Monday, May 15, 2006

Website Work, CCS Momentousness, Monday Morning Quiz and It's All Coming Back to Our Cyborg Vice

* The site is coming together! My impatience means we'll (Jane Wilde and I) will be launching in June with just the tip of the iceberg, but I'm excited nonetheless.

* I've got to keep this short, as I'm heading north to White River Junction and today's key Center for Cartoon Studies faculty meeting. It's a lengthy year-end assessment and prep-for-Year Two session, and it'll be good to finally sit down with my Year One fellow instructors (whom I rarely get to see, socially or scholastically, living as I do almost 90 minutes away), though we're all eager to engage with our new faculty members for 2006-7. More on this tomorrow...

* After the faculty meeting, I'm meeting with a group of the Year One students to pull together the team working on a special project: a mini-comic for one of the Halloween season's upcoming DVD releases. Mum's the word until the-powers-that-be at the DVD company and the filmmakers themselves decide it's cool to announce the title (for which I'm also painting the DVD cover art), but needless to say I'm really looking forward to the whirlwind effort to complete this little gem ASAP. This group has a lot of talents, skills and enthusiasm to bring to such ventures, and that and the hard work necessary is all it takes -- more later!

* While my retirement from the comics industry stands, it's becoming increasingly possible to apply my skills in the medium I love far away from the plantation of what most folks consider "comics," this latest project being just one example. I'm enjoying drawing again as I haven't in years, and where it'll all lead, I've no idea -- but it won't be back to DC, over to Marvel, or in the stockade of the industry I left behind in '99.

Lest some of you groan, bear in mind the 21st Century's fertile soil lays well beyond their spent acreage (for me, anyway), and I've cast my fortunes in part with CCS as long as the two of us stand. As it goes, so it goes.

* A Monday Morning Quiz, compliments of my Bennington College compadre Brad Verter, who sent
  • this
  • my way this weekend. Let's see how well you score; country bumpkin that I am, I still did pretty well; extensive parenting experience helped telling the toy from the -- uh, toy.

    * This news broke over the weekend, and sets a compelling spin on recent events. Hand-written evidence...
  • what do you know,
  • the shit's getting mighty deep
  • An excerpt (from Kevin Drawbaugh's article):

    "The U.S. prosecutor in the CIA leak case has told a court he plans to use as evidence a newspaper article with notes that he says were hand-written by Vice President Dick Cheney referring to Valerie Plame shortly before she was exposed as a CIA operative.

    The notes show Cheney and his former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were "acutely focused" on the July 6, 2003, article written by Plame's husband, Bush administration critic and former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, said Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in the pre-trial filing made on Friday.

    A Cheney spokeswoman said the matter is a court proceeding and referred a request for comment to Fitzgerald's office.

    Fitzgerald said the notes show that Cheney and Libby were focused on Wilson and "on the assertions made in his article, and on responding to those assertions."

    The article asked whether the administration manipulated intelligence in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

    In the article, Wilson wrote he went to Niger in 2002 at the CIA's request to check out reports that the African nation had sold uranium yellowcake to Iraq in the late 1990s. The processed ore can be used to make a nuclear weapon.

    Wilson said he concluded on his tip that it was unlikely such a transaction ever took place. Later, the alleged African uranium connection was cited by the war's backers as evidence that Iraq had developed or had tried to develop weapons of mass destruction.

    Shortly after Wilson's article appeared, the identity of Plame, his wife, as a covert CIA operative was leaked to journalists. Fitzgerald is probing who blew Plame's cover.

    The copy of the article where Fitzgerald said Cheney made his notes ask if it is ordinary for former ambassadors to travel for the government to check out reports. "Or did his wife send him on a junket?" asks one notation...."


    As Peter Yost's article (the first linked above) elaborates,
    "Cheney's notes on the margins of Wilson's opinion column in The New York Times on July 6, 2003, reflect "the contemporaneous reaction of the vice president," Fitzgerald said in the court filing late Friday."

    Keep your eye and ear on Fitzgerald.

    Have a great Monday.