The Webcomic Alliance has seen fit to make my online graphic novel Moon Town their Pick of the Week! I don’t know what to say except thank you, and I’m honored!

If you’re not familiar with the Webcomic Alliance, I need to tell you that they are a great resource for webcomics, and you are really missing something. Go check it out!

Big excitement in the Moon Town universe, people – Jake Strider Hughes, the super genius behind the Watchmen and Walking Dead motion comics has applied his mad sick skillz to Moon Town. The clip above is a quick motion test he did a few months back. Very exciting… Very. Exciting!

PS – He also did a test  for my comic Cubicle Pigs. He does amazing things bringing comics to life!

Voices
Backward Masking
Dead Man’s Curve
Smells of October
Hazelwild
muse
Write This Moment
Visited Upon the Sons
Guard-o-Matic
Sequitur

Way back when this thing was going to be a collection of 31 short stories, I was hoping it would clock in at 45,000 words. The tales grew in the telling, but even with only 10 stories slated for the collection, the book still clocks in at 45,000 words.

I think that’s a good length, so now I just have to wrap up the rest of the production. The stories all need a polish pass and some editing, plus I’ll need to write an introduction and pen some liner notes for those readers who, like me, enjoy the Directors’ Commentary. But the book is really moving toward its anticipated March 15, 2012 release quite well. Exciting!

As my short story collection Headstones & Monuments comes near to completion, the largest and most complicated story is officially done. Tonight, I finished a good, solid second draft of “Visited Upon the Sons”.

It came out a bit longer than I originally planned. I wanted it to be around 10-12,000 words. It turned out to be 16,800 words (that’s about 60 pages). Getting pretty long for a short story.

In fact, in doing a little research, I was shocked to learn that many of the “short stories” for this collection are actually longer than the official short story classification, and instead classify as novelettes and “Visited Upon the Sons” is actually just 700 words short of a novella.

But it is a nice little puzzle of a story. It has a real sense of space and time, and you get the feeling that some real people are going through some really strange things that are hard to believe. Yet, as unbelievable as it seems, you do believe.

I may have indicated earlier that this story is complicated. It’s a semi-biographical story spanning several decades. It’s about the decisions we make and the way we deal with the consequences.

In honor of the lengthy story, here’s a longer sample than usual.

“Okay. I’ll show you.”

It was such a simple phrase – only four short words – but it changed the course of David Harwood’s life.

It was one of those rare autumn days when the weather is Indian Summer-perfect and there was no homework. David and his friends Zach and Casey were just off the bus when they found their conversation turning yet again to the vacant house at the end of the street. It was an old Victorian that had been slate grey with white accents, and now was a uniform ashen tone of neglect and faded beauty. Its lawns were waist-high with wild grasses, and its once-delicate landscaping had long since been overcome by heartier weeds. It looked the part of the haunted house, and as houses like that often do, it was the subject of the kind of rumors that are irresistible to thirteen-year-old boys.

“My friend said an old woman died in there,” said Zach. Zach Meyer was a small, painfully thin creature. Perpetually nervous, he reminded David of a chihuahua all the way down to his eyes, his thick whalebone glasses making him bug-eyed just like those nervous, tiny little yapping dogs. He liked to read comics; old EC Horror collections if anyone was looking, but Spiderman and The X-Men if he was alone. “And her spirit is trapped in that house. She doesn’t know she should move on.”

As they reached the house, David picked up a stick and dragged it across the wobbly wrought-iron fence at the front of the property, sending up a loud rat-a-tat as he did so. He stared intently through the overgrowth at the front door.

“I heard a whole family was murdered in that house,” said Casey. Casey Stigler used to be as tiny as Zach, but had experienced a tremendous growth spurt over the summer. He was now one of the larger kids in the eighth grade, a large, friendly kid with a Monty Python fixation. He was a good friend, even if he didn’t know when to stop the comedy routines. All three boys liked Monty Python, but with Casey, it was always one too many quotes, one too many jokes, one too many funny voices. Still, he was a nice enough kid, jovial, with a massive mop of jet black hair on his head. And from the look of him, Mister and Missus Stigler were going to have trouble filling the kid up.

“That’s B.S.,” said David. “A murder happened here, we woulda heard about it.”

“But we did hear about it! I heard about it, and I’m telling you – that’s what I’m saying!” Casey insisted. “They were murdered in there, and their ghosts are, like, sticking around. Looking for justice or revenge or some kinda crap like that.”

“Where do you guys get this stuff?” David asked, fixing his friends with his gaze. “You guys have been telling me these same stupid ghost stories since we were in the fourth grade, you know that?”

Zach shrugged.

“People talk,” Casey said. “You hear things. That’s all.”

David looked back at the house. He ran a hand through his dirty blonde hair. With his Hollister hoodie and casual good looks, he looked like he’d been plucked out of an ad in the weekend sales circular. A good-looking kid staring thoughtfully at the ocean, or maybe the courtyard of a private school instead of the front door of a slowly collapsing home. That was not the sort of thing the sales fliers liked to show.

“Devil House. Sheesh,” David said to himself, finally.

“What?” Zach said.

“Nothing,” David answered. “Just, Lucinda was talking crazy about this place, too, last week. Must be something in the air.”

“What’d she say?” Casey asked.

“Nevermind. You guys are already scared.”

“Uh-uh!” said Zach.

“Come on,” said Casey.

David looked at his friends for a moment, sizing them up. “All right, I’ll tell you,” he said. “But you gotta promise not to lose it when you hear.”

NOTE: For fun, compare to the previous First Draft sample I posted. Anyway, I hope you enjoy. The collection is slated for release in Mid-March, in digital, traditional paper and audio versions.

Plato from Léonard Cohen on Vimeo. A meditation on 2D vs 3D, based, of course, on Plato’s assertion that the objects we see in this world are only reflections of some deeper reality beyond.

Lots of interesting ideas in this piece, but it takes a phenomenal amount of patience to sit through it. I think it could have been edited to great effect. Still, it’s really well done, so this is the last AnimWatch find of 2011. Enjoy, and Happy New Year!

A couple of years ago, I did a story called Payload for Tom Dell’Aringa’s second Marooned collection. The story dealt with Lian Fischer’s mission to Mars, and detailed how she became stranded on the red planet. The story met with a decent amount of success, and so I’ll be doing a second part to the story. This second story will deal with her interactions with the mysterious underground glowy-eyed rockosauruses, The Dark Ones.

The second story will be around 8 new pages, and appended to the first 6 pages, to really flesh it out.

In this new paper and digital release, Payload will be joined by new stories by Tom Dell’Aringa, Denver Brubaker and James Anderson. Called Dr. Ugofandian’s Unbelievable Adventures, the book should be a whole lot of fun. Look for it in Spring 2012. More details at Tom’s Marooned site.

Note that MineCraft was made by one guy with a budget in the thousands, whereas mainstream professional titles are made by teams of people over several years with budgets in the multiple tens of millions, and that the YouTube videos my boys like to watch are usually made by one person with a budget in the tens of dollars and a production time of less than an hour.

Never mind that MineCraft doesn’t look all that great – the man who made it was a programmer, not an artist. He is unapologetic about that, and rightly so because if you have to choose, it’s better to have a fun game that’s not pretty than a pretty game that’s not fun. It’s just that as an artist, and as a consumer, I’d rather not have to choose. I’d like to think you can have both, but if your resources are limited, you have to choose.

Never mind that the YouTube videos they prefer to watch are as entertaining as watching paint dry, narrated by amateurs with all the charisma of a high-school nerd but without the sense of humor and charm. And as for production values, the term “amateurish” is really too kind. Blurry video, audio that sounds like it was recorded inside a tin can under water, a preponderance of little blocks of text appearing all over the screen… wow.

None of that matters. When it comes to entertainment, Content is King. If the content speaks to you, you love it no matter the imperfections in the delivery, and no matter the more attractive alternative.

The entertainment landscape is changing so quickly. If Web 2.0 was all about allowing user-created content to become part of the experience (ie, comments as a companion piece to blogs, Facebook postings that invite conversation), then maybe this is Entertainment 2.0, which is all about user-created content as actual content.

And if indie or amateur-produced pieces are more popular then their slicker, more professional older cousins, what does that mean? Seems like a good time to be a small, nimble mammal than a large, slow dinosaur. I think I see an asteroid.

BOY 1:
When I can get a car, I wanna get a Porsche.

BOY 2:
Yeah, I wanna Porsche, too.

BOY 1:
Cuz they’re reasonably priced, you know…

BOY 2:
Yeah, like only $90,000 or something.

BOY 1:
Yeah…

Aaaaand… Scene.

Reminded me of the old days when I was 15 and hoped to one day own a Lamborghini Countach, as if only just wanting the thing made it inevitable I’d have it. You know, along with a zillion dollars and a lingerie supermodel. Turns out they don’t just go around giving away that stuff, though at 15 – who knew?

Halleux hails from Belgium, where he spent many an hour dragged by his parents “against his will” to different museums. But this reluctant extracurricular education paid off: when he was 10, he was in a museum where he was taken with the work of sculptor Jean Tinguely – playful art that looked like toys – and found himself inspired.

The artist is drawn to film and comics, and so it was natural that he wound up at an animation studio in Luxembourg for a bit, finding work as a colorist and layout artist. According to Halleux, this part of his life marked a seven-year period of “drawing uninteresting things for other people”, and he began to despair of being able to ever draw anything else. When he ultimately found the animation industry too lacking in creativity, he took a job working for a bankruptcy furniture liquidator, where he began finding tons of discarded objects that began to form the basis of his work, and his artistic inspiration returned. His work was well-received in a very successful exhibition in 2005, and he’s been a full time artist ever since.

Man, I’d love to have one of his pieces sitting on my desk. Inspirational work from an inspirational artist.

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