Mucous Monday

It's snowing/sleeting outside, I'm stewing in my own mucous juices with one hell of a cold hammering my chest and head, and chipping away at an interminable interview transcription... flaaaaugh. Monday, Monday; at least I don't have to be on the roads today, though at some point I have to bundle up and go outside to scrape down and salt our driveway so Marge can make it up to the garage by 4 PM. Thereafter, I will have manufactured another vast, clotted ocean of yellow-green phlegm and will be expelling it from every opening and pore.

Speaking of vast oceans of congealing snot, Warner Home Video just announced the release of this cinematic phlgem-drop... ah, my first brush with something I'd had a hand in during my comics career being turned into a movie (the prior experience with Rick Veitch via our Heavy Metal 1941 graphic novel was the opposite: a comic based on a movie).

This clinker is typical Jim Wynorski fare -- as contemptuous of its content as it is of its audience -- and there's a back story I'll share down the road, closer to the January release of this title.

I'm not immune to Wynorski's product -- I love his direct-to-video collaboration with Fred Olen Ray, Dinosaur Island -- but given the reported release of both the Swamp Thing cartoon series and live-action TV series, we'll all soon be nostalgic for those Swamp Thing fuzzy slippers again, a sure sign of the apocalypse.

Jeez, it feels like those slippers are crammed into the back of my throat -- which just about summarizes how Return of the Swamp Thing left me feeling upon first viewing -- rented on video from a general store in South Newfane, VT -- which prompted a sleepless night ("is that what our work read like to others?") until the dawn light and reason prevailed.

Of course, my ST slippers are safely tucked away in the Bissette Collection at HUIE Library!

In cleaning up the clutter on my iBook hard disc last night, Marge and I stumbled on some photos from our visit to Henderson State University's HUIE Library opening on the Bissette Collection back in November, 2005, and I thought I'd post a couple of those here to follow up on last week's post about my shipments to the collection.

I should have put these up long ago -- there's still a number of photos from this event on Marge's computer, and we'll get 'em up here for you to check out sooner than later.

Some notes on what you're seeing in these library showcases: the first photo includes various work editions and documents relevant to the creation of Taboo and Taboo-related projects (From Hell, etc.) and personal collection artifacts like the Diabolik screenplay (that's the green-covered binder in the left window, bottom right), a copy of the Joe Kubert School pioneer class anthology Manticore (1977), and more.

The other case houses more Bissette books and art, including the rare FantaCo promo booklet for the planned (but aborted) adaptation of Night of the Living Dead, the hardcover edition of my Stoker Award-winning novella Aliens: Tribes, Comic Book Rebels, Joe Citro's novel Deus X (the limited edition hardcover I illustrated), the now-rare From Hell: The Compleat Scripts Vol. 1, and more.

A lot of amazing stuff happened this weekend, but I'm too sick to get into it now. Sorry. But really, it was full of odd meetings, remarkable breakthroughs, and the laying of groundwork for some promising 2008 projects. And Marge and I made more ceramic masterpieces, working through our Christmas list with one-of-a-kind items lovingly handpainted by Marge and I. Sweet.

OK, I've got to get back to work -- more tomorrow, and have a moldy Monday...