Imagine That Newt is Orange...

...and then click over to

Bob McLeod's Rough Stuff site to read about this vintage Bissette/Totleben collaboration, our first painted Swamp Thing cover art.

Then, at your local comics shop or via

this link, pick up a copy immediately of Rough Stuff #4, featuring the interview with John Totleben and pencils section by yours truly.

George Khoury's interview with John is truly excellent reading, and (per usual for Rough Stuff) illustrated with some jaw-droppingly gorgeous reproductions of John's pencils for covers, story pages, pinups, concept drawings, etc. John's recollections about our Swamp Thing days are, also per usual, dead on the money right -- though I'll post some comments (in the way of additional info, in part since George asks John about my end of things more than once) later this week, as time permits. In any case, get your hands on Rough Stuff #4, and pronto!

I'm speaking in Stowe, VT tonight at 5:30 at

The Helen Day Art Center; here's the particulars.

Maybe see one or two of you there? I'm working all this morning there at the art center with three groups of regional high school students (11th and 12th Grade) drawing comics -- fun, fun, fun! I dig these sessions, and some pretty lively comics come about as a result.

Ya, I know, it's late notice. Heck, I've barely had time to post anything this week, and this bull run (between CCS workload and WRIF final prep) will continue thus into Friday. As time permits, though, I'll try to catch up.

The Virginia Tech rampage is the fresh national horror; but this has had me wincing over the past week:

One thing to keep in mind as you hear/read the increasingly bilious crap pouring out of President Bush's mouth this week: You know, if President Bush would just finance his war the way every other President in US history tends to -- within his annual budget -- instead of keeping it "off the table" with his bullshit sideline funding via emergency spending measures, he wouldn't have gotten himself into this dilemma. He alone is responsible for this, however much he stridently says otherwise. He is refusing to "fund the troops."

The Congress is, at last, holding him and the Pentagon accountable (literally) for this war funding, and it's Bush's strategic burying/sidelining of the real cost of the war that led to this present showdown. The pork is a false issue -- the real issue is Bush, Cheney, et al set up this situation by never honestly funding this war, thus falsely cooking the annual books. It's Bush's own fucking fault -- however much he blisters the Democratic Party with his mounting rhetoric (and it was Republican votes that landed much of the pork attached to the war bill, BTW, so don't buy into that line of crap, either).

OK, there's other stuff to get into.

More later this week!

No Time! No Time!

Wednesday AM and no time -- so, feeble post today. Sorry.

Today's post title is true, but prompted too by the ongoing interview I'm amid with Bryan Talbot, whose new graphic novel Alice in Sunderland is soon to appear. More on that later -- when this white rabbit has time.

I've been working my way through notes on some of my old Swamp Thing pencils for the upcoming issue of Rough Stuff magazine ("S&M for Comics Pencillers"), prepping today and tomorrow's lectures for CCS, etc., all while making room for two trips north -- one today for

the Vermont cartoonists's panel in Burlington at the Firehouse Center for the Visual Arts -- all the info is here!

-- and for a CCS class trip up to

Stowe to visit the Helen Day Art Center and the "Fine Toon" VT cartooning show.

Whew; don't be surprised if I'm absent from here for a day or two, but I'll try to ensure that doesn't happen.


Followup on an email query from 'anonymous': Alex Toth was indeed vetted by Heavy Metal art director John Workman to do 1941: The Illustrated Story. For more info, check out the TwoMorrow's zine Alter Ego #63, December 2006, edited as ever by Roy Thomas; it's Roy's Toth tribute issue, and John Workman's article "1941 And All That: Why the Graphic Novel Version of Steven Spielberg's 1979 Film Was Not Drawn by Alex Toth" (pp. 47-50) says it all.

John, bless him, says the final published book was "brilliantly done by the young and wildly exuberant team of Rick Veitch and Steve Bissette," and notes the graphic novel did make a profit, which was news to me. FYI, Spielberg loathed what we'd done -- I still have a copy of his extremely negative letter to the HM folks in my files, which I reprinted in the letters page of SpiderBaby Comix -- but hey, maybe it's because we saw the truth about 1941 and laid it all out on the page for all to see!

Have a great Wednesday, one and all --

I'll write more later today, but suffice to say now it's hard to grasp the enormity of the devastation in Louisiana -- a part of the country I've twice had the pleasure of exploring, including a trip through Houma researching Swamp Thing in '84 -- and the crippling blow that's been dealt by the raw forces of nature. It's been a long time since New England saw anything close -- the flood of 1927 (which I studied at length last year, including viewings of all the extant film footage), the hurricanes of 1936 and especially 1938 -- but we never saw anything like Katrina. New Orleans has essentially been swept from the face of the planet (though reports from the French Quarter indicate that venerable core of the city stands intact), and our leaders are busily downplaying the economic consequences with the same indifference they've downplayed the reality of the wars they've so blithely squandered a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives on. No joke: as a nation, we should have been saving for "a rainy day," eh?

On the home front, my 19-year-old son Dan called home last night with the heartbreaking news one of his friends had died in an apparent drowning accident. Dan's home with me now, and we're going out for some lunch soon; it has shaken him and his circle to the core.

Just two weeks ago, he was at a farewell party for a friend he's known since age three who was leaving for Iraq; I never thought I'd see my son going through these kinds of things, but here we are.

Here we all are, in so many ways.

The warnings from awake economists during Bush's first three months in office that we would be seeing increasing poverty and Dickensian destitution on a growing scale are manifesting in all corners of our country, Vermont included.

On the most mundane level, it's coming home. Driving the eight or so miles to Brattleboro yesterday, I passed our local store at 1 PM and regular gas was $2.59; I decided to fill up on the way home. When I returned at 2:30 PM, regular had gone up to $2.85. A station in town was closed with "NO MORE GAS" signs up and their pumps blocked off; in a heartbeat, I remembered scenes of the 'even/odd' license plate lines in New Jersey in the late 1970s, the fistfights among people waiting in lines for hours, even days, the closed gas stations one would pass in search of somewhere to fill up.

We haven't learned a fucking thing, have we?