News

Okay, on Friday we lost our dog, Jimmy. The day before Yesterday we found out that Phouka our ten-year-old pug has a cancerous growth on her leg. The doctor is hoping that once removed it will be fine. It’s not the really dangerous kind that Jimmy had, at least that’s what the initial needle biopsy showed, but of course they won’t really know until they take the growth off and get it tested.
I say all that, to say this. It’s put things in perspective for me this week. As most of you know now, we lost Brett Booth as our artist for the comics. I was pretty broken hearted about that. I’d hoped we could all work something out, but it was his choice and it was not to be. I think on a different week, I’d have been more upset, but see first paragraph of this blog to see why I can’t let this be the thing that wrecks my week.
We will find another artist. Marvel is in the process of sending us work to look at from other people. Jon and I were the ones who went over every piece of art, script, lettering, that hasn’t changed. The comic will continue. You guys will be seeing the second half of THE FIRST DEATH in October. Issue seven of GUILTY PLEASURES is being colored as I write this. Don’t worry, guys, you’ll get to see it finished. I’m all about goals, and seeing things through to the end. I don’t know any other way to be. So, I won’t try to be anything else.
I wish Brett the best of luck in whatever he does next. He is still going to be doing images for t-shirts and posters. Please, don’t bug Darla or anyone about that, yet. Let me recover from this week before we do anything new, okay? Jon and I will miss working with him on the comic. We’ll miss those phone calls where the challenge is to hear over the barking of his dogs. I think he has about thirty of them. I maybe off by a few, but not by many. He and his wife Jess are the only people we talk to you on a regular basis that have more dogs than we do. Way more.
Jess is still going to be doing the script adaptions from the book for the comic, so maybe between the scripts and the merch we’ll still have an occasionally dog-filled phone call. So, once we get an artist, it will to a certain extent be business as usual. Except completely different. Every person is unique so business relationships like personal relationships reflect that. It will be interesting.
On one hand I’d have liked not to have all this bad news on one week, but on the other hand truly the whole dog news thing has really made me calmer about the comic. The comic will continue. We just find new people to replace those that have other things they’re going to do.
But the comic can be reorganized and continue. I can’t reorganize my dogs, and have them continue. I can’t bring Jimmy back, and I can’t find a new artist to fix Phouka. I have to wait until next week to find out from the doctors how bad it is. God, I wish that I could hire a new artist to paint a new picture and fix this. Wouldn’t that be something?