Today was a good day

So far today:

It's my birthday, I got a job, I'm back in touch with one old friend and another friend gave us some words of kind regard. I gotta say it was a good day.

So I'm 34 years old today. It constantly fascinates me that some people have anxiety over getting older. I had fun when I was younger too, but thinking about it, so many great things have happened to me in any given year that I couldn't imagine asking to turn back the clock to a time before they happened.

My sister Stacey has two children that are cute and smart and adorable, she has a great husband and she's practically a rock star at her job, they love her so much and she's so good at it. If I turned back the clock five years the kids wouldn't be born and Stacey's situation would be completely different.

Stephen and I have come a long way on Progressions, publishing hundreds of pages of comics and creating our first full-color graphic novel, setting up our proper website and making lots of friends in the business. If I turned back the clock seven years and I'd still be toiling at the Joe Kubert School, being taught narrative art by fat guys whose credentials consist of "cut bristol board for Adam Kubert in the basement of his father's school" and who spends most of every Monday's class drooling about how hot Buffy the Vampire Slayer looked on the latest episode.

I live in New York City, the greatest city on Earth. Turn back the clock ten years and I'd still be Austin, Texas, which--fair enough--is a great city, but I couldn't imgaine going back now. After spending two years in Paris from '89 to 91 I knew I was going to want to live in a big city. The bigger the better--New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong... plus the movies of Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola helped seal the deal and draw me to Manhattan.

I'm 34 now and I've come a long way in my art, studying cartooning, expression, narrative, black-and-white, color, iconography, rhythm, page layout, and just devoting almost every waking moment to absorbing ways of telling stories and communicating visually. Turn back 15 years and I was 19 years ago, with loads of passion and drive but it was all theory. Stephen and I were conceiving Progressions as a comic and we had a script written but I wasn't drawing it. And even after I moved back to Texas from Paris it would sitll take me several years to get started on my long-running minicomic effort "Drug Abuse Is Fun". That was basically a workshop for me to get in practice cartooning, until Stephen and I could find a way to start Progressions.

We didn't realize that the way you start Progressions is basically, to just "start Progressions". That simple, basic fact of life would take five or six more years to even occur to us. We're brilliant but we never claimed to be clever.

Turn back the clock twenty years and I'm in high school, and lord knows I could do without reliving that. In fact, in 1985, WATCHMEN hadn't even come out yet and rekindled the fire of profound narratives in my mind--I was still in the limbo between reading Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Alpha Flight, drawing made-up superhero/funny animal/computer game parody comics like "Game Quak", and being introduced to comics like ZOT!, WATCHMEN, CEREBUS and THE SPIRIT. It was a fine place to be at the time, but not somewhere I'd want to go now.

So yes, I'm quite happy to be 34 and I pretty much feel like I'm in exactly where I'm supposed to be--things in my life are far from perfect but much progress has been made (no pun intended) and it's an exciting time to be alive.

I got a job. I'm still looking for something more permanent that can bring in some income while we develop Progressions, but I've got a temporary assignment starting on Monday that should last for about a month. I've been jobless for a while which has made it tough to get back in the game--employers tend to want things like "references" and answers to the question "what the hell have you been doing with your time?" I'd been working through a temp agency and I'd done a lot of interviews in the last few months, none of which had paid off. It was frustrating as hell and today I was in the process of making calls to every other agency I could find, looking for SOMEBODY who could place me, when they let me know this position was available.

Also today (late last night/early this morning) I got back in touch with one of the most talented people I know, Jeff Iftekarrudin. He's a songwriter, guitarist, budding billionaire and just all-around great guy. Check out his site and listen to some cool music.

And lastly, Kieron Gillen gave us a great writeup about Spark-Tower Wilson over at his blog. Kieron's a games journalist and comics writer with a thoughtful, intelligent style and a sensibility about pop (both "pop" as an independent concept and "pop music" on its own) that I dig. For a while I just thought of him as "the only other person in the world that knows who Shampoo are"*, but then we started communicating and I drew a story for him.
The story's called "Hit", it was one installment of a series of short standalone one-two comics punches. Strong, discrete concepts told in a few pages. Kieron has put our "Hit" collaboration back online for your edification and enjoyment.

Together with Charity Larrison, Kieron's also serializing a graphic novel: Busted Wonder, which is just beautiful and lyrical and quite a change of pace. Charming stuff and I can't wait to see where it goes.

*I just noticed that on Kieron's weblog the mouseover text for our page is a Shampoo quote. Nicely done, KG.

Jeff