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April 25, 2008
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Munson has The Grand versus Justice Hall in Friday Night Fights, which I think is awesome.

I'll try to dig up a scan of Brandon's original pencils, and you can see how much more graphic that is before Photoshop got involved. When I asked for "as gory as you can get," ol' Brandon delivered in spades.

April 24, 2008
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"Did you know The Black Diamond is real?" read an email I just got from a pal of mine down in LA.

Now, I know we tap in to the zeitgeist quite a bit here at AiT/Planet Lar. Astronauts in Trouble presaged the imbedded-reporters thing that the Untitled Jake Gyllenhaal Moon Project will no doubtedly rip, and even "The Bod" in Proof of Concept accidentally uncovered the secret Photoshop-fetish of digitally removing models from their clothing. Shannon Denton's upcoming Aces heralds a Red Baron movie, of course. So we're not exactly in unknown territory, here, feeding on and being fed upon the Pop Culture monster.

But one of the major criticisms Jon Proctor and I got when we first released The Black Diamond: On Ramp back in 2005... was how improbable the whole thing seemed. Joe McCulloch over at Jog - The Blog thought it a little unlikely, I seem to recall.

Well, as usual, the real world comes up with things that are even crazier than one might predict. Hit that link above for a refutation of "The NAFTA Superhighway" and this one for a fact sheet on "the Trans-Texas Corridor." But if it ends up having triple-black-diamond signage...

...well.

April 22, 2008
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You know, running all the administrative and logistical stuff for the business isn't really where the fun is, in comics. A necessary evil, of course, but I'm one of those "You got some chairs? I got a stage! Let's put on a show!" guys. All the egos and the jockeying-for-position and all is just a big yawn for me, as I move towards my dotage. We're heading towards ten years, publishing, and breaking a new creator headed somewhere is quite gratifying, and folks leaving the nest fills us with parental pride. Making Comics Better, that's what it's all about, for me.

But, like putting out Astronauts in Trouble, which, frankly, pays for all of the new work... and like stretching the envelope for what's successful in the scene, like the script collections and anthologies and whatnot that we do...

... I still get a secret thrill when an artist sends me a bit that doesn't much look like anything to the uninitiated, but is the non-fattenting sugar-substitute in my tea:

Man, I can't wait until this one comes out.

April 21, 2008
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Rob Tannenbaum forwards over his MySpace page for his band, Good For the Jews, which, if you hit the link, you can hear the song I quoted yesterday over that picture of Walker. Man, they're funny.

+++++

Marc Mason takes a look at Holmes: "It can be risky, applying the conventions of parody and satire to a public domain icon, but Perez does a really terrific job of it here. He takes on the central conceit of the character’s “seven percent solution” drug use and then carries it out to an extreme. Here Holmes is a raving paranoid, but rather then being called on it or institutionalized, he is granted leeway and his behavior excused… even though there’s no rational reason for doing so beyond his reputation. What that leaves is behavior that would have made the detective an honorary member of the Go-Gos during their 80s heyday. And the results are goddamned funny."

April 20, 2008
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"They tried to kill us; we survived. Let's eat." -- Sean Altman and Rob Tannenbaum

Contemplating Passover 2008

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