Soluble

I've been kind of stupid about this Speakeasy thing. I mean, I haven't even preordered BEOWULF and THE GRIMOIRE myself. Sure, I can and will probably get some freebies, but the point is that all of us involved should be trying to get our own retailers interested. So I'll get on that right away. I've read The Grimoire #1 already, by the way, as a .pdf, and it's good. Very good art, and while I'm not exactly the target audience for the teen girl fantasy comics, it's a good story with fine characterization and plenty of action. The dialogue in the .pdf is hard to read at times, but I'm assured reviewers will be getting published copies. Worth a look. And hey, you've GOT to get Beowulf if only for the reason that the same character is the leader of The Superunknown! Not that that's the only reason--looks like a book up my alley--but frankly, if you're not supporting these books, it will make it that much tougher for mine and other people's books to come out, you know? So set aside $6 a month for these titles, huh?

Wrote just one page, of something called The Solution that I won't talk about for now or probably for quite a while. I will say that it predates Superunknown and Irregular Joe by a couple years but took a while to start to come together, and then has been set aside for those two books and often, just laziness. I'm not sure if it will be a big-ass graphic novel of around 100 pages, three one-shots, or a monthly maxiseries of six to nine issues. I'm not writing it to fit any 22 page cliffhanger format, really, just writing. I was lucky to even get a page done, because enough time has passed since I worked on this that I can't just jump in. I think I'll print it out and go through and write all over it and make a tighter outline.

ADD and I started tentative work on something as well. Who knows what will happen with it or anything else I ramble about, but at least they're all trying to be different and interesting.

Speaking of which, Grant Morrison's SEVEN SOLDIERS #00 is dynamite: a mysterious, sexy, funny, thrilling, creepy blast of fun and ideas to lead off his raft of seven different four-issue miniseries, all independent yet related. Judging from this, this really will be one of the biggest events in comics for 2005. Yes, his ALL STAR SUPERMAN with Frank Quitely will be great and Frank Miller's doing some stuff and whatever, but this really feels like a fresh approach to superheroes to me. Oh, and I read THE INTIMATES #4 and I do like the book, though it spends a little too much time being hip and not enough on making me care about the characters. And while I sympathize, I can do without Casey's worries about the longevity of the title working their way into the bottom-of-the-page text scroll in the comic itself. He does balance the antiauthority stuff, though, with some big brotherly advice, like his antisuicide line that "nobody's worth it." His THE INFANTRY is pretty decent, too, the only Devil's Due comic I've read or am reading.

A line from Joy Division that always gets to me, from the song, "Isolation":

Mother, I tried, please believe me
I'm doing the best that I can
I'm ashamed of the things I've been put through
I'm ashamed of the person I am