Crooked Little Fucking Vein

My copy of Crooked Little Vein arrived in the mail this morning.

It’s slow at work, so I’ve started reading here.

How good is it?

I’m on page 12 and I’ve had to stop three times to call my wife and read passages to her.

Between laughing fits.

Aliens tormented Ben Franklin’s ass.

More later….

I Have Wings

There are two realities in my head, two worlds.

In one world, the mundane one, I’m a bartender. A simple bartender at a simple bar in a simple little town.

In the other, I have wings.

Huge, white wings that spring from my back, unfold, and lift me up into the wind and the sky.

Standing on the bluff, the water pounding the rocks far below, logic tells me that the mundane world is the real world. The rational one. People can’t fly.

My heart tells me that the other world is real.

Who’d want to live in a world where people couldn’t fly?

So I step out, into the wind.

 

 

 

The Greatest Place In The World (at least when I was 13)

I still remember the thrill I felt the first time I walked into a comic shop.

Before that, I had purchased my comics from those spinning metal racks in drug stores and grocery stores. The only back issues I had ever gotten came from flea markets and yard sales.

So when Alternate Worlds opened in Cockeysville, MD, all those years ago, I was there the first day. After all, it was only a ten minute walk from my apartment, even if I did have to cross York Rd, which was scary as hell to a kid of 13 (I think, my memory has never been great when it come to dates).

Concrete steps led down to the little white building that housed the store where I would spend much of my free time for the next few years. Box after box filled with treasures beyond my imagination. Before I had stepped into that store, I had loved comics. Afterwards, that love had become a life long addiction.

The store moved several years later. Not far, just across the street and around the corner, into one of those snazzy shopping centers. It gets more traffic these days. I haven’t been there in ages. Haven’t been back to Maryland in years.

I should stop by the next time I visit Baltimore. Maybe next year.

You should stop by, too, if you’re in the area. I bet Mike McKenzie still owns the place. Tell him Kevin Glover said hello…..

Watch Out, He May Bite

Let Warren Ellis Show You His Comics

Originally uploaded by benchilada

Warren Ellis is probably my favorite comic writer.

Without question, he’s a genius. His subject matter can be disturbing, thought provoking or just down right silly. His bibliography would take page after page to list, and regular readers of mine have already seen me pushing his work, including his first novel, which just came out this week.

I first remember Warren from Marvel’s Hellstorm comic. At a time when the vast amount of books coming from Marvel were worse than they had ever been, Hellstorm gleamed with creativity.

So they cancelled it.

They gave him a book called Druid. After four issues of utter brilliance, they canned that, too.

A three issue run on Doc Strange.

A four issue shot at Thor.

Apparently the entire editorial staff at Marvel was smoking Fruit Loops.

Off for greener pastures, Warren spent the next few years creating stories of his own, some at DC’s Vertigo / Helix division, some through various independent companies. The one common amongst them all was his sheer genius.

Transmetropolitan, The Authority, Planetary, Orbiter, Ministry of Space, Ocean, Strange Kisses, Desolation Jones, Fell, The Apparat Line.

Pick a card, any card.

Warren’s hobbling around the San Diego Con right now, probably miserable.

He made an announcement earlier today that he would be taking over Astonishing X-men, following Joss Whedon.

Do I have to tell you, I can’t wait?

The Mad Brit Who Saved Comics

Alan Moore (7872)

Originally uploaded by acb

As modern comic readers, we take Vertigo Comics and all that comes with it for granted. But back in the 80’s, Vertigo didn’t exist. DC’s supernatural characters existed side by side with their spandex set, in a bright and shiny world totally unsuited to them.

Until Alan Moore came along.

Now Alan is a bit of a comics genius. He has created, among other things, The Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Tom Strong, Top Ten, From Hell, V For Vendetta and The Lost Girls.

But this was a young Alan Moore, full of piss and vinegar and probably the blood of some minor demon. He was a mad brit and DC had no idea what to do with him so they gave him what was their lowest selling book, Swamp Thing.

And what came next, was legend.

He immediately turned a third rate monster book into something truly unsettling and almost poetic. A dark, dangerous, breathing story that opened your mind and spit in it.

And it laid the groundwork for what eventually became Vertigo, introduced us to John Constantine, and brought back many of DC’s second string supernatural characters (Baron Winter, Zatanna, The Demon, Deadman, even Cain and Abel).

So next time you’re reading Lucifer, or The Exterminators or 100 Bullets, remember to say, “Thank You, Alan.”

Look Out, It’s An Aardvark With A Sword!

I discovered independent comics around 1981.

In particular, I discovered Cerebus.

I was thirteen years old and the idea of a barbarian aardvark appealed to me. (Still does, actually). The book was heavy on satire, of comics, of movies and of life itself. It reminded me, in many ways, of Gerber’s Howard The Duck.

Cerebus, however, was in glorious black and white, which made it different from every other comic I had read. It was also, more importantly, the work of one man, Dave Sim. Both writer and artist, Sim was the voice of Cerebus and vice versa. There was no editorial interference (the book was self published by Sim and his then wife) and the book was always just what Sim wanted it to be. Often brilliant, frequently hilarious and occasionally poignant, Cerebus ran a full 300 issues, telling the complete life story of its flawed protagonist.

The entire series is available in a series of 16 trade paperbacks, all of which are still in print and can be ordered either through Amazon.com or your local comic retailer.

Discovering Spandex

I discovered super heroes at the end of 1973. Somebody, probably my mother, brought me an absolute gem of a comic, Marvel Team-Up # 16, featuring Spiderman (who would quickly become my favorite) and Captain Marvel (who would often fade into obscurity).

It was exciting, it was dangerous, it was in vivid color. It was written by Len Wein, with art by Gil Kane, and even at that tender age of five, I realized that those names were important, I just didn’t understand exactly what they did.

I read this particular comic over and over, until the bed ate it…..

I guess that statement deserves a little bit of an explanation. You see, my parents had this really big bed, with a headboard. The headboard was one of those that doubled as shelving, so there was a little cabinet on either side that could be closed, and in the center was an inset shelf where you could leave things like the book you were reading or whatever.

Except, to my five year old eyes, the knots in the wood in the center looked like eyes. I was convinced the bed was possessed. Scared the beejeezus out of me. So, when my beloved comic fell down between the headboard and the mattress, there was no way on earth I was going to try to retrieve it.

So, the bed ate my comic……

No, I Won’t Put Your Cat In My Book

There are two conversations that are inevitable when people find out you write fiction. The first one you know. Everyone knows. Writers have complained about it for years.

“Where do you get your ideas?”

Harlan Ellison used to tell people that he got them at K-mart, four for a dollar. It’s as good an answer as any.

But that’s not the most frustrating of the conversations. It can usually be laughed off in a sentence or two and you can get back to enjoying your evening. No, the one that really drives me crazy is when someone starts telling an anecdote about their friend or their pet or their breakfast, whatever, and then they say, “Oh, you should put that in your book.”

I assume that’s supposed to be helpful or something. It is not. And it can be damned uncomfortable trying to figure out a polite way to tell someone (often a friend or relative) that, no, Fluffy will not be appearing in the book.

Let me explain a basic rule of writing fiction. If it doesn’t move the story along in some way (either through plot or character development) then it shouldn’t be there. Humorous asides find their way into my work organically, they come from a natural progression, I do not shoehorn in funny stories.

So, no, I won’t put your cat in my book……