DAY 2

...of my unemployment, to be specific.

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Yesterday my wife had the day off, so my first day unemployed I didn't really do anything because we were both sort of goofing off during the day.
And to further nit-pick, I didn't count Saturday and Sunday (even though I got laid off Friday) because, you know, the weekend. Yesterday (Monday) I would've regularly gone to work if I was still gainfully employed.
So, today I'm officially considering this my first crack at living unemployed. Got it?

I have a list of things to do today, and some of those things I've been letting slide for months. Because I'm a procrastinating bum.
So, I'm trying to update my three blogs on Blogger and set to work on doing a mini-comic, something I've always wanted to have in my portfolio/resume, but never seem to accomplish. So, that's something I'm going to work on this week. I'd love to be able to "spew it out" in a single week, but I can't seem to set boundaries on: 1) how many pages I want to do (8 minimum) or 2) what size page  I should make the comic, either standard comic book size (6.75"x10.25") or mini-comic size, which in this case is an 8.5"x11" sheet of paper folded in half (ie. 5.5" x 8.5" page).

Reasons to work at mini-comic size: The actual mini-comic size is what Jason Karns does self-published comic FUKITOR at, and I love FUKITOR. Some issues/stories are more inspired than others, but the artwork is always tremendous. Also, one of my main inspirations to do a mini-comic was because of a mini-comic that Dan Clark worked on as a kid with his friend, Adam Owen. I worked with Dan at Great Arrow Graphics from 1998-2003. Towards the end of my stint at GAG, a few of my fellow employees and myself formed a group called the Crabapple Club, with the hope of creating a comic book. These founding members were: Dan Clark, Pam Cichoki, Josh Hrizak, Will Rice and myself (Terry Kimmel). We never did put out a single issue, but I remember Dan showing me this little B&W comic book he made with Adam back when Dan was a teenager and he was heavy into the guys who created Image Comics (Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, etc.). The cover itself was black line art printed on red paper stock. Adam wrote and drew the 8 pg. book and Dan inked it. For the life of me, I CANNOT remember the name of the comic but it was about a superhero who had flamethrowers built into his suit sleeves and he burned criminals to death (with the distinctly evocative and awesome sound effect of "FREEEAWWWW!!" as the flames whooshed out of his costume's wrist tubes). Maybe superhero isn't the right word; vigilante is the more accurate word. But the dude did wear a costume and mask. His origins are vaguely suggested: a criminal element destroyed his family and his life (disfiguring him in the process in the final panel reveal--oops! Spoiler alert!) and so the reader is expecting to follow further adventures of our anti-hero as he exacts vengeance on the villains who wronged him.
I actually started writing and drawing a special edition of this comic, a so-called International Version, fueled by my viewing of Italian writer/ director Renato Polselli's DELIRIUM starring Mickey Hargitay and Rita Calderoni. I saw the DVD around the time I first saw Dan's comic, and there are two versions of the 1972 film. There's an additional sequence for U.S. audiences - a framing sequence actually - set during the Vietnam War, and in the International Version, there's more explicit and weird, lurid material. In my idea for re-doing the comic, I was going to create a whole new page (sometimes more than one in a row) that would be inserted between EACH page of the original 8 pages of the comic. These pages were supposedly "cut" from of the more explicit International Version of the mini-comic. In fact, I debated translating the dialogue into Italian or Spanish also, whatever language I'd be able to do. It was a conceptual thing!
I left GAG in 2003, four years before Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's GRINDHOUSE double-feature was released, so I wasn't actually thinking and articulating in terms of "grindhouse" but essentially, that's what I was doing.

[NOTE: BTW, I "blame" the group name on Dan-- I mean, credit for the "Crabapple Club" moniker goes to Dan, ha! Meanwhile, Pam and I still meet semi-regularly in hopes of finally putting out that FIRST comic, which sounds extra pathetic since I haven't worked at GAG for TWELVE AND A HALF FREAKING YEARS now. In fact, Dan is the only GAG member still working at GAG. But our new "splinter" comic book club name is the Apple Corps., in deference to the original name.]

I actually e-mailed Adam a few times asking him if he minded me doing this with his character, and I think for the most part he was fine with it, but as I continued alluding to the possibility of how over the top I might go with the additional pages I think he backed off a little. So, I may do a variation on his anti-hero but make it mine, especially since he's not following through on continuing this comic he created years ago. Actually, Adam started doing another comic, GREEN PIECE, a sci-fi comic with a lizard detective who solves interplanetary crime. I can't remember if he created the character himself, or in conjunction with writer Jason Degroot. I want to say Adam was friends with Jason, and Adam actually created GREEN PIECE, writing and drawing the comic. But I remember Adam sometimes having guest artists? Inkers? But Jason wrote a few of the comics. Well, you can check out some of these comics on Smack Jeeves webcomics hosting here. And although the last GREEN PIECE comic was posted four years ago, Jason seems to still be creating work on the site with other titles, part of his Repercussion comics line.

Alright, I've been wrestling with this damn blog post all morning and there's other crap I should be doing. So, more to come.

Stay tuned, y'all!