I love the way Neil Gaiman talks about the process of writing. This is from yesterday’s blog entry:
“I'm more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I'm at that place where I hope that the book knows what it's doing because right now I don't have a clue — I'm writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it's actually going to lead him.”
See what I mean?
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My friend Jennifer Oliver, who designed the Thorn cold-cast statue from Graffitti Designs a few years ago, and was one of Disney’s top clean-up artists during the 80’s and 90’s, has created a new fantasy print. She doesn't have a website, so the print is up on e-bay. Jennifer adds: "Every print plants a tree. I'm sick of my work being a drain on the environment, so I plan to keep up the tree planting policy from this point forward." You can see the picture better here.
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James Robertson, who helps Bryan Talbot with his website has sent me a note to say that there is a new CD ROM of Bryan’s critically acclaimed book Heart of Empire. For Heart of Empire fans (including myself) there's a tremendous amount of process material, like pencils and annotations. You can read the first chapter online for free by clicking here.
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Here are some last minute Best Of 2007 lists that included SHAZAM! The Monster Society of Evil:
2007 Glass Eye Awards
Innocent Bystander's Best of 2007
Blog@Newsarama Our Favorite Comics of 2007
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There are quite a few new SHAZAM! MSoE reviews out there, but I'll save those for a later blog. For now, though, there's this fun one from a site called Shuffleboil that I'll run in full:
“Shazam: The Monster Society of Evil” by Jeff Smith
Finally, a superhero comic we can wholly endorse! Bringing some of that Cartoon Book whimsy to the World’s Mightiest Mortal, Smith reinstates the qualities that actually made this mortal so mighty in the ’40s and ’50s — an absurdist fairy tale quality with just the right dash of innocence, while not being so naive as to be stupid! If Captain Marvel had been the same as all the other superheroes, we wouldn’t remember him today — and Smith is here to make sure no one forgets the real thing. Besides, Dr. Sivana is totally Dick Cheney!"
Dr. Sivana is totally Dick Cheney?
You know, I've read that in a LOT of reviews (with varying degrees of approval), but I honestly was not trying make Sivana into Dick Cheney, I was just trying to make him a greedy, ego-maniac like Daffy Duck or Phoney Bone…
Oh, what’s the use? You don’t believe me anyway.
Happy New Year, everyone!
