Archive for February, 2012

Oh no. The editors of Vegas Seven have let me loose in the Arts & Entertainment section of their weekly paper again. This time, I write about a quaint little gallery you may have overlooked inside Emergency Arts (EA), Sporadica Designs.  Why might have you overlooked it? Because I am in that building at least once a week and have missed it every time — and it’s been there since EA opened! Check out the article to read about its owners, Kathryn Gilbert and Joy Snyder, and then be sure to view their new installation, “Out on a Limb … Artopsies,” which opens next Friday at EA.

What else is going on? I’m still sort-of sick. Well, I still have a persistent cough — otherwise, I feel all right, I guess. But the constant coughing has left me with a consistent headache and a sore back. Also causing the sore back? I haven’t worked out in more than a week. No running, no weight training, nada. It kinda sucks. I’m going to try to go for a light jog tomorrow, maybe, if I’m feeling better, because the weather is FAAAAAB, so I’ll let you know how that goes.

Otherwise, I’m gonna try to leave the house tonight to see my friend Kyle of Kirby Krackle rock the house over at Choices Pub with his tourmate-in-geekery, Euge Ahn of Adam Warrock. So, if you like comic books and good music, these dudes put those two things together in proper fashion (Kirby Krackle rocks it while Adam Warrock raps it), and you would do well to drop the $5 at the door tonight at 9 p.m.

Oh, and don’t forget, I’ll be signing comic books with some other fine folks at Alternate Reality Comics on Saturday from noon to 3 p.m. Come by!

Hey, you kids like comics, right? And the people who make them? And you like to support causes that make life better here in Southern Nevada, yeah? Well, then, I expect to see you at Alternate Reality Comics (4110 S. Maryland Parkway #8) this Saturday, Feb. 25, from noon to 3 p.m., because I’m assembling the crew behind Tales from Fremont Street for a special signing and art exhibition kick-off, and to boot, we’re going to ask for donations to one of our favorite charities, the SafeNest shelter for abused women and children.

Joining me at the signing table will be cover artist Jska Priebe, interior contributors Deryl Skelton, Ed Hawkins and F Andrew Taylor, and my collaborator in the book, Warren Wucinich. We’ll have copies of both Tales from Fremont Street and Tales from the Boneyard, whose proceeds benefit the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival. As well, we’re kicking off the month-long exhibition of selected original art from Fremont Street, which will be showing inside Alternate Reality’s “Artist Spotlight” space (following its debut at the Barrick Museum last fall).

In addition, we’re asking guests to bring donations for SafeNest, based on their current Wish List. Alternate Reality owner Ralph Mathieu will also be donating a portion of the day’s back issue sales and proceeds from raffle tickets sold to the shelter.

Need more incentive beyond great comics, awesome people, raffle prizes, amazing art and worthy causes? How about free refreshments? OK, done! Now you have no excuses. Hope to see you there with donations in hand when you walk in, and comics when you walk out.

I’m finally (I hope) on the upward climb out of a mildly nasty cold I’ve been working through the last four or five days. It wasn’t incapacitating, but it did keep me on bed/couch-rest for a few days, erased most of my social calendar, and tossed out my exercise routine. I tried working through it, as I have/had both editor-imposed and self-imposed deadlines, but didn’t accomplish as much as all of this forced time locked in my house could otherwise yield. I did manage to get out and have a normal dinner and a drink at a favorite bar for one of my best pals, Mikey Vegas, although the smoke inhalation from a few hours at Frankie’s Tiki Room might have set my recovery back a few days. Eh, it was worth it.

I know it’s been a while since any new comics of mine have graced your eyeballs, but if all works out, the fruits of the above-displayed labors should be coming your way, either electronically or digitally, in the next few months-to-a-year. The crappy artwork comes from various production stages of the sequel to the Utopian, about which I’m sure I’ll bore you with more details soon. The awesome artwork I’m digitally coloring is by Argentine artist Damian Couceiro, from a project-in-development he and I are working on … and that’s all I’ll say about that.

In other news, I’ll have announcements of upcoming events, both in the worlds of comics and music, coming very soon, so stay tuned!

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Geoff Carter. Today we celebrate his ahem ahem birthday, and I’m celebrating by enshrining him in digital portrait for all eternity (or until the web implodes). For those who aren’t lucky enough to know Geoff, I’ll say this: Your life is a little less rich for that omission.

I’ve known Mr. Carter since I was but a young lad, back when we both still had full heads of long hair (only one of us does now; sadly, it’s not me), through the usual channels (basically, I don’t remember, but poetry, coffee and possibly mutual lovers played into it somehow). I knew him then as a poet, a snappy vest-wearer, an aficionado of good music and great literature, and someone who never gave himself enough credit. Geoff went on to become a writer and columnist for Scope Magazine (the precursor to the Las Vegas Weekly), a web content guru for the Las Vegas Sun and the precursor to VEGAS.com, and then he later emerged from a darkroom cocoon as a fantastic amateur photographer, just as he set sail for greener (and wetter) pastures in lovely Seattle, where he continues to ply his word trade.

We’ve stayed friends all these years, mainly and especially thanks to the magic of the interwebs. It was Geoff who was mostly responsible for turning me onto LiveJournal, through which I developed most of the good friends I have to this day, coming out of post-divorce fallout. And thanks to the magic of giant cylinders that float through the sky on jet-powered wings, I’ve probably physically hung out with that bastard more often over the last four or five years than we did in the previous 10 or 15.

It’s criminally unfair that Geoff Carter is not a household name. See, some of us hacks are really good at being in the right time and place, and have somehow attained a reasonable level of success and gainful employment through sheer willpower, despite not actually being that talented. The fact is, Geoff can write circles around just about anyone I know, myself included. He has a poet’s soul, but a humorist’s canny. He can work a camera, naturally, with no training or special lighting or planning, better than a lot of “pro” photogs I’ve come across. And the motherf*cker just gets fitter and better-looking as he gets older, not counting his fabulous mane of fashionably gray-ish hair.

So, Geoff, happy birthday. And people of the world, when Geoff finally finishes that novel he’s been working on for ahem ahem years, and it’s available in what few bookstores are left outside of your iPads and Kindles and Swindles and Bindles, you best know you’re gonna buy/download/steal that sh*t, and then you, too, will want to be Geoff Carter when you grow up.

As I do most weeknights about 6 p.m., I was listening to The Story with Dick Gordon on NPR (via our fab local affiliate, KNPR) tonight in my car. Dick’s guest, scientist John Priscu, was talking about the recent progress made by Russian researchers in their probing of a giant sub-glacial lake in Antarctica, and what American scientists will be doing soon a other lakes buried beneath the ice there. I’ve heard bits and pieces about this discovery of life existing in these multi-mile-deep lakes, but it wasn’t until hearing Priscu on today’s show hypothesizing that there are entire eco-systems under there that have thrived for millions of years without seeing the light of day that it was really put into perspective: Scientists are uncovering not only liquid water beneath an entire continent frozen over with ice for untold epochs, they’re not only theorizing that there are advanced forms of unknown life down there, but according to Priscu’s projections, they may find that at the bottom of these lakes, the water might actually be warm. Essentially?

The Savage Land might be real. Sort of.

See, way back in the 1960s, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced readers of the X-Men comic book series to the Savage Land, a mysterious, tropical preserve hidden within Antarctica, filled with prehistoric creatures (and other weird beasts befitting the sci-fi aspect of these stories). At first unexplained, later comic book writers attributed the Savage Land’s existence to some alien race fiddling around down there, but I prefer the original notion of its architects: a land that time forgot.

And that’s what we’ve got here, folks: Scientists are uncovering a world hidden beneath the otherwise barren Antarctic wasteland, one preserved beneath the ice for tens of millions of years, replete with lakes and streams and, yes, life. Now, will that “life” involve anything more than resourceful bacteria living off the exhausts of the Earth’s core? No one is sure. Will we find prehistoric fish and plankton living in a pitch-black, watery world? No way to tell yet. Will there be Man-Apes and sabertooth tigers and Tubanti Fish People? Highly unlikely.

But did Jack Kirby’s imagination somehow tap into a real truth, bubbling just a few miles and about 50 years away beneath the surface of Antarctica?

Hell yes.

An oldie but goodie. Have I talked about how much of an influence Henry Rollins has been on my life/career? I have? Oh, all right then.

Happy birthday, Hank.

It occurred to me today that whenever I put new art “out there” on the web, whether it’s a new pleasure drawing, a commission, or a work-in-progress, I usually cross-post it to a few places: DeviantArt, Tumblr and Facebook, depending it’s stage of completion.  But I rarely post here, on my own blog/website. That’s just … dumb. No, really, it’s stupid. I have this problem: I always worry that I’m over-saturating the internet with my work, because in MY purview, I see it posted to three or four different venues. But the fact is, only some people see it in some venues, just like Tweets passing in a timeline — someone at 2 a.m. won’t necessarily see something you posted at 2 p.m.

Hence, I’ve decided to get out of that frame of mind and start updating THIS site more regularly, instead of just when there’s a new project or appearance out there to self-promote. It’s ridiculous how self-conscious I’ve become about blogging over the last few years. I guess it’s because four or five years ago, I was just a writer. I wrote about stuff, and everyone who followed me did so for the reason (or because I bribed them). Then I started playing in bands again, and that made me a writer who played in a band, an entirely reasonable thing in which people could maintain interest. But then I started making comics, and I started doing more visual art, and suddenly, I became worried that I’d alienate the people who don’t give a crap about art or comics or music or whatever. So I fractured my internet presence, even as I redesigned THIS site to encompass all those things. I launched Tumblr accounts and Blogger blogs and multiple Facebook and Twitter presences.

Ultimately, however, all of those things are just facets of one person: me. So I’m going to stop apologizing, stop over-thinking, and start putting it all out there. You’re all smart people who are as capable as I am in ignoring or glossing over posts that don’t interest you without un-following my exploits. Some of you are here because of the comics, but maybe you like rock music and will enjoy my band. Some of you are here because of my journalistic career, but maybe you’ll get turned on to a comic. You get the point.

And, so, once again, I use a “desktop snapshot” as an excuse to update this site and get my blogging juices flowing. The above Photoshop windows, by the way, come from a variety of comics and illustration projects that are in various stages of development, but of particular interest to (probably) many of you, one in particular: a sequel to The Utopian. Stay tuned. And look for an onslaught of backed up postings. We’re gonna get this party started.