual Moose in the Closet Year II story, I think the roots of it all takes place during the summer between sophomore and junior year.

Mary had to go up to school (Cornell) early and Jackie went to neighboring Ithaca so I decided to ride up to Ithaca with Jackie, hang out with her and Mary for the weekend and then come back down to Brooklyn.

On the way we stopped in the Poconos at Jackie’s family’s time share, hung out with the family and had a good time like we always did. I was always close with that family – still miss them all. After the stop it was off to Ithaca for a weekend of friends, fun and forgetting about R.

The road trip was your typical “twenty-years-old and want to have fun” road trip. Music, laughs, stops at random places for pictures. We get to Ithaca, pick up Mary and roll around the town built solely on supporting two college campuses. Did some shopping (they had a pleasant outdoor market of some sort), ate some pizza, picked up some wine and beer.

The town was pretty dead that weekend, the bulk of the students yet to move in. We had a low-key dinner, walked around Cornell’s huge campus, laid in the grass for a while and talked about life. It was sort of restrained – Mary was in a two year long back and forth fucked up relationship, R and I just broke up and Jackie broke up with B (my friend that stopped talking to me after playing strip poker with his ex-girlfriend) a little bit ago – there was some tension emanating from all of us. But nothing like a little alcohol to lighten the mood and get us all talking, which is what happened later on that night.

To preface this, I always had some feelings for Mary, even when I was with R. The feelings spawned from the super-friendship, the closeness that causes one to lower his guard while his emotions run crazy. I think Mary was the only person who didn’t know which means she probably did but never acknowledged it. I always kept my feelings in check. Having never met her boyfriend but hearing the stories (from her, mainly) I couldn’t stand him and having broken up with R recently – I couldn’t stand him even more. But on this trip she promised she was through with him and that made me…complacent.

So we’re drinking. I hear two stories, one from each, which I have no right to ever tell and being that we don’t really talk anymore, no right to even remember. But I heard them and it fucked me up a bit. It fucked all of us up. And here I am, wallowing in misery over R, and I get these two stories that are real heartaches and I feel like the biggest asshole ever. The kind of shit that you think you would never have to deal with or ever have to have any of your friends or loved ones go through. And I get them both and at that moment, I think we all realized that we can no longer avoid the fact that our lives aren’t like High School anymore.

That night Jackie and I sleep on the floor. In the middle of the night Mary sneaks out and goes to her boyfriend’s house – we don’t talk about it. Mary and I don’t talk about much of anything from that weekend on, actually. Everything changes in our relationship after that weekend and it was obvious it was going to happen instantly, leaving Ithaca there was the unavoidable realism that this particular friendship peaked. And the shit just piles on even more.

This Blog Thing and On the Way Down: The Last Catering

So two comic bloggers (Blog This, Pal and Noetic Concordance) included me on this Comic Blog-a-Check-Out-a-Thing that this comic blogger (Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog) started. I’m going to take part but to save space and get to the story (which is hopefully why 99% of you come here) I’m going to comment on each blog in ten words or less.

The Unofficial John Westmoreland Memorial Tribute (Nonblogrollable) – The Brown Bunny without the blowjob.

Size Matters (Blogrollable) – Looking out for the little guys, the innovators. Responsibility!

Fun Ideas (Nonblogrollable) – Can’t correlate title to content or content to comics.

Innocent Bystander (Non Comic-Blogrollable) - Well written, few comics. Why do I even blurb?

The Word on the Street (Nonblogrollable) - Nothing new. I’ve heard the word on the street already.

Websnark (Blogrollable times two) – Unique voice goes down easy like ex-girlfriend.

Polite Dissent (Bloggrollable times two plus a femur) – What a great idea – originality is clutch fellow bloggers.

Return to Comics (Blogrollable with stipulations) – Stick to older comics, less competition for your voice.

Lady, That’s My Skull (Blogrollable and if I ever meet him I’ll buy him a beer) – Entertaining and unique! Like comics should be (buy Elk’s Run)!

Snark Free Waters Blogrollable) – Fun and easy to digest, like Johnny Walker Blue Label.

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This whole week is basically one big story that continues a longer story. You can click back if you want to catch-up. Monday has the whole collection of links. Not a great week for newbs, this is more of a pay-off week. This is like starting Watchmen at issue 11 minus Cold War fears and fake alien invasions (SPOILERS!). Feel free to check out the "Best of" to see if you like it here first. Yesterday’s story.

Once the t-shirt thing got off the ground I gave up catering for R’s family. The fact that we broke up had nothing to do with that decision. Really. It didn’t.

Once it became obvious the t-shirt thing wasn’t going to make me rich, however, I became a little more desperate for money. And when R called me up and told me they were short for a catering gig and could use my help, I thought about the tax-free hundred-plus bucks I would make (and how many burritos and 5-gallon jugs of Rossi Red that could buy) I not-so-reluctantly agreed.

After not speaking to R for about two weeks I honestly can’t think of a more awkward situation than hanging with her, her family and her best friend for about ten hours while we prepared food, loaded vans, drove to Connecticut, unloaded vans, cooked food, set-up, served food, cleaned up, loaded a van and finally drove back to Brooklyn. It was ten hours of being near each other in a hot, stressful, manual labor filled environment where it was impossible to avoid each other.

Of course, as soon as I see her the feelings start to kick up. Pretty much instantly. And I start to do that rationalization thing, where in the matter of five minutes I convince myself that she regrets the break-up and there is no possible way she wants to not be together. I mean, we were perfect for each other, right? And she most likely wants to express her regret by having sex in the bathroom because the lowest common denominator for everything in my life is sex.

Almost the first thing I do is try to show her that I’m following through with something and I’m not the shiftless, lazy, stoner fucker that I turned into. I tell her that the Brooklyn T-Shirt Company is going well and we’re selling our shirts like you wouldn’t believe. Hundreds of shirts. She actually asks, “Wow, you actually did it?” which in a way hurt but at the same time – that’s what I was going for, right? I tell her that it’s looking very promising and promise to give her one of each shirt.

And my confidence goes up a little bit more.

The whole thing seemed to be going smoothly. I think there was an aura of desperation about me but it didn’t seem to scare her off. Of course, my judgment was also cloudy, but you don’t take that into consideration when you’re convincing yourself to make a move on your ex-girlfriend several weeks after proving how absolutely clueless you were about her feelings towards you.

So when her best friend came up to me later on in the evening and asked me how I was holding up, I wasn’t quite expecting the reaction I got when I told her I was going to try to “win R back”.

You know that stare you get sometimes? The one that you get from a fish you just pulled out of the water. That big fucking eye that’s saying, “Uh…what’s going on?” That’s the stare R’s friend gave me. For about a minute.

I pleaded my case, said that she’s obviously regretting the break-up and if I do something over the top romantic she’ll fall for my quirkiness all over again.

Now, you know how the fish fights for its last breath? The mouth open as it lies motionless and that eye just continues to stare, pleading, telling you you’re making a mistake? Me neither, I throw the fish back, but I’ve seen it in movies and R’s friend looked exactly like that either way.

She finally spoke. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

I had no idea what she was talking about and pressed on for more information. She refused to give any up but kept saying I should forget about her and just move on. Her words didn’t convince me, but the horror in her face sure as fuck did.

The rest of the night was miserable and I was one mean fuck. R’s family wanted me to help out at the sister’s wedding, the one that I was ORIGINALLY a guest at and I told them I would think about it. I blew it off (and got shit for it later).

Good Times, Sparks, ER5 Preview Page and On the Way Down: Selling Shirts

My 16-year-old sister, Elizabeth, visited this weekend and it was good times as you can tell by these pictures we got at Dave & Buster’s:


The newest Washington Spark is available online. This is the first one in which I edited the cartoon page. You really can’t see the cartoons, however, so here’s who I got to contribute. From left to right we have: Noel Tuazon’s (Elk’s Run) illustration, Matt Dembicki’s (Mr. Big) Animal Stew, Chris Piers’ (Upcoming project at a yet to be named publisher) Mundays, Paul Maybury’s (Hard Candy, artist on mine and Chris Fabulous’ Elk’s Run back-up) Deviled Egg, Jamie Dee Galey's (mini-comic god) Munch Munch and a collaborative comic by Jacob Warrenfeltz and I (DC Conspiracy super-stars) Convention Confessions. Also, it looks like I’ll have a pretty big announcement soon regarding next months paper. Like Eisner, Harvey, Ignatz and Xeric big. Enjoy!


Josh gives a little ER5 preview, a week after three hits the stands and a month before 4 solicits. This is like super treat. Why? Because Hoarse & Buggy loves you. Now buy the books, fuckers.

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A little bit about this week. This will be the next to last week about what has been come to be known as the 423 story. I think you’ll start to see where this is going and by Friday I think you’ll see what I’ve been yapping about since I started this blog almost seven months ago. For those who need a refresher, as linked to last Friday we have: A prelude to 423, 423, The Tipping Point, Breakdowns, Summer Money Attempt #1, Hooker Hand, Movie Memories, Sentimental Bullshit, and Movie Making.

We already decided to launch Brooklyn T-Shirt Company. One night Max, Gennaro and I stayed up late creating three t-shirt designs in Adobe Photoshop. We took our designs to a silk screener the next day to get pricing estimates and the first thing he had us do was go back to Max’s house and redo all of the designs in Illustrator – first lesson in graphic design, I guess.

On our second trip we were good with designs and we agreed upon five bucks a shirt. Later on, however, Gennaro decided he wanted to drop out of the Brooklyn T-Shirt Company. Max and I were now splitting the bill and in order to get the additional dough I had to hit up the parents. They lent me the money (which I’m pretty sure I never paid back, sorry guys) and we picked up our first order, enthused to sell them.

We were stupid kids, we didn’t know much about running a business then (ok, we still don’t). The idea of selling them for a small profit to local stores or putting them on consignment, at least, never even crossed our minds. Why sell it for six or seven bucks when we can sell them ourselves for ten bucks a pop?

So we hit the streets.

I took my shirts down to the Promenade during a weekday at around lunchtime. The thought was, in addition to the suits on lunch breaks we’d get a lot of Japanese tourists passing by. Elizabeth came with me, she was about nine at the time and maybe some people would fall for the whole “poor kids trying to get by” routine.

We rolled out a blanket, sat our asses down and waited for the people to come to us.

Our first customer was this really cracked out chick. She walks by and sees our shirts out of the corner of her eye. She looks at our F-train shirt which had a recreation of the F-train sign on the back and our logo on the front and she proclaims, as loud as she can, “That’s BAD!”

“Cool. It’s ten bucks for the shirt.”

“Oh shit! That’s BAD! That’s a BAD-ass shirt!”

“This one here has every neighborhood in Brooklyn written on the ‘B’. We’re doing two for seventeen, three for twenty-four.”

“That’s BAD!”

Honestly, the conversation went back and forth like this for about ten minutes until she said tried to haggle the price of the shirt down to five bucks and then walked away saying she had no money.

Everyone tried to haggle. Eventually I caved and made seven bucks the lowest selling price. Once I started doing that I didn’t even put up much of a fight. Someone would say “five bucks” and I’d go straight to seven, stating it’s my final offer. Early on in life, I wasn’t much of a salesman (ok, I’m still not).

We got a lot of these:

(While picking up the F-Train shirt) “Cool shirt, man. How much?”

“Ten bucks.”

“Ten bucks? Cool. Aye, do you have it in a D-train?”

“No. No, just the F-train.”

“Why not the D-train?”

“Because we just made the F-train, for now. It’s our neighborhood train.”

“Well the D-trains mine. I’ll give you five bucks for the F-train.”

“No.”

“Well, I’ll come back when you get the D.”

A lot of people seemed to be offended when their favorite train wasn’t represented. Which is cool, I get that. I always felt growing up that the F-train never got the respect it deserved. Everyone was all about the A train and the 2. But now that my old neighborhood is all posh and Coney Island is cool again, the F-train is climbing up to the top and I’m all proud. Gennaro, on the other hand, likes the G-train because everyone calls him ‘G’ (except for me, who calls him ‘Gena’, Geh-nah for those who need it broken down). Problem is that the ‘G’ train will never be cool so he can’t experience the high I’m feeling right now.

But, lessons learned and we sold enough shirts to at least pay my parents back but I’m pretty sure I spent it on 5-gallon jugs of Rossi Red, weed, burritos and cigarettes. I hit the streets a few more times and moved through a lot of the shirts. The leftovers I gave out for Christmas and birthday gifts and Brooklyn T-Shirt Company never made another shirt.

I would say I felt like a failure but I was too drunk and stoned to remember.

Chris Tessmer, CBDP Reminder and My God: Losing It

It’s Friday, enjoy some art. Chris Tessmer has one hell of a sketch blog, great stuff in there.

I haven’t gotten a lot of entries for the Comic Book Death Pool. If you guys want to join, please do so by September 1st. If you have friends interested, let them know. I want to get a good group of entrants.

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I know I skipped a bunch of stories here. I might need to do another religion themed week in the future, just to fill in the gaps. I don’t want to do a back-to-back by any means, one week is enough.

After Confirmation I turned into the typical disenfranchised, angry, anti-religion loudmouth, the kind of guy that made fun of people with any sort of organized religion in their life. I danced around from Atheist to Agnostic to not acknowledging any classification, as if religion just didn’t matter.

My good friend Mormon Josh left college after sophomore year to go on his two year long mission. Josh was good people, although you can say being around the college crew affected him a bit – and not in the goody-good way Mormon’s like to be affected in. He struggled with it – his girlfriend and the alcohol and the parties. Sometimes he’d be fun, sometimes his drunken ass would go into Mormon rage, smiting himself as he broke down.

The decision to go on his mission was a conscious effort to find his religion by distancing himself from us godless types. I was obviously bummed, my other good friend Mickey was also leaving BU and I was the only person from the floor staying on campus – the RA job was too good to pass up. So with my two good friends leaving, everyone else going off campus and R and I on the outs, it was a shitty time – as I’ve said in past entries.

But now I’m home for the summer – R and I already broke up and I have come to terms with the fact that I’m essentially starting over my Junior year. I wrote Josh several times and never got a reply for him – I just assumed he was too busy or too godly to get back to me.

And then I got an email.

To paraphrase, he told me a story about a woman he “saved” while on his mission. She was a heroin addict – single mom with a kid – and his mission took her in and cleaned her up, got her back on her feet. The story was honestly quite touching and as I read it I kind of pumped my fist and did a little “Go Josh.”

And then there was the second half of the letter.

To paraphrase, again, Josh explained how the woman (the heroin addict with the bastard child, remember) reminded him of me. ME. It wasn’t said in a bad way – he said she was such a nice person, funny and compassionate, but she was just lost. You know. Like me.

I found it funny. Called up my friends, told them about it. Everyone laughed, silly brain-washed Mormon. Comparing his good friend to a heroin addict. I wrote Josh back and told him that I was proud of him. I informed him that R and I broke up (he was friends with both of us). I told him to keep doing the good work and maybe one day I’ll find myself again. It was all lighthearted fun, not mean-spirited at all. Josh and I used to always joke like that – he’d always laugh and tell me I was going to hell and I’d just sort of come back at him.

But this time he meant it – and despite my joking about it, it hurt.

I went to church that Sunday for the first time in years and felt nothing. My summer went on. And that’s the theme for next week, we’re going to get back on this 423 thing. For those that need a refresher, go here: A prelude to 423, 423, The Tipping Point, Breakdowns, Summer Money Attempt #1, Hooker Hand, Movie Memories, Sentimental Bullshit, Movie Making,

I don’t believe in hype, but I will say that next Friday’s story will most likely cause light bruising on one-sixty-fourth of the internet.

ER Love, Some Dudes, One Line, Alms for the Poor and My God: Douches

Well, it started out as a promotion that backfired on me. I went to a couple of sites, sent out free books to posters there and they were supposed to hype the book. Everywhere else was going fine until the Digital Webbing thread kicked up. First review dropped was nothing short of horrible but, thankfully, everyone stepped up for the book and basically said the first reviewer was off his rocker. So now I can pimp the thread again and not only that but I have a new idea for an upcoming Here’s the Thing… article, “You’re Transparent, Dude”. So far the second official reviewer to pop up on the DW thread was Rodney Roberts who has a pretty fucking slamming site worth checking out.

I also wanted to direct you all to two cats with art worth looking at. Dan Schmidt and Ben Dale. Dan is the artist on Kel Nuttall’s new Nothingface and he has a back-up coming up in Speakeasy’s Hunger #5 and Ben is busy on some stuff as well which isn’t announceable yet, from what I understand. Haven't linked to artists in a while and these cats deserve a little love.

Thirdly, continuing work on my chapter book and here’s one of the lines my douche-bag, thinks he’s Donald Trump character says after his coworker tells him that he’s not looking at something the right way: “Huh. That’s a great hypothesis. I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you slap an introduction on that, write up some procedures. Record your results, make some conclusions and then slap it all on a poster board and enter it in the fucking science fair!” This is going to be so much fun to write.

And finally, before story time, wanted to direct you to a very sincere request from Elk’s Run writer Josh Hale Fialkov.

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There was this kid, we’ll call him Douche. Probably about five-foot-nothing, stocky, tried to look like Joe Pesci. He always would claim his father was in the mafia although as we got older we heard stories that leaned more towards his father’s business being “protected” by the mafia but nothing beyond that. Either way he rolled with an entourage and his entourage thought he was hot-shit which made him hot-shit in Carroll Gardens.

Quick recap for the newbies – I grew up in between two neighborhoods: Carroll Gardens, which was all Italian, and Red Hook, which was all Latino and Black. I’m a white looking kid (thanks to my Italian mom) with a Latino last name (thanks to my Puerto Rican dad) and I got the shit end of the mini-race war that went down everyday. Alright, back to Douche…

After Communion we had several more years of CCD before we did Confirmation. These were the hard years, the nun years. Communion was us accepting Jesus into our lives. The build-up towards Confirmation was letting us know how fucked we are if we shit on the promises we made at Communion. Without getting into too much detail today, rulers, closets and corners where all motivational tools to get us to fear Jesus’ wrath (which, obviously, only got us to fear the nuns wrath).

CCD wasn’t fun anymore.

When our last year came we were all stoked. I actually quit being an alter boy and decided to just get this whole thing over with and then keep my distance up until the next sacrament like every good Catholic. Part of Confirmation, however, was my first and only Religious retreat.

I don’t think it was an over-nighter. I’m pretty sure we just got to this place pretty early in the day and left pretty late at night. I’m not even sure what the place was, I seem to remember it being somebody’s house. It was out in the country, green fields and trees and we spent a good part of the day sitting around and talking.

After several invigorating hours in which we discussed Jesus, love and penance against a backdrop of Hellfire, we all had some free time to enjoy God’s creation. Not to squander this free time, we sat around and bitched about the waste of a perfectly good day.

Whereas we were all a little irked, none of us were as upset as Douche, apparently. Being a good Catholic, like all wanna-be Italian mobsters claim to be, he decided to walk up to me randomly (with his entourage), push me up against a wall and ask me what I was looking at.

“Not you.”

He let go of my shirt, smoothed it out like a bad movie cliché, and told me that I better not be looking at him – he doesn’t like when spics look at me.

I was kind of shocked, obviously. It was the first time I was ever called a spic and the only time in my life someone actually said it to my face. I’d occasionally get it in emails or over the phone but never did someone look my biracial ass in the eye and call me a spic. I’m as white as my momma’s ass.

Nothing happened, no fight. Douche and his crew just walked off after pushing one last kid into the side of the building. It’s just funny, he was the kind of kid that went to Catholic School, wore a cross around his neck and went to church every Sunday with his family, had the whole Sunday dinner. And here he was, during a religious retreat, picking fights and spewing racial slurs.

Like I said yesterday, I realized slowly that religion is what you need it to be. For Douche, religion was something that made his feel protected, righteous and ultimately forgivable. For me, religion became something that didn’t let people like Douche in.

Contracts, Sean Maher (again) and My God: Communion

Matt Dembicki has a new Small Presser up. It's all about getting ready for cons, go read it.

I’m developing a new idea. Just something to get the juices flowing again. I’ve been sort of thinking about it for a while, I’ve been working on this one character in a completely different story, decided to move him to this new story and it just sort of came together. It is a prose project, serialized chapter books so I can finish the first one and get back to some comic writing. Working title is “Contracts” and it actually has nothing to do with assassins, fanboy. It’s an office-drama – sort of inspired by my own job but with more interesting characters and situations. A prick, an overzealous idiot and the wiser, older leader – the former two jockeying for position, lying, cheating and stealing. The fun dichotomy comes from their home lives, where they’re just a couple of sell-outs. I’ll probably be hitting up some of you for reads soon, the usual suspects, so be on guard. I actually thought of trying this as a comic and then said, “Fuck comics.” I’ve been saying that a lot lately.

And while I’m on it, I’m probably going to be in the market for a prose editor soon, if anyone knows one. Not just for this chapter book idea but also for the eventual repackaging of this website. I’m thinking of trying to distribute at least one of them myself. If anyone has any good recommendations please let me know. It’ll be a paying gig.

Quick plug to Sean Maher. It’s been a while since I linked to him and he’s changed blogs since. His new one is quite awesome, it’s just dedicated to the books he likes and he talks them up with the usual energy and enthusiasm that makes me say, “Ok, ok...I unfuck comics – for now.” This week he’s doing a great theme (the theme week is catching on): comics to read on the crapper. If you’re going to check him out, do it now.

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For us little CCD tikes, Communion was about as exciting as Christmas. No shit. We start CCD in kindergarten and spend three full years building up for Communion and by the time it came around we were so pumped to dine on the body and blood of Christ that you would think we were going to chase it with a three-foot long pixie stick while playing “Wonder Boy in Monster Land” with the Easter Bunny and bathing in Strawberry Quik.

We had all the plans, there was going to be a little party back at the apartment with sandwiches, ice-cream, cake and presents. Man, Catholics love to give presents for Communion. Good ones too; toys, cash, scooters, video games – everything a 2nd grader could want. I got my Pogo Ball as a Communion present. What better way to celebrate Jesus accepting me into his arms than with the most ingenious pogo-stick variant ever created?

So there was all this tension built up, I was ready to explode. I wanted to eat Jesus and carvel cake so badly – top it off with some Zaxxon, maybe Space Harrier 3D if I was really lucky. It was like a second birthday this year except doubled with the whole “one step closer to Heaven” thing.

Two days before Communion I get Scarlet Fever. Seriously, who the fuck gets Scarlet Fever? That’s like saying I got polio. Sacred Hearts/Saint Stephen’s Church was visible from our dining room window and I sat there, rash all over my body, holding My Pet Monster (the aptly named “Creepy”) and crying while I watched my friends come out of the church, little soldiers of God. At the age of eight my God decided to forsake my ass. Me, an alter boy, his devoted servant. Forsook.

Eventually the rash went away and I was no longer in quarantine so I got to reschedule my Communion. Father Michael called me up and told me that we’d do it at the next mass I served.

I mean, I guess that was fine and all but it sort of took away the “oomph”. For the past year I practiced what to do at Communion. When to stand, when to sit, what to say – the whole thing. And now, after all of that practice, I get to toss away everything I learned and instead just sort of walk up to the priest in the middle of mass and receive my first Communion. No special mass – nothing. All because I had Scarlet Fever.

My mom had to talk me into it; I had no desire in taking part of what would become a celebrationless ceremony. I calmed down by the time mass came along. My family still came out, everyone in the church was wondering why my father was video taping this random mass. I went up and received my first Communion and the pictures were snapping and I have to imagine my Aunt Denise cried (because she always does).

I ate of the body of Christ and nothing happened. It was stale, left a weird taste in my mouth. I made the sign of the cross and said my prayers – I didn’t feel any different. I don’t want to call it a let-down, but I think it was my first eye-opener. You hear people talk about eating the Eucharist and they feel enlightened when they pray, closer to Jesus. Some people, when they hear this story and don’t believe it, think that the Eucharist eaters are crazy. I never looked at it that way. At a very young age I started to realize that religion and its customs are what you need them to be, not what you’re told they are.

After the mass the family came back to my parents’ place. We had sandwiches and carvel cake; I’d guess Cookie-Puss but Fudgy the Whale popped up occasionally at our family functions as well. I got some video games, some cash – the Pogo Ball as mentioned.

Continued on with CCD, straight through Confirmation and then stepped back and assessed what I needed religion to be. But that’s tomorrow’s story.

ER Again and My God: The Alter Boy

Some more Elk’s Run 1-3 reviews. First up is Randall Rozzell, dropping his review right here. And remember, the Elk’s Run Bumper Edition is soliciting right now, order #AUG053101.

Party's still going on in yesterday's discussion, for those that like parties.

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Continuing with God Week...

The first couple of years of CCD weren’t that bad. The church supplied us with young, attractive, and calm teachers. Usually women, sometimes there’d be a guy, but these instructors reminded us of our mothers and fathers. They were warm, they were nice. It almost seems like that the strategy was to make us feel secure until we got through Communion. Then, once we reach the point of no return, they unload the nuns and the Hellfire on us.

But, up until that point it was pretty cool. We got to leave school early, the homework was easy, and we prepared for Communion which, as a kid, the idea that we would be eating the body and blood of Jesus Christ was quite righteous. It was like being a T-Rex, a rampaging monster eating flesh. Until I actually saw the Eucharist I was picturing this awesome Jesus burger, dripping with blood. Not to say I wanted to be a cannibal but, you know, when in Rome.

Sometime in the second grade my teacher asked if any of us were interested in becoming alter boys. I was totally grooving with the religion thing, I was feeling the love of Christ like you wouldn’t believe and I instantly raised my hand - wasn’t alone.

Almost every boy in the class raised their hand and even a couple of girls. We all felt the spirit, halleluiah. It became a matter of “who raised first” and I was one of the five kids who got tapped by the Holy Hand of our religious instruction teacher.

The following week I went to the church after class. Father Michael was there. He was the church, you know? He wasn’t the monsignor, he was just a lowly priest, but he was the guy that was always active in the community. He did the 10AM Sunday mass and occasionally the noon mass which were the ones that most people went to. This guy was king Catholic in our community. Closest to Jesus. Like Mike Piazza in the late 90s but with the ability to shoot lightening and smite if needs be.

I want to time out for a second and promise you that none of these stories are going to turn into “but I didn’t really know Father Michael…” I actually think it’s kind of sad that I feel the need to say that. People make mistakes, people have problems – priests or not. I feel bad for the rep the Catholic Church got; there are plenty of better reasons to criticize them – more constructive ones. Anyway…

This was my first time meeting Father Michael in his own domain and it was kind of humbling, he was just a man. He smiled and was friendly but he didn’t carry the aura that people put on him. He joked, he liked baseball. He gave us the run down of the behind the scenes of the church, how everything worked and where everything was. He did a trial mass with us. He assigned each of us a buddy, an older alter boy that was going to show us the ropes. Our first five masses or so were done with the older alter boy, in case we had questions.

It sort of reduced the church, for me – took some of the magic out. We were lighting the candles, not God. The Eucharist came in plastic bags (and looked nothing like a Jesus Burger). Everything had a schedule – ring the bell now, stand now, bring the chalice now. And Father Michael wore jeans and a button down shirt when he wasn’t in the collar. But, despite that initial loss of wonderment, it felt kind of cool to be in the know. As if this whole system was God’s plan and I was one of the people that made sure it all worked according to His grand vision.

After the walkthroughs, the church’s secretary took all of our measurements and ordered our robes. Two weeks later we started doing masses. I made it through the first one only making a couple of mistakes. When Father Michael made his closing statements he thanked me, let the congregation know that I’m new here and then joked about how I still have a little learning to do, apparently.

Some kids had it worse than me. There’s this one point in the mass were one of us was required to stand and hold this humongous bible open while the priest read the Gospel. One of the new kids dropped it his first time holding it, the entire congregation gasped while a bunch of old Italian women were so shocked they fanned themselves vigorously in order not to pass out. Once they got themselves together they probably prayed the rosary. But the priests were always cool. I was watching the ordeal from the sidelines and the priest, who wasn’t Father Michael, just sort of smiled at the kid that was frozen in fear and actually picked up the bible for him and put it back in his hands.

It was a fun little club and our “bosses” where great guys that never faulted us for anything. Being and alter boy was all right for quite some time.

Ebay II, ER Goodness, Surfers and My God: Father Fox

So, after bringing in an astounding 70 bucks from my first wave of comic sales I continue to unload the comics I feel I’ll never read again. This time around I have 102 Spider-Man comics, 56 Ghost Rider related comics and a lot of 88 and 90 random Marvel comics up for sale. And with each passing week I have more and more room at my place…

I rolled this out a couple of weeks ago and it’s finally coming together, somewhat. Nathan Shumate posted a review of the first three issues of Elk’s Run on his blog in an attempt to convince you to order the Bumper Edition being offered through Speakeasy (order #AUG053101). I supposedly have nine more unbiased reviews coming and if the people that agreed to take part in this fuck me, they’ll forever be on my shit-list. Promise.

And finally, I started reading Essential Silver Surfer Volume 1 yesterday. I tried reading this book before and couldn’t get beyond the first couple of pages. At the insistence of a friend, I decided to give it another shot and holy fuck damn it’s good. I don’t think I got it the first time around – it’s really Stan Lee doing his version of Shakespeare and completely rocking it. Good stuff.

Story time…

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My parents raised me as a Catholic. I went through all of the sacraments: baptism, communion, confirmation and something like eight years of Religious Instruction, which was actually held on a Wednesday at my church unlike the usual Sunday School. All the Catholic kids had permission to leave school early on Wednesdays, walk as a group down to Sacred Heart’s/Saint Stephen’s Church so that we can spend an hour with a nun (or, on occasion, a semi-foxy chick) and learn about letting Jesus into our lives.

Our Religious Instruction program was called CCD and I have no idea what that stands for. Whatever you call it, I hated it (not religion or God, mind you, just CCD). But I went through with it, I even became an alter boy in the second grade, stuck with it until the sixth.

But before CCD and the communions and all of the other stuff, there was Father Fox’s church down in Red Hook. This was the Episcopalian (or Catholic Light, if you will) church that my father’s family went to (although my father only went for baptisms, holidays – stuff like that). When I was young and would stay over my Grandma’s on a Saturday night, me and my cousins would go to church with them and attend their Sunday School the following morning.

Catholic Light rocks. Sunday School consisted of cookies, music and coloring pictures of Jesus dying on the cross. And the people that ran it where basically glorified babysitters. There were two groups, the older kids that were actually going through the sacramental motions and us younger kids that they just didn’t want in the church crying and fussing.

The coloring was the best – they had this humongous tub of crayons. The tub must have contained every Crayola (and generic Crayola, which were always funnier) crayon that ever existed since the turn of the century. Just really weird colors that you don’t see today like “Prussian Blue” or “Pinko Red”. The obscure colors allowed us to create pictures of a “Flesh” colored Jesus pulling “Gay Green” fishes out of a basket to feed the masses.

When we weren’t coloring we were singing, as I remember it. Someone would get on the piano and we’d all belt out a range of songs – from “Old McDonald” to “Jesus Loves the Little Children”. Sometimes we’d watch a “Christian friendly” movie which basically meant no minorities were in it and all of the violence was against animals or people in black robes.

We were encouraged to bring our own toys – Luis and I would always bring our G.I.Joes and if the sing-a-long didn’t appeal to us we’d wage war on the church’s toys. Snake-eyes going head-to-head against Moses, Duke putting the hurting on Peter the Apostle. They had an entire set of these crudely crafted biblical figurines. I find it kind of weird, now. I mean, what kid would pick them up and reenact the saga of Jacob and Esau? Most kids our age would have Jacob cheating Esau for their father’s blessing and then in a surprise twist have Optimus Prime run them both over and claim Jerusalem in the name of “Kick Ass” along with Secretary of Israel Hulk Hogan and head ninja Storm Shadow.

But we were encouraged to play however we wanted to – the primary goal, as I’ve said, is to not have us disrupting the church services. And, if doing so meant Lady Jay was going to get it on with David, King of the Jews and somebody was going to use “Dirty Sanchez Brown” to put mustaches on every character in the Jesus coloring book it’s all worth it as long as we’re not picking our noses during a hymn.

According to Father Fox’s church, Jesus Loved the Little Children as long as they kept their asses in the basement and defiled graven images.

CCD – nothing like Father Fox’s Sunday school. But, we have a whole week ahead of us to get into that.

Things, Covers and 5 Nights at Jillian's: Bad With Women

There’s a new Here’s the Thing… is up. This one tells you to stop wasting your time.

The fifth book from Chicago I was planning on talking about, Doll Parts, I didn’t get to read yet. Honestly, I bought it for the cover – much like I bough the first two in Philly for the cover. The interiors – story and art – did nothing for me and I can’t seem to read the third issue. I need to get in the right mindset. But that book is the perfect example of how a good cover can sell a book. I honestly needed those covers. Of course, I’m not going to track down any other work from the rest of the team but the covers…

A lot of times you hear some aspiring creator say “The cover should match the interior”. Bullshit, it’s two different things. A lot of guys that do interiors can’t do covers and a lot of guys that can do covers can’t do interiors. You want a cover that’s going to make people notice the book – it needs to pop. Let’s talk Elk’s Run. I love Noel’s art – love the fuck out of it. I can’t see Noel doing covers. He’s a storyteller and his art works well sequentially, when it has room to breathe and build and evolve. Datsun makes DOPE covers. Check it – I like red heads but couldn’t care less what color they rock on the skins. Two different things, the red hair brings me in, the skins make me set up shop and live with her for six years.

Speaking of dope covers (and Datsun):



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Jillian’s, like all night clubs on Lansdowne St, employed some of the flyest women in Boston and put their asses to work waiting tables. There are waitresses and then there are waitresses that know how to work it and these girls were equipped to work it and had no shame in doing so. Low-cut shirts, short skirts, hooker boots – it was like a fucking a candy shop.

A candy shop which I was not allowed into, obviously.

Not to say I was an outcast or anything but I never fit in well with the blue-collar sexy crowd. White-collar sexy, sure, I know a bunch of those. But the blue-collar sexies and I never got along.

I tried to talk to them, tried to be engaging. But I already had two strikes against me. The game-tech thing was strike one - I wasn’t no bouncer, I had the baggy uniform and the walky talky clipped to my shoulder that said, “Can I get a game-tech to skee ball, someone shoved a condom in the coin slot” every two minutes. Every once and a while I had to get on the floor and go inside a game and it’s almost a guarantee my ass crack popped out. Game tech = not attractive.

The second strike was the fact that, for some reason, these girls somehow made me more awkward than I normally am. And I’m not talking awkward as in stuttering, uncomfortable silences and the occasional nervous fart, I’m talking awkward as in:

1) One time I was fixing a game before the crowd rushed in. I ordered up some chicken fingers from the kitchen and the waitress was nice enough to bring it out to me. I took it, smiled, paid and then just sort of dropped the plate. But, defying all laws of physics, it was this weird projectile drop that hurled the plate right at her and drenched her left breast in honey mustard.
2) Some drunken idiot threw all of the basketballs from the Shot Clock game on top of the netting. I come out of the back room with a ladder, in a rush because I’m getting calls like a maniac on this particular night, check the back room to make sure it’s locked and without assessing my surroundings I just start moving. And, you know, shove the ladder right into this one waitresses’ face. Luckily I didn’t get her too hard, but she certainly fell back and landed on her ass.
3) The third floor manager called me up to talk to me about some stuff. The greatest concentration of waitresses were on the third floor, where the pool tables were. So we’re over by the bar talking, I turn to leave and I trip on the carpeting and take a table down with me. I get up, embarrassed, and see them all trying really hard not to laugh.
4) And my favorite of all. We occasionally played pool after work, had the place to ourselves and we shot some. I’m not a good pool player. I completely suck. We were playing doubles and I have an easy shot lined up in the corner pocket. One of the waitresses I’m playing against bends down behind the pocket and starts talking trash. And, of course, the ball leaves the table and flies towards her face. She moves in time, the ball hits her leg, but she thought I did it on purpose and tells my boss that I tried to hit her with a pool ball. After explaining to both of them that it was an accident and I’m just bad at pool, my manager let’s me off but the girl, and all of the other waitresses, hardly even looked at me again from then on. I was the guy that threw pool balls at girls.


Anyway, that’s it for this week. I might do another themed week next week but I think I want to back to Brooklyn for a few stories. Have a good weekend, all!

Back Patting, Awakenings and 5 Nights at Jillian's: Bad Night

Awakenings and 5 Nights at Jillian’s: The Bad Night

1AM, updating from WORK! I generally don’t like to brag. I do this story telling thing, five days a week, over a thousand words a day for six-months straight so far and I never look for props. I’m growing as a writer – this is good for me. But this week, man. 12+ hour days at work back-to-back plus extra work once I got home, a 16 hour day tonight and I’m still dropping a story on this bitch.

Props, son. Props.

Seriously, though. Everyone who wants to write should try something like this. It’s an amazing experience. Just tell a new, somewhat self-contained story every day. Even if it’s about your past, like mine. Even if it’s a stupid story that doesn’t make any sense, like some of these do. Once you do it for a couple of months, you start banging them out in ten, fifteen minutes and you look back to those first ones and realize how much your writing improved. It’s pretty fucking awesome. Seriously, try it. Set the level at a thousand words a day of self-contained story-writing. Writing!

Awakenings 1-4 is the fourth set of books from Chicago I’ll be highlighting. Storytelling wise, it’s good but not great. Eric Hobbs writing is a little sloppy, I don’t think certain things are conveyed effectively (such as the fact that the story takes place in the future) but the mystery, aside from the parts that are projected a little too strongly, is well written and really hits its stride around issue 3. But the art – Gabe Pena is my dream. It’s just such a clean style, great inks, great energy. The pages just pop. I think Gabe’s the main man on Jason Rand's new project but Eric said that Gabe is dedicated to finishing his project as well – I hope so, it’s always encouraging when an indie guy strikes artist gold. Mitchell Breitweiser’s covers are fabulous, I’m on-and-off when it comes to his interiors but hot damn - that cover for issue two was what pulled me in. Well conceived, well executed.

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Apologies in advance for any bad spelling/grammar. I'll do a check tomorrow morning.

Some of you don’t understand a very important rule. Robin does not read this site. She acknowledges its existence and read it a few times but that is it. She doesn’t want to know this much about me and she doesn’t want to know that I talk about her. So, when you see her, you can talk about the site all you want, just don’t ask her about a story pertaining to her. She doesn’t like it and I get in trouble. She’s happy to be ignorant. So, John (and anyone else), next time you’re drunk please don’t talk to her about stories from our past because she gets uncomfortable and I need to deal with it. Ok, now that that’s out of the way…

I timed my last night at Jillian’s to coincide with the beginning of RA training my senior year. By the time that night came, I was ready to get the fuck out of there. It was a shitty night, too. No other game-techs were on, the place was packed and I was busting my ass. The last day at any job is supposed to consist of 1) cake 2) slacking and 3) photocopying your ass and leaving it on your boss’ desk (cheeks spread, of course).

But not this last day. This last day was running and fixing and refunding with hardly a moment to stop for a smoke. I was stressed out, tired and just wanted to get the fuck out of there so badly. And then my cell phone rang at around eleven.

I was with Robin for about two months by this point and we were doing pretty good. One small hurdle fixed with some flowers and everything seemed to be on stable ground. So we were totally in the lovey-dovey “I’ll do anything for you” phase at that point in our relationship (which, I should add, we’re still in but after six-plus years it becomes “I’ll do anything for you provided I’m not tired and it doesn’t involve my anus”).

So, when Robin called me and told me that she got – well – a very bad phone call, I was worried a bit. Then she gave me the details and I worried a lot more.

You see, Robin had this stalking problem in college. I joke about how she stalked me (which she denies) but the fact is, she most likely had a really weird phone stalker. No matter where she lived (and she had three different rooms and phone numbers throughout the years) she would always get these phone calls with this guy breathing heavy – occasionally from the lobby of her apartment building. She went to the cops about it but they had thumbs up their asses and the calls never happened frequently enough.

Except this time the stalker talked. And pretended to be her best friend, whispering so the best friend’s boyfriend didn’t hear. And over the course of a five minute conversation, figured out that she was home alone – I wasn’t there (and mentioned me by name, I should add). When Robin began to figure out something was wrong, the questions weren’t quite right, the person on the other end hung up the phone.

I can’t say whether or not this was the person that liked to call Robin up and breathe into the phone, but that’s the first thing Robin assumed and she called me up panicking.

I told her to hold on, I’ll be right over. Walked up to the manager that was on that night and let him now that I was out. He tried to protest but I was gone. Ran all the way to Robin’s place (about a mile away, a little more) in around ten minutes (in shoes, no less).

Her upstairs neighbor was inside with her. She called him up and made him go down the fire escape because she was too afraid to go to the door. I got there and took over, her neighbor left and I thanked him for helping out. We called the cops, they filed a report and we never heard from them again.

Last day of work, stalkers and cops aside, I think that was the moment Robin and I decided, albeit silently, to set-up for the long-haul.

Hard Candy and 5 Nights at Jillian’s: Bad Lighting

Before getting into the usual routine, I just want to say a) life would suck without ESPN2 and b) Creative Breaking is the best sport ever.

Admittedly, I’m a bit biased here. Paul Maybury was the extremely talented artist that illustrated mine and Chris Fabulous’ story, “All the Wrong Choices” for Elk’s Run #2. Having said that, Paul débuted his new comic Hard Candy at Chicago this year and I believe it was the third best book I purchased there, behind The King and The Surrogates #1.

It’s a quick read about a Boston school teacher whose student eats a gummy bear and, using the ideology that “you are what you eat”, becomes an enormous killer gummy bear. The teacher has to protect her students while their classmate attempts (and often successfully) to eat them. It’s a funny little story but Paul’s art just gets better with every project he does. He showed me some sample of the things he has coming up and they were jaw dropping.

Oh and Len Kody has a little audio thing of me up on his blog from Chicago. You know, in case you want to hear my voice, view my picture and masturbate at the same time.

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