“Ditko appeared at the first New York Comicon, held in 1964 with around 100 attendees... He never made an official convention appearance again. ” —Rolling Stone.
If a crowd of 100 was mortifying enough, imagine what might happen to the man if forced to attend a comicon today.
China is installing the wind and solar equivalent of 5 large nuclear power stations per week — GlobalEnergyMonitor.org
The Psychological Tactics in Israel's War on Lebanon — TIMEP
As an aside: A close reading of colonial history can help us deduce that a sure way to tell who the aggressor is would be by identifying which side is dropping leaflets (excluding both WWs, which can best be described as the Wars Between Colonizers).
Alphabet City Comics — whereby each panel corresponds to a letter in the alphabet. Fun constraint from Matt Madden.
“Nobody I know likes capitalism, yet HERE WE ARE.” — Kelly Sue Deconnick
“AI and the nature of intelligence are hot topics, as is using DNA as information storage, and printing organelles to study how they develop and function. Including brainoids, little self-contained blobs of neuronal tissue which display patterns of regular electrochemical activity, and raise ethical problems about whether or not they are self-aware.”
Week's worth of Mythomatic orders fulfilled, quite a few international ones.
Inboxes at 152, RSS 147. 34C today, “feels like 43”.
“Daddeee, what's that sound you made?”
Me? (Feeling exposed) Oh, haha, nothing, habibi, just talking to myself.
“That was a funny sound you made, daddy,” he says laughing, which makes me laugh too, deliriously.
“Are you really tired, daddy?”
Hahaha, yes I am, son, you could say that, yes.
It's not that bad. Surviving on 3-hours sleep each night for most of this past week has paid off; Latest TSG is up, newsletter drafted and sent (edition #209: Power of the Package), kickstarter updated, and roundtrip flight to New York booked. And today, I finally managed to step away from work and take the kid out to the coffee shop around the corner for a much-needed treat (for both of us!). We also got to lay on the floor and do some coloring together, and also put together a little chia-planting kit. All in all, a delightful day.
A couple hours after the sense of release/relief following the completion of the TSG chapter that precedes the very last, I started to think about the work ahead: The next and final chapter in THE SOLAR GRID.
According to script and thumbs, the last chapter is a 50-page beast. Between pencils, inks, and letters, we're looking at an average of 3 days per page, and that's if I work fast and assuming no pages require color, but there are in fact quite a few that do. In fact in fact, some even require what might best be described as ill-advised mixed media madness that I'm not entirely sure I can adequately assess the time they would need to make before trying to work on one or two such pages first. Which means we can be sure that 3 pages a day is way too optimistic and things will probably not work out that way. But even if we were to make use of this ludicrously optimistic calculation, we would be looking at 150 days of work. Five months basically, and that's if I work weekends and take on no other projects whatsoever, however small.
This is a terribly depressing realization and wholly unrealistic. I can't not have this chapter finished before year's end, I just can't. I will kill myself. The only logical thing to do at this point would be to go back to script and thumbs, see if there's anything I can cut or at least compress. And perhaps do without any unpredictable visual experiments that could potentially multiply execution time, no matter how strong the creative itch is. I really shouldn't spend more than three months on the thing, so that means I need to see if I can bring the page-count down to 30. That's a lot of cutting and compressing.
Shit.
On a completely different note, I have done absolutely nothing towards this week's newsletter which typically goes out every other Friday at 11:59 pm. It is now 9:45 pm.
Fml.
Just announced from Graphic Mundi, wherein Yazan Al-Saadi's dispatches are illustrated by an impressive lineup of comix-makers including one short illustrated by me, originally for the now sadly defunct The Nib. Titled Cairo Under the Crackdown, here's an excerpt.
You know you're stressed when all your rules concerning carb intake are out the window.
Good morning.
