This, That and Some More of "The List"

Bill and Ted Are Doomed #1-2 are done. Roger Langridge is on inks for #3. I'm finishing up the script for #4. It's looking really nice, I hope folks enjoy what we're doing.  

Benjamin Dewey is finishing up the fourth issue of Beasts of Burden: Occupied Territory, the series so far is looking absolutely fantastic. Unfortunately, the comic is pushed back to next year. No go-ahead yet on the Beasts of Burden series of one-shots I was starting to work on when the world caved in. Here's to next year being something less than a hellscape.

The last issue of Blackwood: The Mourning After is still set for September, ditto the collection hot on its heels. Crazy scheduling post-print lockdown. I think the paperback reprint of the Marvel Bill and Ted  series comes out in August. No royalties on that project, but it's my work and BOOM, normally cheap as chips, treated me decently on the hardcover work. They kind of had to, I guess. I'm the only Evan Dorkin who worked on those books. But then they turned around and offered me an insultingly garbage rate to write a new series ($45 a page, less than I made writing Pirate Corp$! for super-small press Eternity Comics in 1988!). The new series is a nice way for everything to have worked out. Cheap rates get cheap dates. 

I'm still working on an online project, still unannounced. There's also another thing floating around, which will hopefully reach land someday. I have no idea when the Colonel Weird series Sarah and I did a variant cover for will be rescheduled, no idea when another cover we turned in will be shceduled for another series. I don't know what's going on pretty anywhere anymore. Hellscape world.

FYI: I have two HOF eBay auctions up currently, a set of 11 Welcome to Eltingville production drawings, and another "Inktober" horror piece of Don Dohler's infamous Nightbeast, done a few weeks ago (Inktober is a state of mind, right? And I think the name's getting tossed anyway because iirc the guy who started it turned out to be a jerk. WIll have to look into that before declaring it dead). Link to auctions if interested: https://www.ebay.com/sch/chimpanzo_rex/m.html?item=254654690892&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2562 

My arm and shoulder are blown out pretty badly after a few days of typing/drawing/stuffing envelopes, so I'm cutting the typing short tonight. Might have to do some cut-and-paste posts for a few days, so, the list may rear it's ugly head again. 

BY NOT-SO-POPULAR DEMAND, IT'S THE RETURN OF THE NERD LIST, # 26-40

 26) The shaft that was/is given almost every business day to Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, et al.  (See #39) 

27) No insurance plan for comics creators who aren’t exclusive to Marvel or DC.   

28) Well-meaning but insipid superhero comics that dealt with the events of 9/11     

29) The ugly modern DC Universe. 

30) A.C.T.O.R. giving money to a creator whose need was mainly brought on by his own bad career decisions and personal behavior.  (EDIT: Iirc, ACTOR was an earlier version of The Hero Initiative).

31) Publishers destroying original artwork back in the day. 

32) Certain professionals who obtained original art in order to “save it” from being destroyed, but apparently never thought of returning it to the artists/families when things became more public  in the 1980's about the mistreatment of artists/widespread art theft. (See #39)

33) The Comics Buyer’s Guide 

34) Kenneth Smith’s mind-numbing academic rank-fests in the back of the Comics Journal. Feel free to call me a philistine, that’s perfectly fine by me.  

35) Marvel’s policy of not reimbursing creators for lost or damaged original art.  (See #36, 39) 

36) The scumbag who stole the cover to Fight-Man #1 from the Marvel offices, along with reams of other artwork from that period. 

37) The decline in quality of the art board the big companies give out to their artists. 

38) Dave Campiti (EDIT: I can discuss this cretin later on, it's not exciting, but it's interesting)

39) The infamous Jack Kirby art return contract 

40) Vanguard Publishing’s censoring of Wally Wood’s work in their Wizard King collection. (EDIT: Vanguard/J. David Spurlock deserves industry-wide enmity for a number of reasons, including the parasitic glomming onto of older/departed fantasy artists and cartoonists. I've sat next to this guy at shows and he's a piece of work in the Greg Theakston mold -- latch on, befriend, reprint (badly) and insinuate into/control the legacy or estate). 

More later, if you twist my arm! Just not my right one, please.

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(Image atop post: 2002 WFMU fundraiser t-shirt design for the Glen Jones Radio Programme, featuring X-Ray Burns (who is still dead). Fun fact: Deejay Glen Jones was the voice for Joe the comic shop owner in Welcome To Eltingville.)