Neil Gaiman, Here I Come...

Prepping and packing this morning for tomorrow night's trip, which will eventually deposit me on Friday morning on Neil Gaiman's doorstep (with Hank Wagner, co-author with Chris Golden of the St. Martin's Press book on Neil and his work). It's still kind of amazing how all this fell together, but I'm really looking forward to seeing Neil again after so long.

Alas, I cannot bring Neil a Coffee Zombee mug, because -- he cannot drink coffee! My last visit to Neil's US home, ostensibly to do an interview with him forThe Comics Journal (which was deep-sixed by TCJ despite our successful attempt to find a sponsor to get us together -- a long story for another time), was plagued by Neil suffering a major pain-in-the-neck, and I don't mean me. Turned out he suffered from a negative reaction to caffeine! Ah, the '90s...

It's been about ten years since we were face-to-face -- he was working on the whole Princess Mononoke English-language dubbing script at that time, and we roomed together at Necon. We've stayed in touch, but I miss the lad.

I'm sure he's a crispy critter from all his travel and constant workload, but shit, I've seen Neil in crispier condition. Another story, another time.

Soooooooooooooo -- winding down the blog for the week -- I'll be back on Tuesday AM, unless I'm able to steal computer time at Neil's -- let me touch on a few things.

* As of this AM, Tim "Doc Ersatz" Viereck and I have rebooted the interview I began with Doc back in the late winter/early spring here on the blog. We're winding down on our Johnson State College 'daze' (where my first-ever comic, Abyss, was funded by Doc) and then we'll be getting into his fascinating years at Dino DeLaurentiis Studios in North Carolina (where he worked behind the scenes on David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Stephen King's Maximum Overdrive, and King Kong Lives, among other films), Douglas Trumbull's complex in Massachusetts (working on the historic Universal Back to the Future ride), and much, much more. I reckon we'll have more to post, with pix, by December, so prepare for a trip down someone else's memory lane around the time the snow might be flying.

Johnson State College campus memories and oh so much more, coming soon...

* Speaking of other people's memory lanes,

Center for Cartoon Studies pioneer class alumni Adam Staffaroni is posting photos and narrative of his summer 2007 trip to the great Northwest over on I Know Joe Kimpel

(which is still your one-stop shopping site for all things CCS-related in terms of comics, etc.). Check it out! I'll be having breakfast with Adam this morning -- we're working on a project -- so I'll find out more, but keep an eye on the Joe Kimpel blog for Adam's Saga!

* Today, my Drawing Workshop class at CCS begins a three-session workshop on character design and model sheet design with

the amazing Kaori Hamura, who lives here in Vermont

and is now into her second year of working with CCS, sharing her animation industry insider knowledge of creating characters and getting down the essentials.

Here's a little more one-stop info about Kaori and her career; enjoy visiting the links and seeing her work online.

* Speaking of workshops, CCS is still basking in the glow of Lynda Barry's visit last week.

More personal responses to Lynda Barry's CCS workshop -- with photos! -- awaits you here,

and we're all working on something special following her visit. More on that another time.

* Well, the fall sales season at the Antiques Mall in nearby Quechee, VT's famed

Quechee Gorge Village

is winding down. I've been restocking the booth big-time the past week or so, including original art (Cayetano 'Cat' Garza art, original art packaged with Colleen Frakes Xeric-Award winning comic, etc.), more CCS comics (all signed!), collectible comics from the '40s to the '90s, DVDs of all genres with a lot of rare and recently-released cult titles (almost all factory-sealed and brand new) including the Alejandro Jodorowsky classics El Topo and The Holy Mountain, books, a ton of Bissette collectibles (all signed) and much, much more.

Going...going...gone! This one-of-a-kind Bissette Coffee Zombee mug is now in some happy coffee-drinking collector's home, available exclusively at Dealer booth #653 in the Quechee Gorge Village Antique Mall!

I've now racked over 800 items in that rather wee booth since April of this year, with strong sales throughout the summer and fall. All earnings from the CCS artist community's work goes to the artists, save for the $1 markup to help cover a portion of the monthly booth rental fee. Marge and I had a pleasant Saturday painting new ceramic pieces at the White River Junction

Tip Top Pottery studio,

so I'm placing some new Bissette one-of-a-kind original works in the booth next week -- including the first in a series of dinosaur pottery pieces to accompany the Coffee Zombee mugs I've been doing. I'll post photos of the new work here next week.

So, if you're in the area before Christmas, visit the booth -- dealer #653 -- in the Antiques Mall in Quechee Gorge Village. You won't be disappointed, and be sure to pick up lots of CCS goodies!

* There's a fat batch of new trailers with commentary over at my fave online entertainment Trailers from Hell!

If you haven't been there since my last post of the link, give yourself an hour or more today to visit 'em and catch up -- if you're at the office, wait till the weekend, Bunkie. No need to lose your job over From Hell It Came or Suspiria previews!


* And in the big bad world:

Followup on the current estimated cost of the wars (Iraq and Afghanistan), essential context for spend-and-borrow-to-wage-war President Bush's ongoing vetoes and verbal abuse of Democrats in recent weeks.

"The $1.6 trillion figure, for the period from 2002 to 2008, translates into a cost of $20,900 for a family of four, the report said...," to also followup on that rather expansive span I cited yesterday. Again, I'm not sure where some come up with the $43,000 per household pricetag, but I'm sure you'll agree the estimated $20,900 is daunting enough. We're all like Br'er Rabbit: "Oh, please, puh-leez don't throw us to those bloated-budget Democrats, Br'er Bush!"

We also have news this morning about the Blackwater investigations: "A Blackwater Worldwide spokeswoman says the company supports "stringent accountability" for any wrongdoing in the wake of a New York Times report that federal investors have found that the shooting deaths of at least 14 Iraqi civilians by Blackwater guards in Baghdad nearly two months ago violated rules of deadly force..."

Aaaaaaaand, the Associated Press reports: "The Justice Department has reopened a long-dormant inquiry into the government's warrantless wiretapping program, a major policy shift only days into the tenure of Attorney General Michael Mukasey." Good news, that.

Now if only our elected officials wouldn't let AT&T and Verizon et al off the hook for selling us all down the river in this illegal spying program.

Have a great Wednesday, one and all...

Garry Trudeau, Petro-Paleo Art, Prez Privilege and Private Platoons

I'm cramming for an afternoon CCS lecture on Garry Trudeau (who is coming to visit The Center for Cartoon Studies in October, participating in fundraising for CCS and more!) and mystery novelist and fellow CCS instructor Sarah Stewart Taylor and I have a heady senior thesis class ahead I want to do a little more prep for. It's been a little weird resurrecting art from a beloved project writer Tom Veitch and I never could find a publisher for -- Grumm, which we pitched to Archie Goodwin at Epic (shot down due to a Native American component to Tom's narrative concepts, though one that was not central to the miniseries; as Archie put it, "Coyote and Time Spirits just haven't done that well for us") and Karen Berger during Vertigo's first year (and which, after a year, was rejected, though the rather clumsy conversation with Karen that followed at an otherwise pleasant lunch together at the World Horror Con I've ever attended left me with the impression Karen simply had not read the proposal, or had forgotten it completely -- sigh). Grumm still looks pretty good to me, and the proposal and sample art holds up well; anyway, this is part of what I'm bringing in to share with the seniors today.

On a completely unrelated track, I've also been excavating and prepping an expanded dino comics history piece, which has led me into research on the 1930s Sinclair Oil dinosaur promotional artists and campaigns, a curious slice of petro-promo history I'm finding more fascinating than I should. More on that -- later.

_________

Will the Congress ever step on this ceaseless expansion of Executive privilege and domestic spying program?

I can't see how, given the fact that the Republicans are still calling the shots in the Congress -- note the 4-vote loss last night of yet another Democratic bill intended to somehow curb President Bush's Iraq War "strategy," in this case an attempt to limit the length of a soldier's Iraq combat tour. President Bush's allies blocked the bill.

Huh, so the interminable tours -- which have precipitated the highest suicide rate in the history of the U.S. Army and the National Guard -- will go on. As I've pointed out here before, this treatment of our soldiers is oddly parallel -- almost identical -- to that of those imprisoned in Guantanamo and elsewhere in this interminable "War on Terror." How long can anyone hold out once they find themselves in what is, essentially, service/imprisonment without defined parameters, limit or end? This Kafkaesque nightmare for those entrapped in Bush's concept of "service" and "justifiable incarceration" is an abomination, a form of psychological torture the Congress has sanctioned now (with inaction, and refusal to debate or act) for years now.

Is this how the GOP honors our servicemen? Is this how they "support our troops"? How long will we stomach the Republican stonewalling of any change, however incremental, in the Bush policies the American people have had enough of? Honestly, with precious few exceptions, I simply cannot see how anyone can continue to justify this reprehensible crap. The Republican refusal to honor or impose any measure of checks or balances is reaping the whirlwind, and we all will pay (but none more than military families, still the only part of the American public to bear the brunt of sacrifice in the wars Bush is intent upon treading water within).

The complicity of the still-Republican-led Congress in all the various shitstorms coming to a head presently begs the question: how can any American conscientiously continue to support the party?

In other quarters, the lack of Congressional oversight -- again, blame the GOP Senators (and complicit Democrats like Joseph Lieberman, who is behaving like an ideological scum-of-the-earth, crowing over the blocking of the bill last night) who have rubber-stamped and refused to probe such a plethora of insanity that one doesn't know where to even begin. Inaction is as hazardous as action: for instance,

will the privatization of foreign policy operations ever be addressed, in any public arena? There's reportedly more private contractors in Iraq than there are US military serving -- all quietly established as if it were "business as usual."

For excellent historical reasons, "most countries forbid their citizens fighting in foreign wars unless they are under the control of their own national armed forces,"

a premise the Bush Administration blithely ignored (as they have other facets of the Geneva Convention). With the usual perverse skewed logic of this hyena pack, they've conveniently forgotten

the role similarly hired hands -- the Hessians -- played in the American Revolution, and our colonial forefathers's "insurgent" defeat of both the Hessians and the army of their employer, Great Britain, though of course Blackwater is paying its mercenaries much better these days.

But of course, that's not a lesson learned, nor does the Bush Administration or GOP care to make that correlation.
_____________

Have a great Thursday...

"Blackwater, Blackwater, Crash, Crash, Crash;
Blackwater, Blackwater, Smash, Smash, Smash;
Blackwater, Blackwater, Kill Kill Kill --"

[To be sung to the tune Oliver Reed and his Teddies sing in Joseph Losey's The Damned aka These Are the Damned, 1961]

Today is Constitution Day -- and, appropriately enough, the first day in recent history in which Alberto Gonzales has not been our Attorney General.

In the first bit of news to eke out of Iraq concerning the Blackwater mercenary army in quite some time, we get a snapshot of what the Bush/Cheney Administration "diplomacy" has really been all about.

"The Iraqi government said Monday that it was pulling the license of an American security firm allegedly involved in the fatal shooting of civilians during an attack on a U.S. State Department motorcade in Baghdad.

The Interior Ministry said it would prosecute any foreign contractors found to have used excessive force in the Sunday shooting. It was latest accusation against the U.S.-contracted firms that operate with little or no supervision and are widely disliked by Iraqis who resent their speeding motorcades and forceful behavior..."

And in another revelatory bit of Bush Administration redress and context, we also have the weekend spectacle of former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan spelling out what most -- well, many -- assumed/knew about the reasons for waging unprovoked war on Iraq: "I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows -- the Iraq war is largely about oil."

There's more to it -- click the link, read it in full, and prep your Road Warrior costuming and gear, folks.

Have a great Monday.