June 2007 Archives

letters stand for animals

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Currently in Minneapolis, where I did a really fun reading/discussion/party with Austin Grossman last night, and am currently staying with Steve and Jessie. Struggling all day to catch up with email, but I was very happy to see this kind review of Reading Comics in Utne Reader. Stay tuned for more tour dates.

Comments are down again. Looking into it.

I mentioned it in the sidebar, but I should say something about it here, too: Kicking off the grand Summer 2007 Reading Comics American Tour, I'll be moderating a panel this Wednesday, June 27, at Multnomah County Library, called "Appreciating Comics."

It's happening 6-7:30 PM at the Central Library's U.S. Bank Room, 801 SW 10th Ave. in Portland, OR. The other panelists are Scott McCloud (of Understanding Comics/Making Comics fame), Colleen Coover (Banana Sunday), Dylan Meconis (Family Man), Jenn Manley Lee (Dicebox) and Gail Simone (Birds of Prey). It should be really, really fun, and I hope to see Portlanders there.

There's some official information here! And I can't resist displaying Jenn's drawings of five of us with glasses:

Then, Wednesday, my first head-to-head of the summer with the mighty Austin Grossman, at the aforementioned Rain Taxi event in Minneapolis (7:30 PM at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design's auditorium, 2501 Stevens Ave.). We'll be discussing superheroes and reading briefly from our books; I will probably also talk a bit about World War Hulk.

a distant drumroll

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This weekend Salon has an excerpt from Reading Comics, which seems to have attracted a bunch of comments already... man, you spend your days piling up the tinder and hoping for a matchbook, and then somebody like that first commenter comes along.

A brief interview with me in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, previewing this Thursday's Rain Taxi event with me and Austin Grossman.

Day 1 of MoCCA was fantastic, but the report on it is going to have to wait until I get myself some protein and caffeine.

scores and hashes

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Flew out to the East Coast yesterday, on the same plane as my friends Jenn and Kip, who managed to convince the guy scheduled to sit next to them that he should switch with me. A lucky thing, too: the guy who was initially sitting next to me pulled out a gigantic pile of newspaper sections that had pretty clearly been trash-picked--several weeks' worth of the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Oregonian, USA Today--picked his teeth with his cell phone for a minute, then turned to me and said "You know, a plane is a really good place to get a lot of reading done." [Pregnant pause.] "I've got a system."

No updates recently, because my life has largely consisted of being happily domestic, working on projects that won't be public for a little while yet, and discovering that getting paid twice for the same thing is sometimes not quite as easy as it looks. Oh yes: and getting to hold a copy of the finished book in my hands. Hooray!

Another sentence worthy of an exclamation point: Today I get to meet G. Willow Wilson and see Richard Thompson play!

rivers divided

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A lot of catching up to do. In no order:

1) I've been waking up the last few mornings with Bob Dylan's "Changing of the Guards" stuck in my head. Yesterday, I thought "I wonder if that's a signal of something? Let's see: that bit where he sings 'sixteen years' at the very beginning of the song is supposed to be a reference to its having been sixteen years since his first record came out. What happened to me sixteen years ag... ah, yes--almost to the day: I graduated from college."

2) Yes, comments here are broken right now. Working on it.

3) Best titles of books spotted at Book Expo: An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England; Eeeee Eee Eeee; I Am America (And So Can You!). The highlight of the show, though, would have to be getting to meet a little stuffed bull. And the book I'm most psyched to read is Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise--FSG had copies of the first chapter, and I was excitedly showing it around. Of course, most of the people I was showing it to were comics people, so I had to explain that it wasn't that Alex Ross.

4) LOL80s!

5) LOLTHEORISTS! I particularly like this one.

6) Reading Comics World Domination Tour 2007 planning is underway. Look for me this summer/early fall in Portland, Minneapolis, NYC, Boston, Chicago, Lansing, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and possibly more. Details to follow one of these days.

catching up

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Right--the Internet! I've been on the road and at Book Expo America. Fuller report coming in a day or two; there's some catching up to do when I'm not sitting on the floor next to what appears to be the only public electrical outlet in all of Newark Airport. In the meantime:

I interviewed Berkeley Breathed at Salon.

And I've got my first piece up at the Huffington Post--this one's about the Heroes for Hire/Mary Jane statue/etc. business.