There’s a new Here’s the Thing… up, go check it out.

Ashcans. “Hey, check out one-eighth of this graphic novel! The rest is coming out in at most a year!” They have their place, I guess, if used effectively. Early promotions, recouping some losses, having something new at a show, keeping your name out there – graphic novels take a while and cost money.

I picked up two ashcans at SPX and they both look gorgeous. First one was A. David Lewis and Jason Copland’s preview for Empty Chamber which looks to be an action/adventure espionage romp with am ass-kicking sexy chick and a toned down version of Mel Gibson’s character in Conspiracy Theory. A. David Lewis’ story is well laid out – a nice little mystery presenting itself in the ashcan that makes me hungry for the rest of the story. It seems to really dive right into the action, enough set-up to get to know our main player and then throw him into a world he’s only read about. Copland (who has a story with Stuart Moore in Western Tales of Terror 4) continues to be one of my favorite artists that aren’t ass-famous yet. But ADL and Jason make a good pairing and the story is a perfect fit for Jason’s ultra-clean, somewhat old-school style so I wish nothing but the best for this project – maybe it’ll put both of these guys where they deserve to be.

The second one is Neil Kleid and Jake Allen’s Brownsville. Neil is a weird case – I read his Xeric Award Winning 90 Candles some time back and instantly dumped a lot of faith on him – I’ve been talking him up a bit – realizing that I was staking my reputation of a man with impeccable taste on a dude who released a 90 panel comic book that I liked. Then I started seeing some images for Brownsville (coming out through NBM and drawn by the retardedly talented Jake Allen) and got wind of the pitch (two words – Jewish gangsters) and I started to become a bit more assured that the dude was the real deal.The ashcan really solidified that for me. The pacing is spot on, the characters’ voices instantly jump out at you and the story is intriguing right from the start. I mean, they’re Jewish mobsters! Think of the taglines: “Greed breeds enemies. These guys are fucked.” It’s just too easy! “Luca Brasi sleeps with the gefilte fish.” All kidding aside it looks beautiful and it’s definitely going to be a strong final product.
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Strip Clubs are a double edged sword. If you get wasted, it’s quite possibly the most fun you can have giving women money. However, if you get wasted, you end up giving them a lot more money than you should. Men get jealous over two things, mainly. How much money someone has and how much attention they get from women. In strip clubs, the more you spend the more attention you get (in theory). I firmly believe that’s why there are always so many fights in strip clubs.

The first time I went to a strip club I was a broke college kid with forty bucks to my name. After paying my cover and buying a seven dollar beer, I would have had enough left over to put three singles in between a stripper’s cleavage and two ten dollar lap-dances. Not the most productive strip club trip I’ll ever take but a good introduction at any rate.

We get to the club and I just flip it. I’m talking Titty Town. New York Titty. It was like living my best wet dream except with a bunch of Mexicans and bikers standing around with bottles of Bud Light and dollar bills. My friends and I walk into that place like zombies and reach right for our wallets.

I was immediately attracted to this tall girl with a bar code tattoo on the back of her neck. She was like Amazonian tall but without the Russ Myers, the kind of girl I see in the coffee shop and want to take her out for some gelato. I ask my friend Matt, the strip club veteran who’s been to two before this, what I should do.

“Give her a buck and ask her for a lap dance.”

It was such a weird answer at the time. I understand I’m not going to take her home to meet my mom but I figured I should at least buy her a drink. She’s sweet looking – you just look at her and you know that she really is stripping to pay for nursing school; it’s not just some line. You start playing out these Pretty Woman fantasies, about how you’re going to totally take this girl out dancing and wine her and dine her and make her fall in love with you and get her to quit stripping and become an accountant or some shit.

While I’m working up the nerve to talk to her my buddy Jim hands me a beer and tells me to be a man. Since I didn’t have to buy my first beer, I walk over and hold out a five-dollar bill – not a single – and she comes over, shaking those awesome fucking hips and giving me this seductive look.

And I’m just thinking, “She likes me.”

She does a little dance, bends over and puts her hands on her tits and looks down at them. She stays there for a moment and it’s all awkward. Finally I tell her, “They look great.” She laughs and tells me to put the money in between them. I do that, she clamps on the five, spins around and pulls her mouth right up to my ear.

“If you want a dance, I get off after this song.” She kisses my cheek and pulls back to the stage and I just stood there, in shock, as she smiled at me, waved and turned to the next guy. Here I am thinking I’m going to start a life with this girl, have kids, a fucking house in the hills and every night she’s going to move like that – every night she’s going to smell the way she smelled when she pulled up to me.

Of course, she realizes she found her mark for the night.

I go and tell my friends what just happened. Matt buys me a celebratory drink which I put down instantly, my hands shaking the whole time. I wait for that fucking song to end and it feels like years. At the end of it I practically run over to where she’s getting off the stage and ask her for that dance.

“Give me five minutes, baby.”

She called me baby! This is serious shit right here, right?

I go back to my friends. Someone else buys me a drink, tells me I’m gonna need my money for this chick. No idea what he’s talking about but whatever. I kill that drink to calm the nerves. Five minutes later my girl comes up to me – TO ME – and says she can give that dance now.

I don’t know what the song was – I don’t even think I was listening. I was so focused on her as she swooped in, her smell, how soft her skin was. I didn’t know what to do with my hands and she told me I can touch her – she won’t tell anyone. There’s a sign to my left that says “Do not touch the dancers” and yet she’s giving me permission! This is the start of a beautiful relationship. Maybe not the story we’ll tell our grandkids but either way it’ll be something monumental to us.

So I lay my hands on her back, she brings them around to her tits and gives me this devious smile, this evil smile, this “you’re making me so hot that I’m gonna fuck your brains out smile”. She puts my hands down, leans back over and says, “I don’t want my boss to see that.”

She starts asking me my name. What I do. All the while grinding on my hips and swinging her ass in face and I’m quite possibly the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life, she's interested in me. It's like a small-talk date but she's in a g-string.

The song ends and I give her a twenty instead of ten and she smiles, tucks it away. I offer to buy her a drink and she just laughs and says that she gets free drinks when she works. She invites me to a private room.

A PRIVATE ROOM.

And I say yes, naturally. And she tells me it’s a hundred bucks.

And everything goes away. The buzz, the elated feelings. She doesn’t look like the girl next door anymore. She’s tall because of her stilettos. Her smell is artificial. Maybe she’s not in nursing school. I noticed the bags under her eyes. The “devious smile” ripped right out of porno movies. She was what I wanted her to be for twenty bucks. For twenty bucks she let my imagination go wild and all she had to do was smile.

I told her I don’t have a hundred bucks. She tells me to take some money out. Ask your friends to lend it to you. She’ll make it worth my time. The ATM takes credit cards. It’s just a hundred bucks.

I go back to my friends and Will wants a dance with the stripper next. He walks up and asks for a dance, she leads him to a chair with the same smile she gave me. Five minutes later Will’s asking us if we have some money to lend him, he wants to go into the private room with her.

I tell him to fuck off. Loudly. Jealousy? I don’t know, maybe some of that mixed with a little shame. Ignorance. Either way we decide to leave. The whole way home Will’s bitching that we wouldn’t give him money. I just wanted to fucking punch him.

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I have something fun planned for next week. The theme is “Playing with Balls” but it has nothing to do with sex. It’s some good old Brooklyn stories about the million uses we had for blue balls (and again, no, not the sexual kind).

Labels: mitc

No comic plug today. Long day at work and needed to get shit done for the Counter Culture Festival, I can’t believe I got the story done before going to bed (sorry if it’s not that good). I’ll be picking up my SPX plugs tomorrow with Neil Klied’s (I put up almost a thousand words a day but God-forbid I get someone's name wrong. So sorry, Mr. Kleid) Brownsville and A. David Lewis’ Empty Chamber ashcans. I also have a new Here’s the Thing… coming up this Friday based on someone I met (briefly) at SPX.
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First off, I’d like to thank my boy Guam for introducing me to the term “doobs”. You can hear the song “Doobs” in the hit play “Tales of a Broken Heart: Not a Love Story” which will be playing again in Boston. I swear to you it’s so worth your time and you should really, really, really go see it. Don’t take my word for it, read the Boston Globe review. It’ll be at the Improv Boston every Friday at 8PM in November and the first two weeks in December.

What would be titty week without a discussion on doobs?

I have doobs. No doubt about it. In High School I used to have pectoral muscles (from playing football) with larger than normal nipples or, as Jorge once called them, nipples roughly the size of deer ticks (which, I assume, means they're big if he meant relative to a normal tick). In college my pectorals starting turning into doobs and by junior year I was no longer able to call them pecks – they were 100% doobage (luckily the doobage has since turned into a peck/doob mixture again, hopefully I’ll be back to full peck eventually).

As time went on, and the doobs became more prominent, my confidence shrunk quite a bit. I stopped taking my shirt off in public, even if it was 95-degrees in my dorm room I’d sleep with my shirt on, and avoided places like beaches and pools as often as I could. I wasn’t a big fan of the doobs and really didn’t want anyone to see them.

Eventually the doobs became a joke amongst my friends. As you can tell by this site, I have no problem with making fun of myself. It’s my schtick, my routine. I do the same thing off-line; I often find my own awkwardness is an excellent source of comedic material. Do to this, my reluctance to ever show my doobs became a running joke, I would tell girls that no-one can see my nipples unless I see theirs first.

At first everyone sort of laughed about it – until they realized that I indeed avoided ever taking my shirt off. My little running joke backfired because some people made it their own personal mission to see my doobs. They’d wait until I was sauced and then get a little flirtatious; ask if I can just give them a peek. My little joke got out of control to the point where I became the chick. I was the one that was harassed and liquored up in an attempt to show some skin.

It didn’t take long, however, to turn the situation to my favor. Us horny perverts, we always know how to make the most of a situation. I invented the “boob for doob” and I think it can safely be classified as one of the best inventions of all time. Better than Mardi Gras beads. The basis was simple – show me yours and I’ll show you mine. The reality, well…

Let’s take my friend Kim. My friend Kim was obsessed with seeing the doobs. She kept asking and asking and asking and I kept replying, “Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.” One day she agrees to the deal.

My friend Matt, who was with me at the time, insisted that we tape the flash. She immediately said no but after assuring her that we would a) record it in a private room and b) erase it before we set foot back in the hall she agreed to at least “feel it out”.

We get to Matt’s room, video camera at the ready. She’s embarrassed, obviously, and acting all hesitant but we continue to push it. Finally she does it – a quick flash but we catch it on tape. We watch it back in slow-mo and then erase it.

“Your turn,” she tells me.

“Nah. I don’t think I’m gonna do it.”

“But you promised!”

“Eh.”

She’s upset but, you know, I never said I wasn’t an asshole.

(As a side note did end up showing her the doob at her going away party before she went to Europe. She was one of my better friends so the whole “not showing mine” was more of a joke and she took it that way.)

I’ve played a lot of strip poker in my life, it’s my favorite sport, and I can honestly say that the “boob for doob” move was the precursor to every strip poker match. And I can honestly say I cheated my ass off every time.

Labels: mitc

Two more pick-ups from SPX. First one I just kind of caught out of the corner of my eye, heard the pitch and picked it up. Matthew Bernier’s Out of Water is the story about a boy who falls in love with a dolphin. It is a gorgeous book –reminiscent of Craig Thompson in both art style and story telling technique but not enough to be entirely derivative – Matthew has his own voice and it’s strong. Super clean lines, nice and heavy inks and a touching story – I can’t find a website for him but you can order by emailing him at tinglyelectriceelunderpants @ hotmail.com and put “order” in your subject to check this book out – it’s worth the couple of bucks.

Elizabeth Genco writes the always entertaining (and informative) column “The Craft” on Scryptic Studios. I’ve talked to her online a couple of times yet didn’t realize she was at SPX, didn’t realize she had the table right behind mine and didn’t realize who she was until she bought Elk’s Run towards the end of Saturday. Go internet! Anyway, she handed me a copy of Weird Sister, her anthology that follows a modern day witch and her ghost dog (no, sadly, not Forest Whitaker) as they fight evil in Brooklyn. There were three stories in the book and what I found interesting was that you can see her grow as a writer and a producer with each story (I don’t know if she put these together one after the other but it really looks like she did). By the time you get to the third story the layouts, story and dialog (and her phenomenal find of an artist Jeff Zornow) portray a great deal of confidence and competence. On the whole a little more back-story, maybe an intro chapter that gets more into the girl’s head, would have been nice but once I got into a groove with what was going on I found it to be an entertaining read. The other two stories where illustrated by the talented Adam Boorman and Dash Shaw). I imagine you can order the book on her website – it’s worth a check-out

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For starters, in the comment thread yesterday Shane said that I need to find a synonym for “titties”. Part of the joke was to keep using the same word over and over again to sort of play with the juvenile nature of the word but I think Shane may be right. So, from here on out I will never use the same word for “titties” again because there are much more juvenile words I can use.

Luck is an odd thing. Let’s look at gambling, for instance. Back when I first started going to casinos I was lucky if I won 20 bucks on a slot machine. When I started playing blackjack I realized 20 bucks was shit and “luck” meant I was winning somewhere in the hundred-dollar range. On one trip I went to the casino with one hundred bucks to gamble with. I whittled the money down to my last ten bucks playing blackjack and then put my solitary ten-dollar chip on 14 in roulette and won 350 bucks. Luck then became anything better than hitting a single number with ten bucks down. Two years ago I was down in Gulfport and hit the number in roulette 6 times in my first ten spins and then went to chomp down on the best steak I’ve ever eaten. I’ve went to casinos since that magical run but I’ve yet to consider my self “lucky” yet. It’s going to take a haul of upwards of a couple of grand for me to adjust my stance on what “lucky” truly is.

When dealing with tantalizing ta-tas, it’s the same thing.

As a kid, a mere glimpse of a girl’s cans is the luckiest thing that can happen to you. My first glimpse, as mentioned, came as I happened to be looking into a neighbor’s window. Despite being able to cop a feel at the age of thirteen, the let-down of the event didn’t really redefine “lucky” for me – a random glimpse of some 5318008* was still cause for celebration.

Breast feeding mothers always attracted a crowd of young boys. If we were in Carroll Park and somebody put the baby to the nipple, word spread ridiculously fast and within seconds almost every boy in the park was playing over by the breast feeder’s bench, hoping for a glimpse of the diamond cutter before she tucked it back into her shirt.

If the mother in question ever fumbled the shirt or the baby started wigging out – that was a lucky day.

I’ll also never forget the time I learned the basic mechanics behind the wet t-shirt contest. When you’re growing up, there’s always that one girl that lives in denial when it comes to her blossoming bazoombas and refuses to wear a training bra. In our neighborhood, that girl’s was named Alison.

Several times a summer we’d have block parties on Woodhull Street. Brooklyn block parties are insane. We used to have rides show up, fucking ponies, ice-cream trucks, fire trucks, DJs – it was like a mini-carnival on a solitary block. Everybody barbequing and riding bikes, playing football or playing manhunt. One of the real treats during a block party was when we used to open the Johnny-pump up (or the fire hydrant for those non-New Yorkers).

We’d open it up and put the sprinkler cap on it and have hours of fun playing various Johnny-pump games which, I believe, warrants their own story one day. For now I’ll just say that any kid that didn’t want to go into the Johnny-pump gets pushed in. And, as you may have guessed, Alison got pushed in while wearing a white t-shirt and no bra.

She was a good sport, once she got pushed in she just sort of laughed and skipped around and had a grand ‘ole time, not realizing that every boy stopped playing around and stared at her, mouth’s agape, as her tiny chesticles began to show through her sopping wet shirt. Eventually her MOTHER yells at her to get out of the pump and when Alison asks why her mother says, “You’re breasts are showing!”

I’ve never seen anyone turn so red. I honestly felt bad for her and looking back at it now; her mother could have been more subtle (but this is the same woman that, when Alison got hit by a fucking car, she insisted on changing her clothes before taking her to the hospital because she had blood all over her shirt – how’s that for priorities?). She ran off, covering up her lil’ tracts of land with her arms, and ran into her apartment. She didn’t come out for the rest of the day but you better believe she started wearing a training bra at that point.

That was a lucky day.

I used to take Judo and one day a cute girl signed up for our class. The girls obviously took precautions in case their gi ever opened up, they usually wore t-shirts underneath it. This girl had a good set of knockers for a kid my age and I was very excited to pair up with her despite the fact that I’d never get a flash.

Judo is compromised of throws, trips and grapples. The grapples were always the worst, being pinned down and struggling so hard to get back up that you rip a huge fart, everyone sitting around laughs and you’re humiliated. With the new girl, the one with the bombs, you let her grapple you. Most grapples when you’re starting out in judo had you on your back while the person grappling you lay on top. One of the grapples in particular, the most popular one to use, resulted in boobs pressed against your face if it’s a girl doing the grappling. The minute that you laid there and fake struggled while the Sensei yelled, “C’mon! Are you gonna let a girl beat you?” was the best minute of a horny kid’s life.

Despite the fact that the rack was safely hidden behind a layer of sports bra, t-shirt and gi – it was still a luck day.

And then M came into my life junior year. Cute as all hell with double-ds. One of the most sought after girls in High School. Early into our year long relationship the over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder came off, the Annette Funicellos busted out and I then knew what lucky was.

Fucking jackpot.



*Put it in an LCD calculator and flip it upside down.

Labels: mitc

I talked about Adam Suerte’s Aprendiz in the past on this site; I picked up the first two issues at last year’s SPX. I got to grab the third issue this year and whereas it had a different tone than the first two it was still a beautiful book with a thoroughly engaging and honest story. It loses some of that “struggling hero” feel, Adam’s apprenticeship takes a turn for the better as he starts to actually get good – his confidence builds – but it makes up for it with an extremely interesting look at the tattooing world and how one learns their craft while having some genuine moments where you feel nothing but pride for a guy you don’t even know partaking in a craft you know nothing about.

Think of it this way, if some dude was to write a story about learning to be a knitter it would have to be insightful and interesting as fuck to get me past the first page. As much as I will acknowledge tats are a lot cooler than knitting, they’re both about the same distance away from “my world” and yet Adam gives his story the right amount of human drama to make his experience, despite how dissimilar to anything I’d ever go through, relatable.

I said it once and I’ll say it again – buy this book. You can get it through his site.

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Yesterday I began my journey into the wonderful world of titty by talking about the first pair I’ve seen from afar and the first pair I’ve seen up close four years later and the disappointment I felt when I realized that titties weren’t what I built them up to be. Despite the initial let down, I decided to investigate the mythos behind the titty. I began to study what, exactly, made something like porno mags stolen from Joe Tomo’s Cigar Shop sexy and Natural Geographic pictures laughable. They both had titty, so why was one so much better than the other for getting my teenage hormones to go from “raging” to “fucking supernova”.

The problem was that I was not presented with titty again until I was fifteen years old – my studies had to wait two full years. I think this was a very unhealthy situation to be in – like the stem cell researcher I was hungry for knowledge and had no material to work with. The titty-void left me open to the wrong types of influences.

Some of you may recall that I was working at a local video store and had access to all kinds of porno – it was a thirteen-year-old’s dream come true. Now, as a responsible adult, I believe that thirteen-year-olds should have to work for their porno. When it’s all there for the taking – every fetish, pleasure and mustache style – it has a profound effect on what’s wrong and what’s right when it comes to sex. I had no boundaries, no-one to tell me, “No, Jason, most teenage girls don’t do that – that’s more of a thirty-seven-year-old-cheating-on-their-husband thing.”

So, skipping the details of every movie I’ve ever watched, by the time I hit fourteen I thought titties were nothing but humongous, perfectly tanned, slappable, extremely bouncy, cum-catching, whipped cream covered, clothes-pin wearing bags of flesh that you can violently pinch until you practically rip them off. So, you know, that’s why I didn’t “get them” the first time I saw them – I didn’t give them a back hand chop to bring out the natural redness.

Fucking porno.

Needless to say that the next time I got my hands on some titty it was followed five seconds later by an “ouch” and a quick pull away because I pretty much pinched it so hard the poor girl will never be able to breast-feed.

It was at a teen-club, which is where most of my more embarrassing stories take place, and I was sitting in a dark corner making out with some chick whose name I don’t remember since, you know, she stopped talking to me after that night. We took a walk outside, Bay Ridge area, and found a park. After another heavy make out session she pulls away, looks around, and smiles as she pops some titty out of her tubetop.

This time I was “ready” for them.

Except, of course, they were a lot whiter than anything I’ve seen in a porno movie and nowhere near as bouncy but I didn’t let that get to me – tan lines are fine and you occasionally saw them in the more low-budget movies. I went back to the making out, quick cup of the titty, and the pinch.

She honestly had tears in her eyes. She pulled away and popped her top back on, backed away from me and ran off, either because she was crying or because she thought I was going to wear her skin as a trench coat.

I still had a lot of learning to do.

Labels: mitc

I had a great fucking time at SPX. The Hoarse & Buggy table did well; we actually made some money which was awesome. The DC Conspiracy table seemed to be doing well, too. I got to talk to some great people and picked up some truly amazing books that I’ll be talking about this week and probably into next week. One guy I met is even going to be the inspiration for my next Here’s the Thing… article, sort of counterpoint to last weeks article, a dude that’s doing it right. I just want to email him first and get his approval.

I’m not going to write much more about SPX today. After the Sox-Orioles game I caught some of the Pats and then slept until eleven. Now I’m kind of beat again and since I decided to change the theme for this week I needed to write up a new story. Last Friday I said I was going to do a week of stories about my mom. But I talked to a lot of people at SPX and directed them to this site and instead of going to the cutesy, feel-good stories I wanted to weed out the weaklings so I don’t “let them down” next time I talk about strippers and dope. So, on that note…

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Whoever said “more than a handful is wasted” has never come face to nip with a nice set of titties. I’m going to dedicate this week to some of the titties I’ve met before, the spectacular ones and the good ones (because titties, like pizza, are never bad), the glimpses and the gawks, the fumbles and the feels of fury.

My first flash of non-film titty came when I was around nine years old. I happened to be looking out of our apartment window while the building across the way from us was sporting a liberally frumpy naked chick rummaging through the refrigerator. I saw just enough to be 100% sure that she was naked but not enough to satisfy my pre-pubescent desire to see any titty, despite the packaging.

Little fact about our apartment. Both the front and back have three windows. One of the back windows is in our tiny, closet-sized bathroom. The bathroom window would be more than half the length of the bathroom wall and about a third of the width and it would be directly in line with the shower. I say “would be” because my father put a wall up over the window. He didn’t take the window off and replace it with a wall, mind you, we were poor folk. He just got this flimsy material at some hardware store and made a false wall that covered the window. It was like plywood with this heinous print on it.

Now, the flimsy false wall got a hole in it at some point. I don’t know how but it basically looked like a peephole, it was about eye-level and gave clean line-of-site access to the apartments across the way. Despite how sketchy that sounds, I don’t think it was ever put there purposely (unless I did it and forgot about it), the people across the way were way too far for quality adult-like peeping and in all my years of using that peephole I never saw anything remotely close to what I saw out the window that one day – and I used that peephole a lot. I think the hole really was an accident because an adult would never waste their time in front of it.

All through my pre-teens and into my early teens I’d look through that peephole every time I was in the bathroom, hoping to grab a glimpse of some titty. All the hours I put into staking out our neighbors' apartments I never saw a thing. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t see another titty until I was thirteen years old, when a curious girl named Melanie and I got a little experimental on the swing set.

I talked about Melanie in the past; she was my first summer fling. We met at this time-sharing thing my parents belonged to in the Poconos and while the adults drank rum and merengued the night away I was sucking face with a girl from Philly who thought I packed heat when I was home in Brooklyn because I was a pathological liar when it came to impressionable girls.

And one time she let them out.

I watched her as she reached around behind her back and unclasped her bathing suit, that wicked smile stretched across her face that teenagers feel is sexy but in reality is a mixture of awkwardness and embarrassment. It’s awkwarrassment. I sat there beaming like an idiot, frothing at the mouth and rubbing my hands together. Here it is, the moment I’ve been waiting for. After seeing a pair for the first time almost four years ago I’m finally about to see them up close. They’ll be mine to play with and I’ve been studying what to do – the licks, nibbles and soppier sucking. I even knew at this point that the folds where erogenous, sometimes more so than the nipple itself. And all the waiting and anticipation and researching were finally going to pay off.

The top comes off.

And the moment was really not what I expected at all. I expected them to glow softly, reflecting the light from the moon and creating a calming sort of sexy mood lighting. I expected angels to come down from heaven playing trumpets and singing hosanna to the titty. I expected the titties to emit a fragrance so seductive and delicious that my olfactory nerves would fucking explode, causing violent nose bleeds and forcing me to level with my doctor and say, “Dr. Sergio, just give me some tissue and stop asking questions. I saw some titties, you know what it’s like.”

“Ah…first titty. Did you know the folds are erogenous as well?”

“Yes, Dr. Sergio. Yes, I do.”

Obviously, it was nothing like that. After getting over the initial shock of the seemingly mediocrity of the titty I’ve learned to respect them for what they are. They’re a reward for good service, a down payment on the coming sexual romp, the first checkpoint on the way down.

Whoever named them “fun-bags” only got it half-right. There’s no such thing as a no-fun titty but to unlock the full fun potential it requires hard work, dedication and the ability to command the titty. And in order to get to that point, it takes a good amount of embarrassing stories, which is what I’ll be doing this week.

Labels: mitc

Tomorrow is SPX! Please pass by my table. I’ll be in Versailles Ballroom, table 80, with Josh. I’ll be selling Hoarse & Buggy books and talking up the Counter Culture Festival. Also, pass by the DC Conspiracy table at 75B and pick up a copy of our jam book along with brand new issues of Matt Dembicki’s Mr. Big and Bram and Monica’s Raised by Squirrels.

My comic book message board wisdom for today is actually the setup for the new Here’s the Thing… column. That’s right, I wrote a new one. Go check it out.

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My freshman year roommate doesn’t just belong in the Peanut Gallery, he’s the President.

He was a sophomore which basically meant no-one wanted to room with him after freshman year, never a good sign. I called him a month before I moved in to ask him what I should bring, stuff like that, to which he basically “yeahed” a lot, showing no interest in much of anything. I considered requesting a roommate change since it’s easier to do before school starts but it wasn’t an option unless I wanted to move into Howard Johnson’s for a term – the local BU HoJo’s was temporary housing for freshman. I opted to tough it out.

Wrong call.

The kid was a smokestack for starters. I was a half-pack a day at that point and he was easily pushing two packs a day. He got to the dorm a couple of hours before I did and the whole place already reeked of smoke, much to my mom’s horror. He was a grumpy little Asian kid, sitting in front of his computer, playing Quake or some shit. Shades closed and the lights off. Hardly got up to say “hi”.

He pretty much stayed in that position for that the remainder of the year.

He’d play video games into the wee hours of the night. I’ve always been the type to go to bed late, even now with my job and all I still don’t get to bed until around 1 or 2AM, get up at 7AM. Back in college I went to bed around 3AM usually. Eric would get to bed by around 6AM and sleep until 2PM or so. Every night. I’d go to sleep to the soft glow of a computer screen; hints of CG splattered blood reflected off of the walls around his desk.

I hardly ever got any time alone with R, obviously. That was the worst part. I’d complain to him and he’d just give me the “it’s my room too”. I’d convince people on the floor to take him out with them, it would occasionally work. If he got home and I hung something on the doorknob to let him know not to disturb, he’d actually bang on the door until I answered, naked, and ask me how long I was going to be.

If I didn’t answer the door he’d start calling the phone.

I wanted to get him out of the room so bad that I would sign him up for information packets about groups he might be interested in. He’d start getting invitations from the Asian American Club, the Anime Club, the Video Game Club – I just wanted him to bite on one of them and maybe find a reason to get out every once and a while – none of them worked.

Eventually he got a job which might sound awesome but he actually got a job working in the dining hall, which is where I worked. And he worked a lot of the same shifts so it was almost as if he was purposely torturing me at this point.

But I made it through the year without killing him which says a lot about my resolve, I think; a lesser man would have destroyed him. He left Towers (our dorm) after his sophomore year and went to Miles Standish, a standard move for anyone in Towers it seemed. He got a single which was probably a great call on his part.

We actually became better friends (or at least more cordial towards each other) after he moved out. Of course, I’d only see him in the dining hall because he never left his room still but we were both promoted to student manager and since he had no social life he was great when it came to switching shifts – astonishingly, he never had a conflict.

Despite the fact that I want to continue to expand the Peanut Gallery I’m going to take a break from it next week and instead do a week of stories about my mom. I think some of you might come to the conclusion that she’s the biggest peanut of them all (but a lovable one).

Labels: mitc

Ahhh…Lost. Glad to have you back, old friend.

Some comic message board wisdom…

175k copies? What a piece of crap!

And story time…

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I was friends with Dan from freshman year straight through to senior year. He lived on the sixth floor; we worked in the dining hall together. Sophomore year we both became student managers. Junior year he got an off-campus apartment with a different group of my friends that I didn’t even realize he knew. Senior year he was one of the four people that performed in Jesus Christ: Megastar. So we have some roots yet he’s quirky enough to dedicate a Peanut Gallery posting to.

He liked to scream, for starters. A lot. People do comedy in different ways. I obnoxiously turn everything into sex, my boy Guam constantly jokes and 75% of the time it’s funny, PJ does his bizaro-PJ routine where he goes from quite Catholic boy to licking girls faces and making anal sex jokes. Dan just sort of screamed. That was his comedy. He saw an opening for a joke and he, you know, screamed something. Usually involving the f-word and threats to kill somebody.

So, there’d be a bunch of people standing in front of the grill in the dining hall when Dan would say:

Dan: Hey, pass me a spatula.

Jason: In a minute.

Dan: PASS IT NOW OR I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU!

And then he’d laugh really loudly while everyone around got uncomfortable and began shifting about, thinking pizza might be a better idea than burgers.

But yelling in the dining hall is harmless…

I’ve had friends that I’ve known who honestly believed they drove better drunk. They weren’t rationalizing their behavior, you look in their eyes and you know that they really thought they were excellent drunk drivers. Of course most of these people have had their licenses suspended, yet they still believe that if it wasn’t for that “broken” street light that was only yellow for “like a second” they would still be getting along fine as the world’s best drunk driver.

Dan was like that, but not with cars. He thought he was the best drunken swordsman.

For starters, I don’t really hang with people that own swords. Dan was an exception because I didn’t know of his swords until junior year. Unless you’re a ninja, samurai or antique collector there is absolutely no reason why you should own a sword. And if you are any of those three things, you shouldn’t own a sword you got for two-hundred bucks at a flea market. There are four things you can own that are worse than a sword: a fake “The One Ring”, a battle axe, Denver Broncos’ parachute pants and an Iroc-Z. Nevertheless, Dan had a couple of swords, being neither a ninja, samurai or an antique collector.

When he got drunk he’d take his swords out and whip them around. I shit you not on several occasions I’ve seen him demonstrate how he can stop the sword within a couple of inches of someone’s throat, without the person’s consent, of course. Everyone would yell, “WHAT THE FUCK DAN! PUT THAT SWORD AWAY!” to which he’d follow up with his usual humor, “HOW ‘BOUT I CUT YOUR FUCKIN’ HEAD OFF!” He’d then laugh maniacally as we all called it a night and headed home.

Amazingly no-one ever got hurt by Dan’s sword. Maybe he was the best drunken swordsman in the world, which in reality means about as much as the best impotent lover.

Labels: mitc

I went to pick up my monthlies yesterday and walked out of the shop with three Lapham comics in my hand, Stray Bullets 39, Daredevil vs. Punisher 4 and Detective Comics 811. Stray Bullets is my favorite comic series, no surprise there and it makes me so goddamn happy to see David Lapham getting some mainstream work. His Detective story has been strong but the man works better as a complete package, Daredevil vs. Punisher has been so good so far. I think if Lapham was to do the Punisher monthly I would buy it for the first time. I really dig this Punisher pushed over the edge angle, going crazy and killing well…questionable people.

Also, I’ve been keeping up with Spider-Man: House of M only because Tom Peyer's writing it (with Mark Waid) and he entertains me everyday on his site. It’s the only House of M book I was getting and so far I’ve been enjoying the fuck out of it. So much so, in fact, that I grabbed John Layman's Fantastic Four: House of M 1-3 on a whim today – the cover looked quite inviting. It was a really fun book, sort of a guilty pleasure kind of thing where you can route for the bad guy and giggle about it. So, I’m not getting House of M but the mini-series have been kind of fun.

And finally, before story time, some comic book message board wisdom:


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(My biggest grammar fuck is angle/angel. I don’t know why – severe brain fart. Always had it. For that reason alone, this story was a bitch to write. Angle of Death, although funny, is not very threatening.)

Mohamed wasn’t the only psycho on our floor freshman year; there was also the Angel of Death and his roommate, Norbert.

Despite living with these guys for a year nobody really knew anything about them – it was all rumor and hearsay. They were these two Asian guys (I know, Norbert, right?) that supposedly only had a room on our floor to keep their scholarships. Everyone said they had an off campus apartment as well and only used the room when they needed to get up early or between classes.

These guys both acted like they were straight from the Japanese mafia – designer clothes, mean looking scowls, a general contempt for everything in existence. They were the kind of dudes that, if you see them pulling up on Ninjas, you get the fuck out of their way.

We saw Norbert every once and a while; he’d come to the floor more often than the Angel of Death. Never sparing a glance at any of us but walking straight to his room. He’d occasionally give a nod if you were right in his grill – like if he was exiting the bathroom while you were entering it – but for the most part he just reaffirmed his existence without paying you any mind.

The Angel of Death, on the hand, was the stuff of legend.

O-Dog started the legend, saying that he saw the Angel of Death in the bathroom once, coming out of the shower. His entire back was covered with the most righteous angel tattoo ever inked, more ominous than heavenly, wing stretched along the back of his arms. O-Dog told us that he turned around and left the bathroom, fearing that one look from the scary tattooed Asian man would cause his immediate demise. It was this story that dubbed the kid the Angel of Death.

Everyone jokingly spread the legend of the Angel of Death. How no-one can escape once he sets his eyes on you. We made up a story about a kid who found himself in his line of site only to be mowed over by a car shortly after. The Angel’s stare was a guaranteed death sentence, if not instantly by his own hands he marks you for the Grim Reaper to collect at a later time. It was all fun and games until we all saw that our rumor wasn’t far from the truth.

I’ve talked in the past about the pranks we played on our floor. One of our favorites was when we lined somebody’s doorframe with newspaper (they swung inwards) and stacking hundreds of cans behind the newspaper so that when the kid broke through cans flew all over the place.

The sophomores on our floor thought his would be a funny prank to play on Norbert and the Angel of Death. They claimed that they actually weren’t “that bad”, they’re just quite, and last year they hung around a lot more than they do this year. Despite our protests they decided to go through with the prank and whereas I took no part in the set-up I wanted to see the payoff.

We knew Norbert was home that night so they got to work and finished setting up at around one in the morning. They called the phone, someone answered, and they said that there was an emergency and he needed to evacuate the building.

We’re all standing in the hallway, in front of the door, camera at the ready. Door opens. We hear a groan and the door shuts. We sit in silence, wondering what’s going on. Maybe he didn’t want to deal with us assholes? Maybe he wouldn’t play along?

Five minutes later the door opens again and the biggest fucking knife I’ve ever seen comes punching through the newspaper, the Angel of Death’s beet-red, enraged fist clasped around the handle. His body punches through and he looks like he’s going to fucking kill all of us.

I’ve never seen a crowd of people scatter like that. We just ran, diving into people’s rooms and making bee-lines for the stairwell. All we heard was the Angel of Death’s screams coming from behind us, none of us looked back to see if he got anyone with that knife or if anyone needed help.

Wherever we ended up was where we spent the night. I slept on the sixth floor that night in a friend’s room. Although we realized he just wanted to scare the fuck out of us and had no intention of killing us, for the next week or so my floor mates and I were afraid to walk around on the fourth floor, expecting the Angel of Death to take his revenge at any moment. As time went on life returned to normal but none of us went near the Angel of Death’s room again and always checked to see if he was around before letting our guard down.

Labels: mitc

I have nothing to plug, again, but I did find a funny post on a comic message board that made me wonder if I could make an ongoing feature called “Comic Book Wisdom”. Within five minutes I found ten great examples quotes that make me laugh (especially out of context) and decided that it would be pretty easy to keep up with. So, let’s start this one right. (You gotta click it to blow it up).



God, I hope so, because that story sounds exciting.

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There was this Arabic guy that lived next door to me freshman year. I’m pretty sure his name was Mohamed but that doesn’t say much since one of my knee-jerk racist tendencies is to be pretty sure every Arabic guy whose name I’ve forgotten is Mohamed until I discover otherwise. No one’s perfect; we all have our little racist things. For the sake of argument we’ll call him Mohamed.

He hated us. The entire floor. Every single one of us was his enemy. When we had our music too loud he’d knock our doors down. If we were congregating too late in the common room he’d curse at us and threaten to call the RA. He’d never say a word to any of us unless he was yelling.

The other Muslims on our floor had it a lot worse. Mohamed was roomed with one of them, O-Dog, who was a cool as fuck cat that we somewhat corrupted by introducing him to dope. Mohamed would always lecture O-Dog about being a better Muslim. O-Dog would tell us that Mohamed hated that fact that he fraternized with the rest of the floor, that we were a bunch of drug and sex addicts and how we should be avoided.

O-Dog just sort of agreed with the cat because he was honestly afraid of him. He let Mohamed have his way with everything. O-Dog never played music in his room, he liked hip-hop and reggae and Mohamed would always yell at him when he played it. No posters, he couldn’t watch the movies he liked. It’s the reason he was always hanging with one of us, his room was basically only good for sleeping.

Mahim, the other Muslim on our floor, was traditional, he did his daily prayers and lived the life of a peace-loving, inclusive, model Muslim. His roommate was this cat Alex, a metal head that blasted nothing but hair-bands all day. But Mahim and Alex got along well together, they managed to integrate their lifestyles, compromise, so that they functioned as roommates.

This pissed Mohamed off to no end because Alex was Mohamed’s arch enemy. He would lecture Mahim all the time, saying that Alex’s devil music was fouling his room and making Mahim’s prayers useless. Mahim told us Mohamed wouldn’t leave him alone; he kept trying to get Mahim to room with him. Mahim would rather be with loud, dirty, metal head Alex than Mohamed because he honestly thought Mohamed was fucking nuts.

The thing that was funny about Mohamed was that for someone who lectured all of the other Muslims on the floor about cleanliness and bad influences and disrespectful roommates/neighbors was quite possibly one of the most disgusting people I have ever had to live with.

He would hack up tremendous lougies in the shower – we’d hear him bring them up from the depths of his intestines from outside the bathroom, he’d wake people up with the horrible sound. We learned early not to take a shower in the stall next to his – the stalls were paired up so that two showers shared a drain and floor. A couple of instances of a loogie floating over to the drain (or occasionally a particularly noxious, yellow, stream of piss) and we all came to the conclusion that when Mohamed was in the shower, that was his time to do whatever the fuck he wanted, no-one else goes in there.

I occasionally pee in the privacy of my own shower but who the fuck does it when there’s a person three feet from you sharing a drain? That’s never a good thing but making it even worse is the highly detectable presence of the piss. It was like he had an asparagus shake every morning.

He’d also bring all his shaving gear into the shower and he was a hairy dude. He’d leave a pile of hair all over the stall, never bothering to simply run the shower a bit to sweep up the stragglers. You could have made a wig for chemo-patients with the hair he left behind.

And I don’t even want to get into his tendency to not flush, as if it’s beneath him.

We complained about him to the RA quite often but Mohamed had no respect for the RA either. We adapted by getting water slippers (we basically didn’t wash our feet all of freshman year) and running the shower for several minutes before getting in - in case Mohamed used it that morning. We tried to designate one shitter as the Mohamed shitter, he seemed to favor the middle one, and that was fine with us. He’d occasionally switch up his shitter but for the most part he stayed with the middle.

And the kicker? He failed out freshman year. The only one on the floor to not come back. With all the quiet he demanded you’d think he would at least be studying. Good fucking riddance.

Labels: mitc

Baltimore, Quarters, Conspiracies and Peanut Gallery: Josefrero

Went to Baltimore Con this past weekend with Chris and it was good times, even got to meet and have lunch with Robert Kirkman (who’s friends with Chris) and I realized first hand that he’s an all right son-of-a-bitch. Picked up some books that I hope to talk about this week. I got Batman: Year II for five bucks on Chris’ recommendation and I have to say that after the reading the first issue I wanted to rip my eyes out. It feel like it was written by the bastard child of William Shakespeare and Rob Liefeld who tapped some guy named BatsBitches03 from the Newsarama board to edit it. Maybe it gets better but I have no intention of finding out.

Homeboy Jason Copland (a phenomenal artist) started his new blog, No Quarter. Go check it out.

And I started updating the DC Conspiracy site in order to start getting it ready in time for SPX. Updated the “events” page and added the brand-spanking new “preview comics” page. I still need to add some comics, members and a link to the Counter Culture Festival page.

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I started the Peanut Gallery last Wednesday after realizing the football weak was boring. I’m going to continue it this week since it’s been a lot of fun to write and I know plenty of characters worth talking about.

Jose was the butt of every joke on Woodhull St. The kid was just whacked out. He was also David’s brother, my boy, which meant I had to see him quite often.

For starters he was obsessed with cops – he wanted to be one his whole life. He would pull kids over on their bikes and give them speeding tickets. If they got three tickets he’d impound their bike. And you couldn’t fight the dude, he was bigger than all of us and rode this fucking monster truck sized BMX. So he’d take my bike and I’d run to my father and you could see the rage on my father’s face as Jose explained to him that I’m riding recklessly and he needed to teach me a lesson. Somewhere in the back of my father’s mind he was debating knocking a ten-year-old in his snotbox.

His obsession with cops was an odd pairing with his horribly racist ideologies. He wanted to be Italian so he adopted a fake accent and insisted people called him “Joey”. Dave and I would be sitting on the stoop, listening to music and sipping quarter-waters when Jose would come out, look at the corner at some black kids and comment on how the cops should do something about those “loitering niggers”. Dave and I just sort of roll our eyes. He hated every race but mainly black people and Hispanics (which was amazing because his ass was straight-Columbian). He’d sort of jokingly call me a spic quite often to try and rile me up. It usually worked.

He was worse when he got his license. His family owned a station wagon and he used to drive Dave and I around and drop us of places. He’d drive that fucking station wagon like it was the Dukes of Hazard car. Swerving around, accelerating hard, and honking his horn. But that wasn’t even the embarrassing part. He’d pull up alongside hookers and let them now it’s illegal to solicit. He’d park the car and walk into a convenience store if he saw black people in there, just in case the owner needed back-up. I mean, the guy was fucking nuts.

The family traded the station wagon in for a mini-van and that had to be the best day of Jose’s life. He’d brag to people that he had “the van” and cruise around the neighborhood with the window open, blasting White Snake and occasionally techno music.

He didn’t seem to have any friends – I don’t know how he could possibly have friends the way he acted. He was always hanging around Dave and me, trying to start shit. If he ever caught us doing something stupid he’d actually tell our parents. He was just so fucking lame.

At the age of 18 he became an auxiliary cop which is a little better than a civilian but worse than a C.O.P. (that’s Citizens On Patrol for those of you not down with the Police Academy movies). But man, he’d wear that badge everywhere. He’d pin me against a car and frisk me while flashing the badge, saying I looked suspicious.

Eventually the whole family up and moved to Florida. Now he’s back in New York, living in his parent’s old house, an active member of the NYPD. Although he now seems to be a well-rounded and extremely friendly adult he still insists people call him Joey. Good ‘ole Blue and their screening process.

Labels: mitc

I haven’t read a comic in three weeks except for the Decoy Hardback which is why I haven’t been pimping comics. But I did finish Goblet of Fire and read the first 200 pages of Order of the Phoenix since last Friday. In less than three weeks I’ve read the first four Harry Potter books and a third of the fifth one. That’s over 1500 pages of Potter action in less than three weeks. I swear to God I didn’t even think I’d like them. The ending of Goblet of Fire fucking rocked me. I’m such a dork.

I will say that I went to a bar today on Panama City Beach and got drunk enough to feel really, really, really bad for this barfly. I ended up talking to her for an hour, she was really nice, smoked like a chimney but really nice. We just talked about life and shit, mainly religion which I find pretty funny. It was just sad, she must have been in her late 30s or early 40s, this plaid skirt and fake-fancy shirt – too much make-up and all done up. Voice sounded like nails on a chalkboard. You don’t get a lot of barflies in DC (at least not in the yuppie bars I got to) so whenever I go on business trips I end up getting all sad for the ones I see. I couldn’t imagine my life without Robin; I keep seeing myself as the male version of a barfly. Shit, if it wasn’t for Robin I’d be an alcoholic and gambling addict – I’d just be a depressing son of a bitch. And I see these chicks and I just think it would be me without Robin. And with a vagina, of course. An old, musty vagina.

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Going back to high-school here, Abe was this cat I didn’t start hanging with until senior year. He was this big Hindu kid who was a nice as all hell guy but a bit…sheltered…until he started hanging with us.

He was one of the “beat monsters”. One of the things about being in the dork program in high-school was that it was easy to be the “cool kid” despite how dorky you were. I had this random assortment of Asian kids (and Abe) that I called my “beat monsters”, sort of apprentices in the art of beat-boxing, and they called me the “beat master”. I realize that there is nothing cool about that whatsoever but it was fun, so, who gives a fuck?

So, quiet Abe, who never really talked much, was taken into the “beat monster” fold, the first (and only) non-Asian to be allowed in.

He started hanging out more, schmoozing his way into my non-Beat Monster friends and it turned out he was a pretty cool dude albeit an occasionally awkward one (coming from the kid that was nicknamed Beat Master, I know).

He always dressed like he was running an insurance office. Slacks, bad button down shirt tucked in, a thin belt stretched around his waste and desperately holding on to that last belt hole. His book bag was straight from 1982 and filled with holes. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke cigarettes or dope, but just liked to hang around – play some ultimate Frisbee in his shiny black shoes, clumsily tripping over his own feet.

Things got kind of weird, though, one day when we were joking around about masturbation.

You see, every guy starts out puberty thinking masturbation is evil. To call someone a “masturbator” was an insult in-line with “gaylord” or “herb”. At the age of twelve, masturbation was our dirty little secret – our shame. What made it worse was that our fathers told us it was ok, that everyone masturbated. As an adult that conversation is sleazy and I’ll never have it with my kids - as a kid it was the most disgusting thing to ever enter my ears.

But, once high school hits, masturbation is no big thing. It’s freely discussed. Except for Abe who happened to be carrying around the “nobody masturbates myth” until senior year in high-school when we talked about it in front of him.

And, well…let’s just say that years of holding it inside just sort of spilled out. He asked questions (“Does it take long in the shower for you too?”), made observations (“I like it better if I just use the fingers, not the full grasp.”) and occasionally went too far (“Tastes funny, though.”). Guys don’t taste. And even if we did, in a moment of curiosity while still in our early teens or possibly a little later, maybe, you never know, we never admit to it. And if we do admit to it, it’s a trick to get some other guy to admit to it so we can all make fun of him.

At one point, Abe actually said that this was “great” and he’s so happy that he can finally talk about masturbation with other guys. I think it’s nice and all that the kid came out of his shell and realized he wasn’t a disgusting pervert for the past six years but I rate the comfortable level of that conversation somewhere between catching your father getting gang-banged by four dudes and catching your father getting gang-banged by four dudes while your mother video tapes it.

But Abe was a cool dude – I just wish that one conversation wasn’t the first thing that comes to mind when I think about him…and masturbate.

Labels: mitc

There was a story yesterday, it was updated late. My hotel’s internet access was down and I wasn’t able to update until after I got back from the base. I decided to change the theme because I was bored writing about football. Yesterday I called this week the “Rogue Gallery” but after some consideration I decided it was more of a “Peanut Gallery”.

Matt Dembiki has a new Small Presser up, read it, it’s really fucking good. It’s about why us comic creators do what we do, a very honest, reflective piece.

As a funny aside I’m down here in Panama City, Florida – panhandle and republican strong-hold. Last night I ate at a restaurant that a) actually had “freedom fries” on the menu b) advertised they served every dressing but French (take that, Kraft!) and c) had Fox News channel on all of their TVs. It was pretty funny in a very sad way. I sent Kevlar vests to two soldiers in Iraq that needed them - but I'm sure they're happy to know the people of Panama City are supporting them by serving Freedom Fries and voting Bush. It's like this restaurant was stuck in 2002.
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Sleazy Steve was the kind of guy that you’d bring to a club and he’d cock-block you in the attempt to pull the ass you were trying to get. He was bad. I think that if he were desperate enough he’d tell a girl you had AIDS while you were taking a leak. The kid had no shame and that’s why we loved him.

I actually “double-blined-dated” with him once except I found out later that it wasn’t really a date. He just sort of invited two hot girls over his house and cooked dinner, told me it was a “double-blind-date”. He made ravioli and insisted we ate the salad he made because it will help us digest. I think he put some Spanish Fly (which never works, mind you) in the salad thinking it would work on the lot of us and cause an orgy to erupt. He really was pushing it and we all got sick afterwards. I never get sick off of ravioli and salad. He was probably wearing pheromones as well. Just a bunch of shit you buy off to the internet because it’s supposed to make people horny.

He also hooked up with this girl we all called Slutty Spice. She was everything you would expect out of a slutty sorority chick. A little chunky, low self-esteem. Greasy hair, oily face. Easier than Glass Joe. He was almost embarrassed to tell us about it.

Almost.

But as soon as he got rolling he told us all of the details, from the initial contact to the facial. According to his story a couple of hours lapsed between those two events. I don’t know, it usually takes me a six-pack and knowing a girl for three months before I even say the word “facial” and it’s usually followed by a nervous explanation were I say I was talking about buying her a salon style facial. Sixty bucks later I’m cursing my lack of spine. But not Sleazy Steve – a facial’s a first date for him.

Of course his claim to fame was trying to sabotage mine and Robin’s relationship when we first started getting together. He told Robin that she should “watch out” for me, that I’m a shady guy that’s just going to use her and I have no interest in a relationship. At the same time he was trying to convince me that I don’t really want a relationship, that Robin isn’t the type of girl I’m usually interested in and that she’s kind of slutty and not the kind of girl it’s worth getting involved with. Ah…Steve…my friend…

Cock-blockers are fun to hang around with provided you know that the person is a cock-blocker. Robin didn’t know Steve was a cock-blocker but at the same time his mannerisms forced you to question his motivations. A close talker, always gripped your shoulder, pulled you in and whispered. He kind of talked liked Satan, or how one would expect Satan to talk. But we all knew he was a cock-blocker so we’d take his advice and laugh amongst ourselves. The girls we hung out with would always have some story about how Steve tried to seduce them. It was good times.

There’s never been a cock-blocker like Steve. He’d win a gold in the cock-blocking Olympics and make sure the silver and bronze winners didn’t pull any ass at the after party.

Labels: mitc

Sorry I’m late, internet connection at hotel was down, no way to get online when I was on the base.

You know, I was bored writing football stories as you could probably tell by yesterday’s lame-o story. So, instead of letting a week suffer, I’m going to start a series of stories focused on my “rogue gallery”. Some of these people will likely never be seen again on this site, but there are enough anecdotes about them to make a fun day’s worth of storytelling. Other people appear every once and a while but are whacked out enough to be honored with their own day. This might carry through to next week. I bring you the Moose in the Closet Rogue Gallery.

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Gilbert is the kind of guy you generally hate to be around. Not because he’s an asshole or because he smells or because he sleeps with your sister – the hatred does not come from any of the usual sources. Gilbert is a saint. I mean an honest-to-God saint, not “Oh, so-and-so is a saint, he let me copy his archeology homework.” This guy was touched by God and in turn stole God’s powers. And just being around him was enough to remind you how shallow and worthless your life is. It really only took about ten seconds to get to that point.

He was the RA at the Spanish House my senior year so we spent many a night together on rounds, doing RA stuff. He was older than me, in his thirties, law student. He spent ten years in the Peace Corps, living in some third world country for over a third of his life helping people. Like I said, the guy was a saint; every story with him has to do with him sacrificing a huge part of his life to help people.

Gilbert came up this past Monday, when my boy Guam, also an RA with us, was visiting me. He had interviews with five different law firms in the area on Monday, after which we went out to dinner together. Gilbert is also down here in DC but, admittedly I’ve never seen him here – just never hooked up, that kind of thing.

Guam is all about the money. He has no shame in admitting he wants to be the high powered lawyer defending big tobacco while doing lines of blow off a hooker’s ass. Ok, he has some shame in admitting that fact, evident by the fact that he hasn’t admitted it, but he does like money. We were joking around over dinner and I told him that if he came to work for a firm in DC he might have to go head-to-head against Gilbert who would be defending (pro-bono, of course) the single, unemployed, handicapped, black mother of three children that’s being sued by Ford for some reason. And Guam would have to crush Gilbert and his client; it would be the worst feeling in the world. We laughed at first and then Guam reminded me of a Gilbert story that really sums the dude up perfectly.

Early senior year, at our first RA meeting, we had an ice-breaker. Jane, our director, told us each to go back to our rooms and come back with the single item we would take with us in the event of a fire. We all scramble off, knowing that this was our chance to be witty and maybe slightly touching.

Everyone comes back with the usual stuff. Someone has their CD book, someone has a picture album. I grabbed my laptop, I figured that made sense, those fucking things were expensive. Guam grabbed some random toy off of his shelf because he thought it was funny. But everyone had something that was actually quite dispensable. Except for Gilbert, of course, who had absolutely nothing with him.

We took turns telling everyone what we would take and why. I told them how my laptop was the most expensive thing I owned and had all of my writing on it. I coughed “and all my porn” and got some laughs. Score. Marcelo says he’d want something to play with as the building burnt down – more laughs. Score.

And then it’s Gilbert’s turn.

And he points to his glasses.

And he tells this heart wrenching story about his grandfather that was poor because he always gave more than he could and how his grandfather loved these glasses and when he died he gave the glasses to Gilbert, the only heirloom he could pass on.

It felt like it took Gilbert a half hour to tell this story. And as he did, everyone just stared at their CD books and their electronics and their toys and felt like the biggest dicks of all time. Gilbert’s story was touching, it was well delivered and a great tale of an ordinary man doing extraordinary things, but at the same time it made all of us so ashamed of what we brought.

So, Gilbert’s a saint. And he doesn’t try to be downer; all of his stories were encouraging. All of my stories involved alcohol, hookers and dope. So, despite his intentions, he was a bit of a downer.

Labels: mitc

Some months ago I discovered Courtney Huddleston for the first time and ogled over him on this site. Courtney must have been partaking in one of my favorite pastimes – googling your own name – and saw what I said and as a token of thanks sent me the brand-spanking new Decoy: Menagerie Hardback, soliciting now through Penny Farthing Press. I wanted to write about it, obviously, but refused to let the fact that the dude sent me a free hardback influence my words in any way, shape or form. I was going to be fair, even if I hated the book and came off as an asshole because, as I say all of the time, I’m not a reviewer. I hate reviewing. And if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it with malice. Granted, if I panned the book I probably would have felt some guilt, but I would have dealt with it as it came. I don’t have to worry about that, though, because when I looked at the back of the book and started scanning names, Phil Hester’s name jumped out and I, like most of my readers, will not only buy anything with Phil Hester’s name attached to it but firmly believe that a book cannot be bad if Phil is working on it. Phil’s excellent story also delivers the strongest art I’ve seen from Mitchell Breitweiser which happens to be on the same level as some of the strongest art I’ve seen in the past few years, period.

For those that don’t know, Decoy is the story of a shape shifting alien trapped on earth that symbiotically connected with a beat cop that got shot while on duty in an attempt to save his life. Decoy is the last good alien from a race of warmongering, sickness infected aliens – and he’s the silent partner to the young, somewhat spastic cop.

The book is beautiful; every artist delivers an amazing performance. Ben Roman's art on Scott Zirkel’s well laid out story about a murder investigation at the circus impressed the fuck out of me – I can’t wait to see what he has coming out next because his style is so fresh and exciting. I fell in love with Rove’s art as well (the kid is 24 and solid as all hell) and he worked well on M’s story about life back on Decoy’s world – a great lead-in story. Ty Templeton’s story that follows Decoy and Luck (the cop) as they protect an Avril Levigne/Courtney Love hybrid from her would be killer is a fun little tale accentuated with Ryan Woodward and crew’s vibrant art. Azad’s noir story was fun, a bit on the nose but not in a groaner way, with Sean Galloway’s art really capturing the feel of gum-shoes, roscoes, mazuma and bims. Fernando Alejandrez did a great job of translating Arvid Nelson’s neo-Russian Revolution story with this retro-propaganda style of art that made the story pop. And then there was Joshua Dysart and Courtney Huddleston’s great little story about a day in the life of Luck, with flashes to his past up to the moment he bonded with Decoy, that captures the feel of the characters and the spirit of the book while delivering a well executed, touching and fun story – a great way to end an all-around impressive anthology.

So, that’s that. It was a solid book with exceptional art and some great story-telling. If you’re new to the character the structure of the book might throw you off some. The first story takes place on Decoy’s home world and the two following stories are within Luck’s fantasy realm, of sorts, not tied to the book’s reality. There’s a bit of a warm-up there that might make it difficult for you to grasp what the book is – just enjoy the stories, though, you’ll catch on by the end.

And, if you like Azad and Hester’s work, you can see both of them in Western Tales of Terror #2, available at our website and I’ll have bunches at SPX. (I have no shame).

Yesterday I posted the picture of the mustache I sported for five minutes for the purpose of taking a picture of it. Well, Chris had some fun with said picture:


Story time.

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None of us first year players knew what to expect at football camp. We all heard stories about the hazing and the beatings and the 3AM runs but it was impossible to sort through the noise and get a feel for what football camp was really going to be like. Even on the bus-ride up there, when the varsity players would threaten us JV guys, promising us hell, it was hard to grasp what they meant by “hell”. I grew up in Red Hook. I had razor wire/Nair eggs thrown at me. I saw someone pull a gun on my friend in elementary school. What were these guys going to do that could be considered “hell”?

Nothing, really. The first night at camp they ran around our cabins, banging on walls and shouting. That was their version of hell.

My cabin made our own hell. David, the token 300 pound lineman, took a massive shit in the toilet as soon as we got off the bus that never went down; it sat there for the week, turning green. We tried plungers, poked sticks at it, dropped buckets of water in the bowl – the bitch would not go down. That was hell.

Football camp was alright. There weren’t any 3AM jogs, the jogs took place every morning at 6AM. We ran four miles along some windy, hilly road that cut through the woods. It took most of us around 40 minutes – I took fat David around two hours. He rarely made it to breakfast. Someone would also run behind David and try to motivate him to keep with it, usually this kid Cherry who we called “Cherry Rice”, not because he was good but because he wouldn’t shut the fuck up.

The only “hazing” that took place was by our coaches and it was more of a “do what I say when I say” kind of thing. They’d signal someone out in the middle of dinner and have him do fifty pushups or demand that someone sing “Blueberry Hill” while he’s right in the middle of talking to the girl that worked the lounge, the only girl in the whole camp who started off the week ugly but became super-hot by the end. Seriously, that last night at camp consisted of every single one of us desperately trying to hit that chick’s skins. You’d think she was a super-model or something.

Practice was a bitch. It was the jog every morning, followed by breakfast, followed by two to three hours of offensive practice, followed by lunch, followed by two to three hours of defensive practice, followed by dinner, followed by one to two hours of special teams practice or light offensive practice. By the time the day came to an end we were beat to fuck but always managed to scrape up enough energy to go to the lounge, play some pool and some Centipede, drink some milkshakes and comment on how the girl really wasn’t “that bad”.

One time we had a shitty offensive practice and instead of free time our coach made us go out for a fifth time and spend over an hour doing crunches. You couldn’t half-ass it, either. If you weren’t in pain you were staying longer.

But that’s what it was – it was work. Discipline. It was getting a bunch of kids that never played football ready for their first season. Didn’t work, though, we only won one game and that was against a team that didn’t win any.

But football camp was good times, either way.

Labels: mitc

‘Stache and Gridiron: Concrete Downs

I had to shave my beard. I have several business meetings all next week with a very important customer. But, before I shaved it off, I wanted to see how I looked with the mustache. Observe:



Don’t worry, it’s gone now.
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Football for me started on Woodhull Street, playing with a Nerf and all the neighborhood kids. You get four downs to score – the sidelines were the rows of cars running down the street. One goal-line was the start of the Hicks Street lot, the other was the hood of some car, depending on how long of a field we wanted.

Every play was the same. The slowest kid on the defending team hiked the ball to the quarterback and counted to 7-Mississippi way too fast. The quarterback looks down field for the open man while shouting, “You’re counting too fast you fucking fat fucking fuck!” Two of the receivers do a crossing pattern, quarterback lets go of the ball and it’s a 50/50 chance that ball will be intercepted – a 10/90 chance it’ll actually be caught by the intended receiver. The receiver will complain about pass interference, the fucking fat fucking fuck that was counting to 7-Mississippi too fast will run up and push the receiver, shoving turns to fists until someone eventually breaks it apart and calls for a “do over”. The kid who owns the football will get so pissed off that he’ll leave and take it with him. At that point we go to Joe Toemo’s cigar/candy shop and pick up a blue-ball for a quarter and play some stoop-ball provided that there’s a stoop available without a car parked in front of it. Otherwise we go to the powerhouse and play suicide.

And that was football on Woodhull Street.

In elementary school we started cutting lunch to play football in Carroll Park. I already told you one story from our PS58 footballing days, a happy tale involving football and guns. I was always one of the receivers since I was pretty fast and had about a two foot reach over everyone. One time I was burning downfield and, not understanding the physics of a body hitting concrete, took flight for a bad pass, caught it in the air, hit the ground, bounced, slid and got thoroughly fucked up. I still wear my keloid on my arm proud.

The keloid has come in handy in the past. You’ll be surprised how many out-of town girls believed it was a gunshot wound when I was growing up. This keloid helped me pull much Pennsylvanian ass during family trips to the Poconos. It used to be a lot bigger, too. When I was twelve my father took me to a special doctor that informed me if he were to cut it off it would grow back bigger. Instead he shot me up with about twenty cortisone shots, my keloid bleeding profusely, and told me I’d have to go back one more time to finish the treatment. After those two days of hell the keloid shrunk down quite a bit.

My father played rough-touch with his friends every Saturday and used to take me with him, I’d play regular touch football with the other kids. These guys were nuts – it was basically tackle football but it’s easier to sell “rough touch” to the wife. But man, I’d see my pops out there in the snow drilling people from behind and getting drilled in return, all without pads, and it was the coolest thing imaginable for a kid my age. Of course he hurt his back eventually and stopped playing for about a year which was awesome for me – I got to use his special receiver gloves in my pick-up games. They were the “Jerry Rice” endorsed gloves that made it possible to pull down a football using one finger. Those things were so not NFL-legal. My father’s back was never the same again but I was king shit on Woodhull Street with those gloves.

Before my father’s injury he got to play in this touch football tournament at Giants’ Stadium. I don’t know if they simply entered some tournament or they won their spot but he took me along. This was the summer after the Giants’ championship, the winner of the tournament got to play the Giants in touch football. I’m sure my pops played his heart out but they didn’t make it past the first round. I didn’t really watch him play, me and a bunch of kids played our own game at the Meadowlands – that’s a once in a lifetime opportunity and I took full advantage.

So, I love football. Problem was I was never really good at it. My father was shocked when I told him I was trying out for the football team in High School and even more shocked when I made it.

Not as shocked when I got moved from Tight End to Lineman two practices in.

Labels: mitc

Elk’s Run #4 is currently soliciting in Previews. Apparently I totally brain-farted and forgot to mention it. Order# is SEP053086. Check out that cover:


No Here’s the Thing… today. I didn’t get to edit it and, you know, football started tonight so…beers. I might throw it up tomorrow morning. The Here’s the Thing…, not the wings I ate. I didn’t get to edit the following story either but, you know, I can’t skip that.

Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. This is awesome.
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Football season started up yesterday. I actually started this blog at the end of last football season, over the past seven months you’ve heard me declare my love for the Mets but you’ve yet to really see my heart bleed green. Football season’s always a tense time in my house. Robin’s a Pats fan and I’m a Jets fan. Same division – ugly. But we get along fine mainly because the Jets never really have a shot at the Super Bowl.

I actually played football in high school. I made the team as a Tight End but after a couple of practice sessions moved to Offensive Tackle/Defensive End. Started on offense and defense my sophomore year playing JV ball, started on offense, defense and special teams junior year on varsity and then just offense and special teams senior year – moved to Guard since I got my 40 under 5 seconds and my quarter mile under a minute (although I threw up after running it).

Junior year was a nightmare – my team sucked. We couldn’t get a win to save our lives. We won the last game of the season and that was all. But we played hard – we certainly improved – and senior year we were above five-hundred and one game out of the playoffs.

Senior year was a good time for football. Plenty of field parties and drinking . But in order to get there, we had to make it through the heartbreaking season that was junior year; a season that ended with me on a warpath like nothing I’ve ever experienced.

Towards the end of the season we had to play Sheapshead Bay. The week before they had an article in the paper about their Defensive End that was supposed to be NFL bound after college – the kid was massive, strong, fast and had a good head on his shoulders. And I had to block him.

I played dirty, I think that’s acceptable in a game like this when your opponent out performs you in every category. I held him a lot, got a couple of facemasks in. A bunch of chop blocks and the occasional jab to the stomach if I got in low and close enough. I held him pretty good, our team basically ran the ball to the other side of the field and the Uber-Player only got two or three sacks going into the fourth quarter.

M, my old girlfriend, and my Grandparents were at this game – the only game either of them ever came to – and I was determined to play my heart out. Since neither of them know what dirty football looks like, it’s safe to say they were impressed with how I handled myself.

Then, in the third quarter, I got trampled. Came in too high and got absolutely run over. Horrible pain in my ankle. I limped back to the huddle and the coach sent a replacement in to take my place. I sent him back.

I kept playing. I was getting mowed over because my ankle couldn’t support me and every time I got dropped I was getting angrier and angrier. Five, ten minutes pass and I’m still playing offense and defense. My coach keeps sending in replacements and I keep sending them back, refusing to give up and let the super-star from Sheapshead get the better of me.

With about five minute left in the game the pain was unbearable and I signaled my coach and he sent in a replacement. I felt defeated as I walked back to the bench.

And then I went nuts.

No reason except for the fact that I felt like I lost, I completely freaked out and started pushing people, kicking shit, throwing water jugs, flipping benches, cursing at the stands, crying (yes, actually crying) – I just completely fucking lost it.

I was emotionally fine up until that point. Pain, that’s it. But holy shit I just flipped the fuck out. After the game M tried to comfort me, my grandparents tried to congratulate me but I just walked along, kicking cars and punching poles. They must have thought I was completely ‘roided out and I just snapped.

I just couldn’t take it. I psyched myself up to beat this guy. It’s been a shitty season, we were going to lose to Sheapshead but I’m going to beat this guy. And in the end I fell first and I just went crazy.

Turns out I tore my Achilles tendon (although not detached, thankfully, just some ripping). It would have been a very minor tear but apparently playing football for over 15 minutes on it (plus kicking random shit) fucked it up a lot more than it needed to be.

I missed the rest of the season – including our lone victory at the end. I think next week will be all about football, in honor of my Jets who will win the first four or five in a row like they always do, getting my hopes up, before breaking my heart.

Labels: mitc

I will be in Panama City (the Floridian one, not the Panamanian one, but you better believe I’ll be singing “Panama” the whole time either way) all next week for work, sort of last minute. I should be able to update this site regularly with no interruptions but I just wanted to let you know ahead of time in case something comes up.

Chris Piers sent me his comic for the upcoming Spark and it’s fucking hysterical but the last panel had this shady character that made me think next month’s Munday would be a “very special” one. I mean, look at that guy. Look at that evil eye. He’s totally going to rape you.

Jorge and I are going to cowrite an OGN based on yesterday's story. I think it's going to rock. We still need to work out the details. So, beyond that, I'm still working on the novel, cowriting two projects with Josh, still have the baseball book sitting around waiting for the right artist to show up, still mulling over this African ninja book, sitting on Release and Esau until I feel like picking them up again, looking into the logistics and doing the research for a Fredric Wertham biographical comic (what better way to honor the man than using the medium he tried to destroy?), writing an 8-pager for the Shear Terror Anthology, putting together cartoon pages for the Spark, writing my Here's the Thing... column, pumping out these stories daily and editing three projects. And the kicker? I still haven't really "dropped shit" yet. I need to learn to focus.

I found the tool Jim Davis’ “team” uses to create Garfield strips. I pumped out a hundred in five minutes, all variations of an “I hate Monday” joke.

________________

Sometimes childhood innocence can lead to destruction with said destruction leading to the destruction of childhood innocence. It’s the “cycle of destruction” as I’m sure some psychologist might have called it in the off-chance the phenomenon actually exists beyond my attempt to have a poetic introduction.

I’m going to drop a bombshell now. For 99% of you, this may not feel like a bombshell, but for those of you, like me, that were born and raised in a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn this is going to blow your fucking mind.

My friend had a pool.

She got it when we were in the fifth grade and what a nice pool it was. It was above ground but it had a deck, diving board and water slide. It was larger than most above ground pools, more of an oval than a circle, with this thick cord stretched above the middle of the pool to keep its irregular shape together.

Having a pool in my neighborhood made you King Cool. Nothing was cooler. The only pool we had to swim in was the Red Hook Pool where you had to avoid diapers and hair-extensions that floated by you while you swam, occasionally getting aggressively dunked by a complete stranger just because you weren’t looking. The main pool was such a warzone at times that most of us dorkier folk just opted to cool off in the kiddie pool.

My friend getting a pool made all the Red Hook Pool drama go away. We were there all the time, there must have been a “pool party” five days a week. Her father was a swell guy that would occasionally barbeque and when he didn’t they’d order us some pizza. I think it’s safe to say that any day of the week at least four people would be over her house and swimming in the pool.

For her birthday, however, she had a real pool party. About twenty-five people packed into that pool. Marco Polo rounds that lasted three seconds, losers in Horse and Rider fell onto a sea of bodies, missing the water and the use of underwater goggles allowed you to see much ass.

We decided to play volleyball at one point. It had to be teams of at least seven on seven in this pool – the thing was practically bursting. And we were jumping around, laughing, bumping, setting and spiking. The net, as some of you may have guessed, was the thick chord that went across the pool holding the irregular shape together.

Now I know nothing about pool physics or pool design except one thing. If you hang from that chord, it’ll pull the sides of the pool in. If the water is already stupid high because the pool is packed, it will begin to flow out of the pool. Between the pressure of you hanging from the chord and the water on the bent area – the pool can explode.

Ever see a pool explode? Coolest fucking thing ever. You don’t realize how much water is in those things until it floods the back yard, I’ll tell you that much. Of all the destruction I’ve witnessed, nothing would top that pool exploding and the subsequent “oh shit” faces that went with it.

Granted, it probably was put up wrong. One would hope that, if installed correctly, it would be more durable than that. But either way I was in the right place at the right time and the result was fucking awesome.

We all got kicked out. Birthday party over. No burgers, no ice-cream, nothing. They never replaced the pool and it was back to the Red Hook Pool where our bathing suits got ripped off and thrown around for a laugh. But for that month – that magical month – we had a pool of our own.

Labels: mitc

I got a half table for SPX. Much thanks to Ron Philips and Kevin Melrose who had a full table but only needed half of it. So, the DC Conspiracy will have a table and Hoarse & Buggy will have one as well – you can come by for Elk’s Run, WToT, The Dr. Dremo Anthology and information about the Counter Culture Festival. I can only imagine I’d be holding onto mini comics from some friends as well.

Audio commentary for Elk’s Run #2 is up, this time it’s a 40 minute conversation between Josh and I in which I say "friggin" about 345 times. Download it, listen to it, and friggin enjoy it.

Jorge Vega shared his own tale of destruction in the comments section yesterday worth checking out.

Fabio Moon, the genius artist behind Ursula and Smoke & Guns (both produced by Ait), has something brewing on his (and Gabriel Ba’s) blog that has me very excited – you can see where it might be going and where it might be going is good. Like “Understanding Comics” and “Comics & Sequential Art” rolled into a nice little easily digestible and non-pretentious package. Part 1 and part 2, for those that want to get learn-slapped.

Story time.
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Halloweens in Brooklyn back in the early-90s were the most horrific ordeals any kid can ever go through. I try to explain it to people who were in other cities and they just can’t fathom it – they usually think I’m lying or extremely exaggerating because their brains just can’t process the level of destruction that took place.

Even our parents couldn’t fathom how bad it was. We would cry and beg and plead with them not to send us to school but they’d give us the same line, “You’re going to school – it’s just a couple of eggs.”

But it wasn’t and that’s what people don’t understand. If it was just a couple of eggs it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, admittedly.

A lot of the grocery stores in our neighborhood stopped selling eggs to kids the week before Halloween. Whereas selling eggs to kids was a lucrative business, the reality is that their store was going to get pelted both inside and out. So there were fewer eggs on the street despite the great demand.

This led to a couple of phenomena that we see in other industries. Bootlegs, for instance. What’s a bootleg egg? A rock. With shaving cream on it. Ever get hit in a head with a rock? It’s not fun and the only think more humiliating is getting hit in the head with a rock and having the shaving cream get in your eye at the same time. Nothing like running home with your head bleeding and eyes stinging.

Another trend was to maximize the impact of a single egg since they were so scarce. Putting Nair in (or on for the low budget, non-engineering types) the egg was always a favorite for boosting the damage an egg can make. Cracked in the head with a Nair egg and by the time you get home you have a nice bald-spot formed where the egg hit. It’s even better when it leaks down to your eye, partially blinding while leaving hairless stripes on your eyebrows. Going into school the next day looking like a mutant was always fun.

And these were the projectiles that I can look back and laugh at.

Some of these guys were like fucking MacGyver with an egg. Finding ways to attach razor blades to them and replacing the insides with battery acid. When the “trick” in “trick or treat” is melting somebody’s fucking face off, you know Halloween went too far.

My elementary school would let us out early as if that mattered. We still had to make our way through Junior High land to get home and it was like a fucking warzone. Running behind cars, getting pelted with rocks and razor blades, chunks of hair falling off as we ran. Your friend gets blinded and you have to decide whether or not to carry him home or leave him behind. You decide to help him and an egg just misses you, hits a wall and instantly starts to peel off the paint. You wish your blinded friend good luck and run like a mother fucker.

Eventually our parents realized that Halloween has gone well beyond eggs, shaving cream and toilet paper. Public outcry leads to a crackdown on kids trying to kill each other once a year. Halloween went from dangerous projectiles to straight up punching, but it’s a lot easy to outrun a kid then it is to outrun a battery acid-filled, nair coated, razor spiked egg hurtling at your head.

Labels: mitc

I think I’m going to stop updated on Holidays and Convention Days. There was a new story yesterday and I think it was pretty good. Hopefully the couple of people that stopped by felt the same.

I had a weird experience, I was all ready to pimp this artist I found last week and then realized that I don’t like his art anymore. It’s kind of like with writing. I generally need to bang things out because if I take a break and then get back to it – I don’t like it anymore. Same goes for other people’s work. Even with this blog – if I look at stories I wrote a month or two ago I think they suck. I guess art’s the same with me. I thought this guy was super stylish in a good way but today I went back to his page and it just sucked. I guess we’re constantly growing – our talent and our perception. I think I just have a lower threshold for suck.

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I was grew up around destruction. At the age of ten my friend James picked up a discarded golf club, threw it off of a footbridge in our neighborhood. It hit a car windshield and caused the car to swerve into a median, another car rear ending it. We ran off. At around the same age a couple of neighborhood kids found a (assumedly) discarded car that we went to work on with pipes to break the windows, our bare hands to take care of the rest. We would sometimes pull the firebox on the corner and pelt the truck with eggs when it showed. We are products of our environments and my environment was destruction.

But nothing I ever done in my youth will ever compare to the wrath my friends and I unloaded on this one abandoned building in our neighborhood.

Abandoned buildings were a treat. It’s where we practiced our graffiti, hid our pornography, booze and cigarettes, and they were the staging grounds for all of our fake “make-out” stories we told in our pre-teen years.

“Yo, I took Melanie into the building on Summit and Hicks and fingered her, son! Smell it!”

There was this one building in particular that we would occasionally visit. It was destroyed in a fire but still standing, six stories tall and pretty wide; it used to be a mid-rise apartment complex. Severe structural damage but as a kid you don’t think about shit like that. Most of the insides were burnt and rotted wood but there were still stairwells you could use to climb to the roof which is where we would usually hang out.

We were climbing down from the roof one day when this one kid, I believe it was Gieke, a neighborhood kid, fell through the stairs. It just gave out and he fell about ten feet straight down to the next landing. It was at that moment that we realized that the wood in that building was about as tough as paper. Smarter kids would have gotten the fuck out of that building but not us – it became our playground of destruction.

We started kicking through floors, putting pipes to stairwells. We’d fake kung-fu kick people through the more flimsy walls after we realized a body can fall through a wall like it was made out of tinfoil (my cousin Luis had the tendency to be a klutz, falling through walls was his specialty).

After demolishing the bottom floor (because, you know, that made the most sense) and breaking holes through almost every wall – after basically making it so that the building could collapse at any moment – we went to our firecracker reserves and busted out the blockbusters. For those that need a refresher, those were the quarter-sticks of dynamite.

We’d stand near an exit, light a blockbuster and fling it up to a higher landing. We’d then leave quickly, wait across the street for the boom. We’d go inside to see the destruction we caused (large pieces of the upper floors would occasionally come down) and then book it in case the cops showed up.

We’d repeat that several times, until we ran out of blockbusters. By the time we were done you can enter on the ground floor of that building and look-up to see nothing but splintered wood exploded walls, floors and eventually daylight. I am still to this day amazed that the building stood up. I’m equally amazed that I’m still alive.

We attacked that building like Kang the Conqueror and it was never the same again. A couple of months later they tore it down and built some low-income housing. Originally it was supposed to be an apartment for mentally challenged adults but the neighborhood fought that – we can’t have retards in our neighborhood but drug dealers and thugs are a-ok. Besides, based on the local kids’ understanding of physics, we already had plenty of retards in our neighborhood.

Labels: mitc

All right. First things first, the Brian Michael Bendis board is having a charity auction for Katrina relief. Lots of good stuff. Hoarse & Buggy put two things up for auctions, the original page 16-17 spread of Elk’s Run #1 (which, admittedly, even I’m bidding on – Josh currently has that page and it’s my favorite) and a set of Western Tales of Terror 1-5 signed by almost every creator. So go bid (or donate, if you can) and get good stuff while helping a worthwhile cause, all proceeds go to the Red Cross.

I readjusted my prose style and restarted my chapter book, banging out twenty pages this weekend. And, it’s probably not a chapter book anymore – I don’t see a clean break that I’d be happy with. So I’m thinking I’ll bang out a bunch more, get some readers on it, clean it up and start looking for a literary agent.

And before story time, I want to get a little mainstream for a moment and say that I read the Ultimate Annuals this weekend and man – I think I’m ready to get back into the Ultimate books. The Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men annual introduced MAJOR changes into the storylines, fun changes that really made the ultimate stories break from their non-ultimate Marvel counterparts and in both cases, the changes were something with some interesting story possibilities. Hats off to Bendis and Vaughan, I’m once again excited about these titles.

I also read the second Harry Potter book and the first 200 pages of the third one. Since last Saturday I read well over 800 pages of Harry Potter. Needless to say, I’m enjoying them a lot more than I thought I would.

I also had the New England Clam Bake from Legal Seafood last night which included clam chowder, clams, mussels, lobster, sausage and a side of rice. I followed it up with some good sex. It was a good night.

Story time…

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On Friday I said I was going to do some sexy stuff this week but I was kind of bored writing it and came up with a much better idea. I’ve talked a bit about my rage in the past but what happens when my rage goes unchecked? When it turns to destruction, unleashing a mindless, heartless monster onto the populace bent on anarchy, feeding off of fear and property damage. This week we’ll explore what happens when rage goes too far.

Annie’s in Brooklyn Heights was a favorite destination for us underage drinkers. They rarely ID’ed us and when they did our fakes never gave us trouble. They had pool, good beer, a decent juke-box and plenty of sexy ladies. Whenever we were home for college we always found ourselves at Annie’s.

One trip to Annie’s left me and my friends extremely sauced. As per tradition, after we had enough to drink we made our way to Happy Days Diner next door for some rare bacon cheeseburgers, mozzarella sticks and milk shakes. The wait staff at Happy Days hated us. We were loud, obnoxious and always played the worst song on the juke-box. One time we put five dollars in the box and played the “Cops” theme song ten times in a row.

This time we were more annoying than usual. We played a variety of children’s songs and sang along with them, danced around, and asked the waiter questions that only drunk twenty year olds find funny. Like when I asked the waiter why they call it the “Fonzie Burger” if it’s not made of Winkler meat. I guess at the end of the night they wanted to make it worth their while so they included the tip on the check and didn’t tell us, hoping they’d get double tipped, I’d imagine.

Well, I noticed it.

And I started complaining, loudly, to anyone who would listen, “What the fuck is this? They think I won’t see this? I’m a fucking math genius! Just ‘cause I’m drunk don’t mean I don’t know math. I’ll take the derivative of this fucking check!”

At this point management kicked us out.

I was fuming as we walked away. We rounded Clinton Street and started to head towards Max’s house when Max told me not to worry, he got even. He reaches into his jacket and pulls out the flower vase that was on our table, complete with fake flower. This wasn’t a big deal; we always steal Happy Day’s flower vases (and gave them to our moms, which we found exceptionally funny). So, not feeling that this was enough payback, I grab the vase out of Max’s hand and throw it across the street – it misses some random guy’s head by inches.

The guy runs away, G shouts a loud “WOOOOOOOO!”, our rallying cry, if you will. Because this was when the destruction started.

I answer G’s “WOOOO” while grabbing a stack of freshly delivered Daily News in front of a convenience store and I chuck them at a passing car. The rest of our crew follows suit and begins to throw stacks of newspapers all over the place. G reaches down to grab a fresh stack but instead plunges his hand into Max’s stream of piss that he’s unleashing on the remaining newspapers.

And then things get silly. You see, this was Christmas break and a lot of houses had their Christmas trees out and awaiting collection by the satiation department. I pick up a Christmas tree and throw it a parked car, trying to break its windshield. It didn’t work, which enraged us even more. We started picking up all of the trees we could find and chucking them into the middle of the street, blocking it off, chucking them at people’s houses, etc.

Then came the trash bins. Running down Clinton Street towards Max’s house flipping them over, throwing them. There was a couple making out in a parked car and I chucked a garbage can at them and ran on.

By the time we got to Max’s we left about ten blocks worth of destruction behind us. We attacked Brooklyn Heights like Dr. Doom and the neighborhood was never the same again. You know, in a comic book sort of “never the same again” type of way.

Labels: mitc

A new Here’s the Thing is up. This one is about The Usuallies and I’m probably going to spend the next three weeks focusing on the topic before taking another break from the column. I’m growing fond of this “four weeks of columns, two weeks break” format.

The new Industry Buzz is up, the collaborative column I participate in on Buzzscope. Focuses on hype and the impact of reviews. Guy did a great job putting this one together, go check it out.

I made my hundred dollar donation to the Red Cross Relief Efforts. The situation there is deteriorating everyday and while the people fight over food, water and control my neighbors up here in DC are shoving multiple thumbs up their asses – it’s a thumb-ass gang-bang which sounds like it’s worth at least trying, but not during a national emergency. Please give what you can. (UPDATE: My company just sent out an email saying they'll match dollar-for-dollar every employee donation to a legitimate Katrina charity. So my 100 bucks just became 200! Give, people.)

And before story time I wanted to once again rip off Sean Maher (who called me a blogging champion) and share a conversation Robin and I had. I was in Myrtle Beach this past weekend and got burned really bad. My face started to peel yesterday and I wasn’t able to stop myself from aiding and picked the skin off my forehead until it was raw. Realizing I was an idiot, I put some of Robin’s lotion on, effectively setting my head on fire. I washed the lotion off, wet a hand towel, wrapped it around my head like a mini-turban and fastened it in the back.

Robin comes home from class and I’m making dinner with a sopping wet turban on (I’m currently growing a beard, I should add) and she starts cracking up laughing, grabs her camera and starts to take pictures. She jokingly tells me I look like a terrorist, prompting me to grab her around the waste, pull her close and with my best Arabic accent and sexual eyes offer to “plunge my 747" into her "Pittsburg”.

She gets mad, says I have no class and walks away. It’s amazing I ever get laid. Oh, and here’s the sexual mujahideen in the flesh:

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Junior year in college my friends and I decided to partake in this Masquerade Ball cruise/dance thing. The ship left from Boston harbor, spent several hours at sea, and dropped us off in time for after parties and drunken hook-ups.

I rented the usual white tux – this one was collarless and looked a lot like a lighter version of Dr. Evil’s get-up. Got the fresh bic-job, as well, which didn’t really help me avoid the “evil genius” image. See for yourself:


All I need was a date. I’ve been single for almost a year at this point, a couple of weeks before Robin came into the picture. I ended up asking this girl Kristen “as friends” and she agreed to come along.

Kristen was an interesting situation. Her best friend Kim and I were very good friends. Kim went abroad for a semester and told me to “look out” for Kristen which I agreed to do. She didn’t really specify, though, so I’m not the biggest asshole here. Additionally, I went on a couple of dates with Kristen’s best friend although it never quite worked out (and there is one hell of a story behind that one).

We had a good time dancing and drinking and smoking cigars. We all had our masks on until it became too hot to wear them. There was a bit of sexual tension between Kristen and I, as I remember it – dancing closely and some subtle touching here and there.

As the night went on I got stupid drunk. We all brought flasks on board but since this was Junior year and not all of us were 21 we pretty much let the 20 year olds partake in the illegal alcohol. I must have dropped close to a hundred bucks on drinks that night and given Kristen my flask full of vodka so she can get sauced.

Now, by junior year I wasn’t the nimble little dancer I was in early high school. I put on a couple of pounds, smoked and had the tendency to trip over my own feet quite often. So when they started kicking some early 90s jams it probably wasn’t a good idea to jump in the middle of the circle and try to serve it up like times past.

And now here I am, in the circle, doing the Running Man, the Roger Rabbit, the Lawnmower, the Cabbage Patch – I attempted the Kid & Play but tripped over my own leg and fell. Everyone was laughing – I was a lampshade short of being the drunken idiot – but in an attempt to redeem myself I did a split.

And split my pants. My rented tux pants, I should add. Big split, too.

My friends told me to chill out so I capped the night off with another cigar and chilled out until the ship pulled in. Got back to the dorm, horny as fuck, and started making out with Kristen. I don’t want to explicitly say she was a bad kisser but I hope she got better since then. All tongue. 100% tongue. I tried to pull in with the lips and I’d find a strong-ass muscle trying to push its way through. And she had this really hard tongue that just sort of flapped around like Jaba’s did before he died in Return of the Jedi.

You know you’re a bad kisser when you’re making out with a 21-year-old horny, single, drunk college junior and the only thing he can think about is how bad of a kisser you are. The night ended awkward, as I remember it, with me falling asleep while making out. She woke up the next morning and left, we never talked about it (but I have no qualms with broadcasting it over the internet, as usual).

Kim knew – when she returned from her semester abroad she cracked many a joke in private about me “taking care of” Kristen. I think we sort of laughed it off because it didn’t really go anywhere thanks to my inability to stay interested with the worst kisser of all time.

I got the pants sewed up and they passed inspection, thankfully.

And so concludes a Decade of Dancing. I think the next three weeks are going to focus on Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll – one week for each.

Labels: mitc

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