Category Archives: Life

Creativity Is My Co-Pilot

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In high school, Pilot Precise pens were the Cadillac of writing instruments. They were hard (for us) to find, but they were as close to fountain pens that we’d get at that age. The most exciting thing was to get a new color. Black and blue were great, but there was also red. Red was pedestrian compared to green. Or freaking purple. When I was journaling back then, I collected pens to represent the rainbow, substituting black for yellow, and finding an orange felt-tipped pen. Those were the days.

In 2010, long after I’d learned to draw, I found a four-pack of Pilot Precise pens at the Government Printing Office, where I was temping. I swiped them out of instinct, but I wasn’t sure what I would use them for. I didn’t journal—I didn’t do much writing in general, and when I did, it was with real fountain pens. I put them in the Box of Misfit Writing and Art supplies.

Along the way, Nicole bought me a set of thirty Stabilo Art Pens. They were regular pens, not brushes, so I tried a little cross-hatching. After a few tries, I was able to create works of art like this:

My mind returned to the Pilots. I only had four colors: black, blue, red, and green, but even with a limited palette, I knew I could create art. Best of all, I had a character I’d never get tired of drawing, and red, green, and blue were her colors. I have a dozen of these drawings, and some of them are really awful (most of my drawings are awful—you’re only seeing the good ones), but here are a few of the best.

(I did this one yesterday)

Concerned that the four-pack was going to run out of ink (it’s not even close), I splurged on a ten-pack. In addition to black, green, blue, and red, it has magenta, purple, light blue, light green, yellow, and orange. I took them for a spin.

It’s been good to stretch myself out after working so solidly with watercolors while making Polterguys. These pens are indulgent, but they’re a lot of fun. It brings me back to the school days when Severian and I would hang out in the back of class, writing all over our notebooks, and being unbridled in our creativity.

Big Wheel Keep on Turnin’

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Sometimes a bad day doesn’t have to be a bad day forever. New Year’s Eve started really poorly, the kind of poorly that could have carried over into the new year. I won’t get into any specifics because they’re none of your business, but my life is going to change drastically, possibly as soon as this month.

I spent the afternoon kind of shock, but one of my oldest friends got my stunned text and helped talk me through it over the phone. I’ve worried that I don’t have many friends anymore because everybody has a life, and many of them were pushed out of my life while I was married. However, everybody I reached out to got back to me as soon as they read their texts, and I was able to process the events of the day.

The reason I didn’t have a bad day was because I got to hang out with the Nerdy Couple, a husband-and-wife duo I can trace back to Bloomington, Indiana. They had with them their Delightfully Weird Friend and another friend I could only describe as unhinged.

I told them all about my morning while trying not to editorialize (while editorializing), and after that twenty-minute conversation, we talked about Star Trek, the Star-Trek-adjacent fic I’ve been posting on AO3, but haven’t updated since October. We talked a lot about Star Trek. Nerdy Husband told me that there is a novel with some information on how Sarek and Amanda Grayson got together (a question that’s been plaguing me for a while), and we all agreed that the Kirk of the original series is actually a thoughtful, diplomatic man and not the horny cowboy everybody remembers him as (thanks, in no small part, to the JJ Abrams movies).

From there we gorged ourselves on sushi, cupcakes, and (for me anyway) Adderall and coffee before playing Cards against Humanity and observing ourselves becoming horrible people. I shared my favorite pick-up line (“You remind me of my pinkie toe: you’re small, cute, and I’m probably going to bang you on my coffee table later.”) which matched the tone perfectly. My bedtime is 8:00, though closer to 7:30 lately, so by ten o’clock I was feeling loopy, which only helped me win a few rounds. Taking breaks to show each other TikTok videos and to share horrifying medical stories, we wrapped it up in time for the ball drop. Delightfully Weird Friend dominated, followed by Nerdy Husband. The rest of us weren’t even close.

That’s how I’m going to remember New Year’s Eve 2023. It was the year I became an artist again and illustrated two-and-a-half comics. I saw Romania, which was awesome, and I kicked my marijuana habit. Newcastle came down with hyperthyroidism and arthritis, but once we put him on treatment, he’s incredibly healthy (for a cat who has those ailments plus kidney disease and cardiac failure). I finally made a new friend, at work, and we text each other all the time when we’re not being productive or going out to coffee. I lost the hearing in one of my ears, but yesterday it came back. I did put on a lot of weight, which I’m not happy about.

This year I’m going to illustrate the MortalMan story I’ve been dreaming about since 2000. I even picked up a new art board to do it with. At some point, I’m going to move to a new apartment, and I’ll be living solo for the first time in my entire life. I have a plan to take my weight off. Other than that, my year will be wide open.

This has been a very matter-of-fact post, but that’s because I’m probably going to hop back into bed shortly. Once upon a time I spent New Year’s Day nursing a hangover, treating myself to a greasy breakfast, and watching bad TV, sometimes with a girlfriend, sometimes with my sister, and sometimes alone. This year I’ve spend most of my morning in my pajamas, drifting in and out of sleep and reviewing my first round of proofs while Newcastle cuddled me. I cannot be happier at this moment. Twenty-four hours ago should have ruined me, but it failed. I’m filled with as much chill and hope as I’ve ever had.

May your year fill you with chill and hope.

The Best Things in Life Are Free, You Can Keep ‘Em

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I uncovered even more jobs I did (mostly) for money, including, Big Face Records in 2012, a rap label that never took off.

Wish Slap from 2010, a truly terrible idea for a TV show where you paid money to have someone slap your favorite celebrity.

The cover (actually used) for the 2014 fantasy noir anthology, Fae Fatales, where I was first published.

And finally, Li’l Dicky from a Bush Administration parody comic I pitched to the Unemployed Philosopher’s in 2004, rejected because “There’s no way Bush will ever get a second term.” This is the worst reason I was rejected.

i did a lot more commissioned work than I realize. There’s more to come.

And IIIIIIIIIIIIIII Will Always Love Yule

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I stopped celebrating Christmas a long time ago, around the time my parents stopped paying my airplane ticket home. After I moved to New York-adjacent, I had a lot of family in New Jersey, but I am a terrible long-distance relative, and I didn’t know any of them well enough to spend the holiday with them, except once, and that was awkward.

The second year I was there, my uncle Larry invited me to Linden, New Jersey, in mid-December, along with the extended families of himself and my aunt Christine. Christine is my mother’s sister, but I adored everyone there, even the kids and grandkids of Larry’s brother, Phil. Even though I was out of touch, Uncle Larry welcomed me into his home on Ainsworth Street as if I had always been there, and I visited them frequently on weekends.

I only saw Larry’s family once a year, though, and I watched the children grow up as I kept them occupied while Mommy and Daddy got drunk. Whenever my smoker’s lungs couldn’t keep up with them, we played the heart-attack game, which was me falling to the ground and all of them tried to revive me using their rudimentary understanding of CPR. My other favorite game was the monster game, where I’d chase them to a hiding place, safe from me, and then I went and had a beer. Eventually, they’d find me, then I’d just roar, and they split.

But that left the actual day, when my extended family celebrated with just themselves, and my found families all went home. You’d think that would be depressing, but it really wasn’t. You see, on December 25, I had plans.

My day would start out late, and I’d head into the city for brunch with Joshua. As this was Christmas, our options were limited. One or two years, he had a girlfriend from China, and she took us to a real Chinese restaurant, which was a lot like that racist dining scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Chicken with broccoli was not on the menu, but something horrible being done to a crab was.

From there, we’d see a movie, which was reminiscent of what my family would do when I was a kid, and we ran out of things to unwrap. For the latter, the movie I remember most was Home Alone. As for the former, the one that became my Christmas movie is Spike Lee’s 25th Hour. (All you Die Hard people are so cute.) And from there we’d go to work.

Working at The New York Post on Christmas was absolutely wonderful. Everyone there was Jewish, or without family, or hiding from their family. None of the hardcore news editors were there, so everyone was relaxed. Year-round, the sport we played at The Post was to make each other laugh, and never was it more competitive than it was on Christmas. Even though I saw them every week, there was something especially heartwarming about seeing Mike and Rob and Dom and my auxiliary dad, Barry, as well as everyone else. The magic of Christmas in New York is such a cliché, but when you pass by the tree at the Rockefeller Center and glance into the ice-skating rink on your way to an office with a sodium-heavy buffet and affectionate shouting from some of your favorite people, you believe.

I have no memory of the thirteen Christmases I spent with Kate because we treated them like normal days. Usually we’d spend the weekend before with her (but never my) family, and her family didn’t get me, so they had no idea what to do with me. The actual day was just like any other, except everything was closed. It’s not as special when you’re not waking up and unwrapping presents.

With Nicole, she has a side-hustle sitting pets, and Christmas is a lucrative day, so we’ve spent it apart, except for once, during quarantine, when we watched that smoking turd, Wonder Woman 1984. This year, she woke up at home, and we unwrapped presents together and went our separate ways, her making a dessert and me taking the new sketchbooks and expensive paintbrushes Mom and Dad got me out for a spin. Zooming with them and my sisters and my niece and my nephew-in-law was pure chaos.

Christmas is just a day. Sure everything’s closed, and there’s nothing good on TV, but the sun rises and falls, just as it always does. You need to eat lunch, you need to take the dogs for a walk. It’s okay not to do anything just because someone else is. If you really need to find meaning on December 25, you can find it. I found mine on a loud news floor, trying to think of a clever headline. (The best one I ever came up with had to do with a computer screw-up that cost New York teachers their December 24 paycheck: “The glitch that stole X-mas.”) And it’s okay to feel lonely. Boxing Day is just around the corner.

I used to be a humbug, including during my time at the paper before I realized what a holiday it was. Nowadays, I am by no means a Tiny Tim or post-ghost Scrooge. I still have a problem with how shallow this holiday is (i.e. the Black Fridays that last well into December) and how I lost the goddamned Wham! game on Christmas Freaking Eve! But even at my loneliest, I looked forward to this day, even if it is just a day.

(This essay has no thesis, it’s just a bunch of random and contradictory thoughts pouring out.)

To Draw or Not to Draw

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Back when I wanted to make action comics, I had a little vigilante with no name. His original story was five issues, based on Hamlet. I wrote the first five scripts, but they are lost to history (Newcastle destroyed my laptop), and my attempt to make a novel of it failed when I couldn’t make five issues drag on for more than 20,000 words. The book would have been called Tantalus. I modeled the character after Bruce Lee, and I gave him a cane he never needed when he was fighting or doing parkour (symbolism) as well as a scarf that would have been a good visual. The book was always intended to be in black and white. I decided, after fifteen years, to draw the character again, and I went a little more stark than he had been in the past. It would have been called Tantalus.

Here is the one I just did.

Here is one of my earlier sketches from 2002.

A more dynamic one from 2003 I would like to have used as a cover:

As well as a couple of dynamic pictures from 2008.

I think I’m done with this character, but I loved his look, and he’s fun to draw. The one I just did didn’t turn out great, but I should give it another shot.

He Works Hard for His Money

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It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes people hear I’m an artist, and they think they could get a custom logo for their businesses. They rarely ever used my art because my style doesn’t necessarily have that clip-art, professional je ne sais quoi that makes it look corporate. What they needed was a graphic designer, but they still paid me, and it is some of my best work. Here’s eight examples.

First was for a post-apocalyptic novel series that I think the author did actually use. It’s a pretty good logo, in my opinion.

Second and third are for a Southern barbecue restaurant that never took off. This guy was never satisfied with anything I turned in, but some of the sketches turned out well regardless.

A friend wanted to write a kids book about a misbehaving kitten, and I mocked up a couple of character sheets, fourth and fifth, and some pages, but the book was never written.

I can’t remember what the sixth one was called, but it was for an indy publisher. This was the one ultimately used on the only book he published, but it took a couple of tries to get it right.

The seventh one came about when a roller derby team asked me to make a figure for their flyers. My style would have been a great match, but they didn’t like my first draft because apparently this is something you’re never supposed to do in the ‘derb.

And finally, the owner of the salon I used to frequent asked me to help with a warning label. The figure chosen from the sixth picture would have the circle/slash signifying “no.” They liked the idea, but it wasn’t slick enough.

Of course, I used to do work for PPC Hero, but my art was never clip-arty enough, and they eventually let me go. The blog no longer exists. That’ll teach them.

I’m happy to be doing my thing these days, with no hope of making money. I may turn in some fantastic work, but it’s usually not good enough for what the client has in mind. As I said, I’m not a graphic designer. Even the ones that used my ideas tended to replace them as soon as something better came along, which is what happened with the comic I wasted 2004 working on, The Book of Jesse. The one I am good enough for is myself. There was a long period of about four to five years ago when I wasn’t, and my art was bad (even my birthday self-portraits), when I was doing it at all (my birthday self-portraits). My renaissance began with a pushy coworker demanding a portrait, but once I shook the rust off, I’ve been amusing myself, and if I can’t do that, then what’s the point?

The Sass and the Furious

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I had a brief dream where, in the next Fast and the Furious movie, Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto gets swept up in the evil shenanigans of his old college roommate, played by some famous slab of beef wearing a fabric baseball cap and a pair of cargo shorts. This is, of course presupposing Dom Toretto, or even Vin Diesel, went to college, much less finished high school. (Considering that it’s in Diesel’s contract that Toretto can never lose a fight onscreen, I’m inclined to think he didn’t.)

Anyway, it got me thinking about my roommates in college, and whether they’d come into my life as bad guys to be forgiven and welcomed back into my family to enjoy a chilled Corona. There’s Will, who’s certainly sharp enough to be a mastermind, but he’s a big softie, and I don’t think he’d take too well to being bad.

Then there’s Jeff. Anyone who knows Jeff knows that he’s got it in him to be a madman. I haven’t seen him in over twenty-five years, but I know he shaved his head, which is a prerequisite to evil. When I knew him, he was perfecting the wicked rubbing together of palms and giggling maniacally while tossing out wicked bon mots like, “When life hands you dilemmas, make dilemonade.”

He could also get inside the hero’s mind. For example, he never swore. He took to words more colorful than “damn” or “hell” like I take to the N-word, i.e. never, ever, not even alone in a dark room with all the listening devices turned off. That’s why it came as enough of a surprise that I fell off my chair when he caught me by myself and leaned in really close, whispering, “Don’t fuck with me.” He denies it to this day, and to this day, nobody believes me but Tim Lentz, who always knew there was something shady about that guy.  

Jeff kept his cool under pressure, a necessary qualification for an overlord, but he also had little patience for malarkey. Even though we were a matched set through much of our freshmen and sophomore years, he didn’t tolerate my bullshit, and understand there was a lot of bullshit back then. Would he kill a minion for making a mistake? Maybe not at twenty, but certainly as he got older, his patience would dwindle.

The reason I know for sure that Jeff’s got amoral plans for the world is that he never left our room without a slip of paper he tucked into his breast pocket. He showed it to no one, but he’d occasionally take it out, read it, and chuckle darkly. One evening, when I was again protecting the purity of Altman Hall from behind the desk, he chatted with me for a few minutes, pulled out this paper, and opened it up, revealing the title: “Taking over the world checklist.” He crossed out a numbered item, “Befriend Jeremiah Murphy,” and folded it back up before I could read what else was on it.

To this day, I have no idea what my role in a global takeover might be. I’m all but hermit who writes novels and illustrates comics no one reads. I have a feeling we’re going to find out soon because we’re both turning fifty, and fifty’s a good age for world-domination. And if he tried to stop him, Vin Diesel find out that this is a fight even Dominic Toretto can’t win.

Does Whatever a Mortal Can

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I love drawing comics. The comic book I’m working on, the second chapter of Best Fiends Forever, is not my first comic book. The first chapter of Best Fiends Forever was not my first comic book. The one I worked on nineteen years ago for those smug dudes in New York who badmouthed me after I quit was not my first comic book. My first comic book was MortalMan, in 2003, and I dug up some of my sketches from back then.

You probably don’t know this if you’ve picked up comic reading in the past twenty-five-to-thirty years, but once upon a time, issues were self-contained, and the only thing you needed to know was in a one- or two-sentence summary near the logo. For example: “When Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider, he developed abilities of a spider and learned that with great power comes great responsibility.” From there, you’d pretty quickly catch up on Spider-Man’s specific powers and enemies, usually through narration.

For MortalMan, the banner was: “When Joe Branford was bitten by a radioactive spider, he had a rash for three weeks and learned that with no power comes no responsibility.” Joe (first pic) was a good-natured teenager who watched TV and read comics perhaps a little too much. However, this prepared him for some of the weird shit to hit Gallup, New Mexico. For example, he was not fazed when he met a talking dog named Pete, figuring he was just bilingual. Pete is a goth. He sees the world as gray and bleak, he writes dark poetry, and he attempts suicide in the first issue (if I were going to write this again, I’d probably change that last bit). He and Joe hit it off, and they hang out at the mall.

This is Kgnydjll and Fphihln (pronounced “Nigel” and “Phil”) emissaries for the Galactic Empire who come to Earth in the first issue to welcome us to the fold. Unfortunately, they arrive in time for a Science Fiction Convention, and no one believes they’re aliens.

I had a lot of big plans for MortalMan, and I wrote a lot of scripts, but I never followed through with them. Joe and Pete were going to run afoul of a pair of John-Woo-inspired super spies and a mob of Tarantino-esque gangsters at a Mafia Convention being held in Gallup, and they were going to rediscover the long-retired superhero guardians of Gallup, Sewerboy and the Kactus Kid.

One of their rogues’ gallery was Irwin the God of Cannabis.

More on Sewerboy et al on a separate post.

At one point, Joe was going to get sucked into hell and would escape when a pair of little boys, attempting to tunnel to China, dig a hole in Perdition’s walls, leaving Joe stranded in Hastings, Nebraska. On his way home, he’d run into my most ambitious creation, M: the scourge of I-80, based on my dear friend, Emilie. With her sidekick, Pixie (based on our friend Abby), she leaps from car to car and liberates the change from drivers’ ashtrays. To pull her off, I’d have to learn how to draw a lot of cars and some very kinetic poses. Twenty years ago, I knew I had it in me. Now, I’m a little more humble.

I still have the original art for the comic, sans word balloons, but I don’t have the script, nor the scripts for future issues because Newcastle liked to sit on my laptop, and 18 years ago, he was much heavier and broke my hard drive.

And yet, I am starting to look for a projects after I’m finished with Best Fiends Forever…

Like No One’s Watching

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Something unusual happened to me yesterday, and I’m still not sure what to make of it.

My office takes up five floors of our ten-story building, and on floors 6 through 9, there is an identical conference room. The rooms are made of glass and are not soundproof (which is not important for this story, but is something worth keeping in mind if you work here). They are located in the same corner of each floor as the elevators.

Every Thursday, my boss, my boss’s boss, and my fellow Editorial Coordinator meet in a conference room, very rarely the one on our floor. The table has four sides, but my fellow Coordinator Zooms in because she is disabled and works from home. Her face is projected on a forty-eight-inch screen, and therefore my bosses and I populate three sides of the table, facing her. I like to sit with my back to the window for reasons.

And here is where the event occurred. This week, we were located on the sixth floor. The only thing I know about the sixth floor is that the break room is there. I don’t know anyone who works there, but since I had the best view of the cubicle farm, I people-watched while our department talked amongst ourselves.

There is a really cute girl on the sixth floor. (I call her a girl when she’s in her twenties; also, get off my lawn.) I saw her approach from the far side of the office on a bearing that would have taken her straight through the glass conference-room wall and right into my lap (not in a pervy way; don’t forget I’m ace). It was hard to avoid watching her because my boss and my boss’s boss were seated in a way that I was facing the cubicle farm, but I didn’t want to seem like a creep, so I kept my eyes on my laptop, and eventually, she veered off.

She reappeared in front of the elevators a while later and pushed the button. While she waited, she started to dance. I am the prime audience for people being free and enjoying themselves, so I secretly applauded her. But the next time I looked up, her eyes were on me, and I felt terrible for invading her private moment. She smiled and continued to dance, and she kept turning toward me, as if to make sure I was watching. A coworker joined her, and they danced into the elevator car.

When I go to the elevators, and there’s a meeting, I get really self-conscious. At the same time, I feel like I have to put on a performance for the people who can see me. For me, that means pushing the button and stepping into the car with exaggerated panache. For this young woman, that meant dancing. Who knows? Maybe she was feeling self-conscious. I won’t dance—I have this pathological aversion to dancing—but there’s a show in me somewhere, and if I put it on, it’ll be because it was brought out of me by this nameless blonde in the white sweater.