Today's the day we check in to see

KHEPRI.COM'S TOP 05 GN/TPB/HC OF 2005, WEEK 11 (MAR 13-19)

05. Hench GN (AiT/Planet Lar)
04. Come In Alone TPB (AiT/Planet Lar)
03. Batman: The Man Who Laughs GN (DC Comics)
02. Ministry of Space TPB (Image Comics)
01. The Couriers v3: The Ballad of Johnny Funwrecker GN (AiT/Planet Lar)

...so that's January 2005, June 2003, and May 2001 representing in the present. If I ran a comics news site, I'd interview Brian Scot Johnson about all that money he's making.

Over at ign.com there's a great review of True Story Swear to God: "A point of interest for those of you fellows who are trying to convince your significant others to read a comic book: My wife read and finished this book before I did. When I got my books to review in the mail, I was showing them to her and giving her the basic plot outline of each. She picked up True Story and looked at a couple pages and asked if she could read it. She finished that afternoon and moved on to Beland's second book. So, if you've been looking for a good gateway comic for that special lady in your life, this might be the one."

If you click this link to watch this .wmv file of a band called "Hurra Torpedo" covering "Total Eclipse of the Heart," I'm sorry.

Three from Booklist:

Wood, Brian and G, Rob. The Ballad of Johnny Funwrecker: The Couriers 03. 2005. 88p. illus. AiT/Planet Lar, paper, $12.95 (1-932051-31-7). 741.5.

The third installment of The Couriers gives us insight on the origins of the comic's stars, urban mercenaries Moustafa and Special (see Dirtbike Manifesto [BKL My 1 04] for more). In 1993, Special, 15 and already a street-smart hellraiser, and 12-year-old Moustafa, who, despite his profession as a small-time drug dealer, still has a bit of wide-eyed innocence left. The two meet after they fall into working for Chinatown crime lord Johnny Funwrecker. Johnny's operation gives them protection and status and allows the inexperienced Moustafa the chance to learn the ropes of the street-courier lifestyle. He and Special build a friendship through their training, and when the feds decide to bring Johnny down, the pair figure it's an opportunity to make the capital to go into business for themselves. This story has the over-the-top appeal of a John Woo movie and Rob G's black-and-white art, with its funky style and hip-hop grace, continues to be a highlight of the series. **Tina Coleman

Spears, Rick and G, Rob. Filler. Mar. 2005. 96p. illus. AiT/Planet Lar, paper, $12.95 (1-932051-32-5). 741.5.

Spears and G's hero is filler: a guy who fills a space in a police lineup. It ain't much, but, along with regularly popping for the blood bank, it's a living for a combat vet who's got his marbles but no hope. Then a hooker who's still a looker... except for the shiner her pimp gave her... accosts him for a light. One thing leads to another: to bed, to our man playing white knight, to getting framed for murdering the pimp and his goon. Hauled in to star rather than fill in, the vet escapes, goes to see a fellow filler, a down-and-out writer who concocts a scheme to get our man off the hook and out of the country. In the end, everyone's got his or hers, though they don't all like what they get. Terrific noir entertainment that stokes fond memories of Muñoz and Sampayo's great Alack Sinner stories of the 1980s, with G's stark, blunt black, white, and red compositions less intricate than Muñoz's, but still damned effective. **Ray Olson

*STARRED REVIEW* Boyd, Andrew and Yount, Ryan. Scurvy Dogs: Rags to Riches. 2005. 160p. illus. AiT/Planet Lar, paper, $12.95 (1-932051-27-9). 741.5.

The question propelling sf and fantasy... What if?... makes great fuel for ludicrous comedy, too. What if, Boyd and Yount asked themselves, there were pirates, just like the murderous degenerates who plied the eighteenth-century Caribbean, around nowadays, and they decided to go for media stardom? Sounds ridiculous, and it is! Blackbeard, back from his legendary death by decapitation, after which the rest of him, fed to the fish, swam three times around the ship before sinking (maybe someone threw his noggin in later, once its career as a pike ornament concluded), captains a crew consisting of McDougal, a hulking Irish (or Scots) man; Pappy, a daft, hook-handed old salt; Jefe, who insists he's not a Spaniard, seems to hails from el barrio, and owns the gang's ship; and Chinese Pete, a cleaver-wielding mute. Though he was in a Menudo knock-off band, Jefe may be the only sane one; of course, it's hard to tell about Pete. In the five chapters here, the pirates start off taking regular jobs, war with the king of the hoboes and his subjects, and wind up as TV pitchmen. Once the drawn foolishness is over, Boyd and Yount offer nearly panel-by-panel commentary à la the banter of the McKenzie brothers (Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis) on the classic TV sketch-comedy series SCTV. **Ray Olson

Jason Richards reviews 1000 Steps to World Domination: "Why does it seem appropriate that Rob Osborne's mini-masterpiece was championed by the madness that is the mind of James Sime? And why does it fit to see this micro-manifesto published by Larry 'Read Comics or Die' Young's outfit? Perhaps because Osborne is torn directly from the same 'do-it-or-shut-the-fuck-up' cloth (sharkskin for Sime, flannel for Young). Honestly, what better way to motivate yourself for sloughing off the 9-to-5 yoke and jumping feet first into a cartooning job than to do comics about taking over the world? You can't possibly aim higher."

"Demo is still selling strong, and we have to re-order weekly again. It's starting to approach Johnen Vasquez sales levels in our neck of the woods."

Brian Scot Johnson weighs in with this, from the Khepri blog:

Q&A: Sell My Book Like AiT

Yesterday, Larry Young blogged about The Question asked of him at comic conventions, and how it evolves over time. Given my friendship with Lar and my emerging status as Warren Ellis' online bitch, people often hit me with Questions as well, usually in the form of "Why doesn't my book sell like Brian Wood's do @ Khepri.com?" and/or "What do I have to do to get my book on Khepri.com?" which is really more of a "I want sales like Larry Young finds @ Khepri.com." Because, see, most questions are actually poorly-cloaked statements; a question implies listening for an answer, even answers you may not want to hear. So, for all you micro-press folk looking to be the next Larry Young, my two most common answers:

1. Kevin Costner Lied to All of You -

"If you build it, they will come" is such a line of crap-on-rye, and somehow it's become a mantra among the new small press. BURN THAT VHS TAPE. When I was first tapped for Terra Major duty, I broke it down for my boys Shane and Bruno thusly:

"Publishing comic books and graphic novels is akin to giving birth. There's the fun of making that baby. There's the blood, sweat, and tears of labor. But once the baby's out of the womb, does motherhood end? Absolutely not. It's just begun. Now you need to take that baby and introduce it to the world. Will there be sleepless nights? Hell, yes. Will there be vomit and poop? Indeed, there will. First steps. First words. You will love that baby and everything it does. However, not everyone will think your baby is the cutest baby on the planet. What do you do? Abandon it? Of course not. You encourage that child. You patch up the scraped knees. You mend the broken hearts. You show everyone you know pictures of that freckle-faced kid. And you get up the next morning and make that boy or girl a stack of pancakes. Because pancakes are love... and comic books are our children. Pass the maple syrup."

2. You Will Never Be Larry Young -

Try as you might, you cannot be Larry Young. And really, why would you want to be? Seriously. I like Lar - privately and publicly. But I'd never, ever give up being BSJ by trying to be Larry Young. Has he helped me? More than anyone will ever likely know - personally and professionally. But a copy of Larry Young is still a copy, not the original.

More importantly, Larry Young is never going to give you a fish. Not a salmon swimming upstream. Not a tigershark diving deep. Not even a little goldfish in a plastic baggie that'll die within 3 hours of dropping it in a bowl of tap water. No, what Larry will do - if you sit down, shut up, and listen - is teach you to fish. And the first rule of fishing? Patience. Few fish are going to hop in the boat for you and attach themselves to a wormless hook. I mean, really - do you want that fish to snap the picture of "your catch" for you, and then whisper the "one that got away" story in your ear, too? Look, consume True Facts, nibble at his Blog. Observe what he does and think it through. Don't just copy his actions, but learn his motivations. And please don't ask the man for a fish... lest you find yourself up a certain creek without a paddle. Lar may be a lot of things, but "fishmonger" is not among them.

Not to get in the way of Heidi MacDonald's Bruce Campbell worship, but I for one am checking out The Chin's new one on SciFi: Alien Apocalypse. Not for its obvious astronauts-in-trouble theme, but for the costuming. Check this out:



Man, I love that costume.

Laura Gjovaag's lost post links to a bit of news about the upcoming True Story Swear to God second volume, as well as to my intro for Drive.

Didn't see this one right away as Evan spelled it with a K. "Skurvy Dogs is unlike any other comic you will ever read. While I don’t read many ‘humor’ books, I’d read a lot of praise for this comedic tale of pirates in the modern world, so I decided to give it a try. I can honestly say that this book had me laughing from cover to cover. The issues collected in this trade provide the bulk of the laughs, and the extras included in this volume make it even funnier. If you are in the mood for a good laugh you really should give this book a read."

Johnny B's got some love for Electric Girl: "I just finished reading the contents of that white box: both volumes of AiT/Planet Lar's ELECTRIC GIRL, by Michael Brennan- thanks to the well-known and justifiably celebrated generosity of Larry Young, whose head is not shaped like a heart, at least not to my knowledge. And despite my complaints a while back about how nobody seems to be writing anything for adults and so on, I gotta admit that I got a, well, (if you'll excuse the expression) charge out of them both."

And also, although not ostensibly about the comics industry, actually is, if you know what I mean:

Five apples

This is what my life is like. I have four apples. At least I’m pretty sure there are only four, I only bought four, I can only see four and there is no reason to suppose I have any more. There could be five I suppose, but I see no reason to think so. The trouble is, everyone else thinks there are five. I ask people for evidence that there are five apples. I ask them what reason they have to suppose there are five, or to show me how they counted five, and these are the replies I get:

1. What do you mean, “count the apples”?
2. Have you studied agriculture? If not, how do you know there aren’t five apples?
3. The majority of people in the world know there are five apples. Are you saying they are all wrong?
4. It’s closed-minded to think there aren't five apples.
5. There is plenty of evidence to prove that there are five apples, go and look for it, I’m not counting them for you.
6. Apples can’t be “counted” by science, so there are five apples.
7. Can you prove there isn’t a fifth apple somewhere?
8. Scientists counted only three apples in the past and now they admit there are four, so there are five now.
9. The ancient Chinese knew there were five apples; modern science still has not yet caught up.
10. They laughed at Galileo when he said there were five bananas, and he was right, so there are five apples.
11. Science can’t yet see all the apples. You can’t see radio waves, but they existed before we developed ways to measure them, so why can’t there be a fifth invisible apple now that we just haven’t developed the technology to see?
12. Quantum mechanics proves there are five apples.
13. I just know the fifth apple is there.
14. It’s a government conspiracy to cover up the existence of the fifth apple.
15. You’re not keeping up with the latest research. It has now been proven that there are five apples (although I can’t actually remember where this research is written up).

Here’s the thing: I actually have four apples and an orange. These people are so busy making up stories about a fifth apple, they’ll never realize the orange even exists.

Just back from WizardWorld LA, where Mimi and I got to just cruise around after our H'wood meetings. As usual, I got a few different versions of The Question.

The Question always changes, but it seems it always changes at once, and what was a perfectly good Question before is now of course yesterday's news and has been supplanted by a new Question. The First Question was a version of "Who Do You Think You Are?/Where Did You COME FROM?" which morphed easily into the same category of Questions which necessitated me writing True Facts in self-defense.

At WizardWorld LA, no less than four persons of esteem asked me Another Question: "Can I have your Contact List/Give me the name of the guy you know at Variety/Publisher's Weekly/USA Today/Entertainment Weekly/How do you get such awesome Real World press?"

I uncharacteristically smile and demur politely.

The answer, of course, is that I never sleep. I never rest. I'm relentless. Comics don't make themselves better, you know?

And I rarely admit this in public, but...

...there is only one of me, and only twenty-four hours in the day. Can't be everywhere at once, although it may seem like it, to you and me.

So if you're one of our creators and you want your book to sell, sure, you can leave it to me, and I'll take care of you. I got some skillz. But if you talk with me first about your plan, it does nothing but help matters if you're out thrashing your work, too.

Take Tom Deady.

You don't know Tom yet, and even if you have heard about his project, you might not care. Tom's the co-writer of our April book, Surviving Grady, about the glorious Red Sox season of 2004. It's a prose book, it's about baseball, it's about the Red Sox. A very small interested audience slice in comics, an industry in which we are notorious. But a very large audience in The Real World, an audience who is statistically unaware of us.

So to make a big splash, ya gotta make an extra effort. Ol' Tom hit the sweet spot. Let's let Red on the Surviving Grady blog give it to us straight:

So on Saturday, March 12, Denton heads down to Spring Training, and he's all, "Dude, I'll send back some photos and interesting news throughout the week," which sounds cool, because then we could show off some Grapefruit pix that aren't "borrowed" from the AP or, y'know, actually talk about baseball instead of imagined conversations with headwarmers.

But then a few days go by. And then a few more. Then a week. And no word from Denton.

So I write him off as drunk or jailed and go about my biz. Then on Saturday I get a couple calls telling me that the Remdawg mentioned Surviving Grady during that afternoon's telecast of the game against the Orioles. My first thought is that NESN has added a new "Blogs that Taste Like Ass" segment, but it turns out the plug was the work of Denton. And it was captured by the NESN cameras thusly:

In the eighth inning, Remdawg and Orsillo begin to dialogue about how accessible they are to the fans during Spring Training telecasts. As if on cue, Orsillo notes: "Here comes somebody now." Cut to shot of Denton approaching the broadcast booth. Rooftop snipers stand at the ready.


Oblivious to the fact that they're in the middle of a broadcast, Denton greets Remdawg and Orsillo. The two greet him back.


Remdawg engages Denton, with the brief but poignant exchange caught on tape. Denton somehow tricks him into thinking he's not a sociopath, and, before departing, hands Remdawg one of the publisher's postcards for "Surviving Grady: The Book."


Remdawg kindly plugs the book. Meanwhile, Denton, who has no idea any of this is even transpiring on camera, stumbles back to his seat, and is later thrown out of the park for making disparaging comments toward a priest sitting behind him.



So, nice work, Tom. The Surviving Grady postcard on the telly.

Lehman and Higgins are getting a stack; any other retailers who could use a few please drop me a line.

Here's an interesting bit of news I've discovered:

"Isotope Virtual Lounge 2.0 T-Minus Monday March 28th. Communications center active. Final preparations are being made. The Isotonauts will be ready when the engines launch."


Isotope bon vivant Ian Yarborough