Gone Fishin'

Hey guys! I'm going to be out of the country for a little bit starting tonight, so my writing won't be appearing much for awhile, and you'd be best advised not to email me, tweet at me, et cetera. If you do end up feeling starved for some Seneca, here are a few easy solutions.

- Read my graphic novel AFFECTED starting here. It's good.

- Check out my new tumblr website here. I've archived all my short comics on it for your liking/reblogging pleasure. Catch up with all your old favorites, and get familiar with the new site, because things are gonna start poppin' off there once I'm back.

- Listen to the Comic Books Are Burning In Hell archive here, which will continue to expand as Tucker, Joe, and Chris hold it down in my absence. Remember: it's the internet's ONLY podcast about comic books!

- And finally, keep half an eye on ye olde Comixxx Alliance blog, because my name might just pop up there before I make my return to internet access. It'll be in good company, bylining some nonsense about superheroes.

Seeya in two weeks!

Comic Books Are Burning In Hell episode TRAY

Once more unto the breach! This time on the internet's ONLY podcast about comic books, the boys and I talked Before Sandman, Before Watchmen, During Parker (ahem, that's the new Darwyn Cooke graphic novel The Score), and Grant Morrison's Barry Sonnenfeld's Dinosaurs Versus Aliens. Lots of shit talkin' and joke crackin' on this one, plus Tucker screams I LIKEA PIZZA PIE really loud. Joe's show notes are here. Now shut up and eat your awesome.

"The Breakfast Club"

As seen on Vice and TCJ, here's a comic I made about what I do for breakfast every Thursday.

Greatest Comic of All Time | Arsene Schrauwen #1

Hey asshole! Wanna know what the best comic of this year is? Read this!

"Corporate Comics Make Graves"

And to round out the week, here's the balance for yesterday, which saw me actually saying nice things about superhero comics. Variant cover for Wolverine #6,713,102,715 by yours truly; reaction tweets by the executive editor and editor in chief of Marvel Entertainment . For realz.

This Comic Is Fucking Baller

Oh, hello there! What did you do today? I wrote about a mainstream superhero comic book with okay-to-pretty decent writing and eyeball-squashing art, the latter of which I got really really excited about. It's the kind of shit I used to do all the time back when a lot more people liked reading my writing, remember? We call it a "vintage DTU post" here at the Seneca Boudoir. Anyway, I've been following the webcomics work of the incredible Connor Willumsen for a long time now, and just this week he made his Marvel Comics debut, crushing the fuck out of a cliched crime story in Untold Tales of the Punisher Max #2. Yes: you should get this comic. Willumsen doing superheroes is really exciting to me -- imagine if mainstream comics were always this on the ball about recognizing explosive new talents! I gushed a few paragraphs of praise over at ye olde Comixxx Alliance Blog, which should be featuring fractionally more of my writing soon. Go and read them.

Comic Books Are Burning In Hell episode DEUCE

The latest (and most erotic; see "hot to trot with our popsicles" at 0:54) audio hour with the gang. We (that's me, Joe, Chris, and Tucker) talked about approximately one million different comics -- Tardi! Lapham! Zettwoch! Some French dudes I really don't care for! -- on our podcast's latest episode, which you can listen to here. Get it, playboi. And here's Joe's show notes for when you're done!

Greatest Comic of All Time | Batman

This week on my Robot 6 column, I wrote about the first comic I ever wrote anything about (here, and boy is it embarrassing): Josh Simmons' 2007 bootleg Batman comic. For those who are thinking about what Caped Crusader comics to read in the run-up to a certain motion picture that's coming out soon, it's this thing, full stop. Click here for my vote in the neverending "best Batman comic ever" debate, and buckle up.

Comic Books Are Burning In Hell episode ONE (finally)

You've been patient, and it's finally here! That's right people, after a total of nine preludes, the official launch episode of the Comic Books Are Burning In Hell audio hour, featuring Chris Mautner, Tucker Stone, Joe McCulloch, and yours truly, is finally available for your listening pleasure. This time it's a full episode on the recently released League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 2009, a royal treatment that I think new Alan Moore comics typically deserve. Topics covered include the history of LXG, Moore's interest (or possible lack thereof) in modern popular culture, the success (or possible lack thereof) of the Century arc as a whole, calling bullshit on this irritating Moore-as-misogynist idea that all the superhero assholes have been trying to propagate lately, and most importantly, whether or not that's Mufasa from the Lion King on the last page of the comic. (Spoiler: it remains a point of contention.) This is a good one, guys, so click here to listen up.

EXTRA EXTRA -- here are Joe's show notes for the episode in question. He's outdone himself this time, which is saying something when we're talking about Jog, the whole reason I do this shit in the first place... ahem, yeah, go read 'em.

Greatest Comic of All Time | SHIELD #2

Here's the latest installment in my ongoing project to write about every Jim Steranko comic ever: an in-depth look at SHIELD #2, which isn't the best one, but my favorite one. Got it? Good. Man, do I love this comic: it's Steranko doing... maybe not art-comix, but definitely noise shit, the noisiest work of his career. Check out the picture below, and click here to read more. You know you want to.

Get This Comic Tomorrow

And now, an unpaid advertisement for a comic I haven't read yet. This Wednesday Wild Children, a graphic novella drawn by Riley Rossmo and written by my boy Ales Kot, comes out on Image Comics. Like I say, I haven't read the comic yet, so you shouldn't take this little notice as any kind of voucher for its content. Ales has done a bunch of press for his book at bigger websites than this one, so google around a little and let him tell you about it himself if you want to know more. What I want to do is encourage you to support art made by one of my closest friends in Los Angeles, who had my back in some pretty fucking dark moments and some pretty amazing ones too, and basically contributed a lot to keeping me alive and sane in a place where that stuff can be hard to do. Ales has been working on this comic as long as I've known him, and I'm really happy he's gotten a big break at Image of all places, a company whose front office is like 50% old friends and acquaintances of mine. Seriously: comics is full of really shitty people, and Ales is one of the good ones, so check this thing out now that you finally have the chance.

I've Been Into...

...a couple things. I still want to keep my recently completed graphic novel AFFECTED at the top of this page for a while, so here's a page from it and a link you can click to read it.



Elsewhere:

*I'm a Fantagraphics-published cartoonist now, ahem! Yep, through the good graces of Frank Santoro, I have a comics-form review of Aidan Koch's amazing new comic Q up on The Comics Journal, aka the only worthwhile place to get published on the comics internet. Look for more of these soon!

*Comic Books Are Burning In Hell, the podcast I do with Messrs. Chris Mautner, Joe McCulloch, and Tucker Stone, is still blastin' away. Here's episodes 0.7 and 0.8; an iTunes feed will be around shortly.

Back to regular business soon, probably with more actual writing, maybe even the return of my All Star Superman book -- watch the skies!

AFFECTED///CONCLUSION

Happy Fourth, folks, and here's a present for you. I've completed AFFECTED, the long comic I've been working on for the last 17 months. I'd love to write a long thing about what the comic is, what I wanted to achieve with it, how I feel about it now that it's finished, but I'm still a little too exhilarated to do that right now. So I'll just say it's my art-porn graphic novel about the Iraq War, prostitution, Los Angeles, the end of the American empire, and true love. I think it's the best thing I've ever done -- not just the best comic, the best thing, so if you care at all about anything I have to say (and hey, you're here right now), go take a look at it. Here's the final chapter, or you can click here to start at the beginning. I'm super excited both to have finished this book and to finally be finished with it. What comes next... is going to be interesting.