So Long And Thanks For All The Fish

So this is an interesting column for me but maybe it shows the insight to a creative mind.

Or maybe I just have a huge ego that thinks that there are more than three people who read this column.

So for the three of you out there, this is my last Just a Thought… well for at least the foreseeable future.

And you can partially blame Fan Expo for it.

You see dear readers, you might have noticed that beyond the editorials that I write here and at Geek Hard and my own podcast/website, TATANS, I really want to write comics. I’ve been in love with the medium since I was a kid and I got handed that first Incredible Hulk from my Grandfather.  When I hit my very early teens, I began to figure out that people actually wrote these things. Later I discovered writer Neil Gaiman and I discovered how truly well written a comic book could be. The Sandman issue “The Sound of Her Wings” is one of the best single issue stories ever written for the medium of comics, bar none.

And I wanted to be a guy who wrote stories like that.

Years have marched on since then and I have read so many stories and found so many good comics that it amazes me that some people still don’t see comics as an art form. How can you look at a Geof Darrow illustration and say it isn’t art? Or read something Warren Ellis and not compare it to the best selling authors on the New York Times best seller lists and notice how well it stacks up.

…well maybe that’s not a fair comparison, anything Ellis writes has to be better than 50 Shades of Grey.

And I want to be a part of it.

It really struck me when I had just finished an interview with artist Mike Del Mundo on Sunday at Fan Expo.

Mike’s around my age and we first met at a panel I hosted at Wizard World Toronto. He’s a really solid artist who’s career has been on the rise since we first met but at the same time he’s still a very humble and awesome dude. I did a decent video interview with him for Geek Hard and thought to myself “If I worked at it, maybe I can be sitting on this side of the table more often.”

As a writer, I’ve got a ton of irons in the fire. Beyond the ones you are aware of, I also do music reviews, I’ve written for a theme park, I’ve worked on adaptations for comics of a Robert Louis Stevenson novel. I wrote a decent pulp story. And I have a ton more in me, wanting to get out. There’s a bunch of comic ideas I’ve been meaning to work on but haven’t managed to complete. There might even be a novel rattling around up there. A ton of stuff but between home and writing, there never seems enough time to do it. Maybe these will be great, maybe they’re terrible but I would like to find out one way or another.

Which means, something had to be let go.

We hear this all the time from comic book creators when they leave a book. Sometimes, they work on so much that even though they want to continue on a book, they need to free up sometime.

In my case, it’s Just a Thought.

But before I go, I want to leave with some thanks and a final thought for all of you to ponder.

First off, thank you to former EiC Pete DeCourcy and Walter Durajlija for bringing me on to write for the site and for current EiC Scott VanderPloeg for keeping me on when he took over. Thank you to Kevin Boyd, who I hassle a lot for panel hosting and contact details but yet always replies to me. Thanks to the Barrie Comic Dinner club especially fellow CBD writer Ed Campbell who always were helpful with column ideas. Lastly, thank you to all of the pros I have interviewed over the past couple of years especially Mike Del Mundo, Jill Thompson, Andrew Vachss, Geof Darrow, Max Brooks and Joe Quesada along with Arune Singh from Marvel who has been a great help.

Now for a final thought.

A friend and I were talking at Fan Expo and he mentioned he didn’t think there is anything amazing coming out right now that he kind of felt that comics were a little stale at the moment. At first I tended to agree with him. I’m considering dropping at least one of my books right now just due to boredom.

But when I got thinking about it, there’s tons of great comics out there. Brubaker and Phillips’ Fatale. I love the current TMNT book. I can’t wait to see what Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson have cooking for the future of Beasts of Burden. And when modern comics fail me or I’m out of the new stuff, I can always pick up something older. This weekend I picked up the Deathlok the Demolisher Masterworks and was amazed at how far a head of the curve those early stories were.

There are always good comics to read. some times there are lulls but there are always good comics out there be it superhero or indy, sometimes you just have to search them out.