Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin
For you, the living, this blog was meant too since 1969
…other than wanting to see some Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez art on the site, here are Superman and the Joker hanging out at Venice Beach:
CASUAL SUPERMAN IS CASUAL
All you need to know about the new comics coming in this week:
Tim: “What’s it about?”
Me: “There’s no easy answer to that.”
Tim: “Well, what genre is it?”
Me: “It is its own genre.”
Other items coming to us from Diamond this week:
One of the unintended consequences of running my Things Not to Say… mini-comic a couple of days ago is that I am now getting people feeding me the “I’m very disappointed” line both in my comments sections and at the shop (and I’m totally looking at you, Brandon from the game store next door).
And, you know, that’s fine. So long as you all can deal with the guilt when I finally snap and wreak havoc throughout the county and strike terror into the hearts of its denizens, starting with poor, innocent Employee Aaron.
Anyhoo, I’m glad you all seemed to enjoy (or at least tolerate) some of my old mini-comics work. You can see a fuzzy scan of the cover of the print edition of Mike Sterling’s Progressive Ruin in my first anniversary post, which also has a reproduction of a letter of comment I wrote as a 12 year old, but feel free to skip that. But there’s a little more detail regarding our comics-publishing concern there, if you’re interested. And if you want to see another strip I did from those days, I posted one here three years ago…be sure to click the “page two” link for…the rest of the story.
In other (well, mostly store-related) news:
1. Whoo boy, nobody wants that “Brand New Day” Spider-Man/Wolverine poster.
2. …But that “Iron Man in space” poster by Joe Quesada did very well. Thanks, popular and surprisingly-good movie!
3. COMIC BOOK CHARACTERS WE DON’T NEED ANY MORE POSTERS OF: The Fantastic Four. Okay, maybe more solo ones of the Thing. And I realize there are a lot more posters out there of, say, Spider-Man, but Spidey posters generally sell (the poster in point 1 excepted). FF posters, not so much.
4. Oh good gravy, we still have that damned New Warriors poster from the early ’90s? And I actually put it in the poster rack for display? “HELLO COME LOOK AT MY ALBATROSS HANGING IN THE POSTER RACK RATHER THAN AROUND MY NECK.”
5. I think we may be past the “sell-by” date on the couple of Matrix posters we have left.
6. Now I’m wondering what sort of Watchmen posters we’ll get as part of the movie merchandising push. These ones, for sure, but maybe we’ll get a nice shot of Rorschach, hands on his hips, standing heroically, chest and chin thrust out, and a big blocky “RORSCHACH” logo across the poster’s bottom edge. Or maybe he can be throwing a punch at the viewer. Basically, I want the same type of posters that we got with 1997’s Batman and Robin.
I thought it’d be neat if they could come up with a way to make special “Rorschach” chase cards, with a layer of black liquid floating between two thin semi-translucent pieces of white plastic…but of course, it probably wouldn’t take much for one of those to break, damaging other cards in the pack/box. Maybe some kind of heat-sensitive card…a close of up Rorschach’s mask, that looks blank until you apply some heat to it and the black patterns begin to show up.
This is what I think about when I really should be thinking about something else. Anything else.
Another bizarrely disturbing strip by me, from the print edition of Mike Sterling’s Progressive Ruin, 1998:
NOTES:
1. I drew the first page, set it aside for a couple of years, then drew the second page so that I could have the finished story in my Progressive Ruin comics digest.
2. I found that math equation on the internet somewhere. I guess that’s sufficiently complex for the purposes of the strip.
3. I don’t know what the ultimate purpose of this strip is, beyond “sometimes people suck.” Or maybe “animals that can do higher math always get the shaft.” Something like that. Make up your own moral.
4. That poor snake. I remember drawing that deathgrip Tommy has the snake in, in that second panel, and thinking “this is both funny and remarkably pathetic.” Also, Tommy’s a little tall in that second panel. Maybe he’s standing on a crate or a bale of hay or something. He is at a fair.
5. My friends worry about me, sometimes.
[EDIT: Ignore the “sidebar” comment in the title, there…those links vanished when I revamped the site a few years ago. You can find them here: 1 2 3.]
Straight outta 1996, it’s a mini-comic by me! Please pardon the lettering:
NOTES:
1. Isn’t that a nice paper color? “Salmon” brings out the art, don’t you think?
2. Yes, the name of our mini-comics publishing concern was “Full Frontal Harvey,” named after an overheard comment by some MTV host or ‘nother about Harvey Keitel’s performance in Bad Lieutenant.
3. I have heard every one of these.
4. The “I’m very disappointed” lady was looking for an issue of Stray Toasters we didn’t happen to have at the time, and I can still hear the particular tone of voice she used when she said that, and it still grates. ARGH.
5. Seriously, I don’t know what’s up with what I was putting on the shirts. Except for the “Democracy” t-shirt, which was the name of pal Cully’s punk band.
6. My favorite panel in this comic is the “do you sell comics” one…I swear to God, that’s where the kid was standing when he asked me that. Also: Swamp Thing cameo!
7. None of the people in these drawings are meant to look like any specific customer…except the “I’m very disappointed” lady, who looked pretty much just like that. GAH, that was annoying.
8. The “how much is this comic” panel shared the page with the copyright information, and where to mail your buck and a half for the latest issue of Wood-Eye…and featured my worst lettering ever, so I’m sparing you the horror.
While breaking down the comic shipment Wednesday morning, prior to opening:
New Employee Tim: “Another Wolverine one-shot? This makes me want to punch Marvel.”
Employee Aaron: “How long have you worked here, and you already want to punch Marvel?”
Me: “Yeah, seriously…what took you so long?”
Also, we finally received an order of Watchmen trade paperbacks…not the order Diamond lost on us last week, but a second order I placed a few days after that initial doomed order, prior to DC runnin’ out of copies.
Guess what trade paperback we didn’t sell a single copy of on Wednesday? After weeks of people coming in and demanding it?
I think we’ll sell through on them by the weekend, but still, just a little annoying.
At least, I’m assuming we didn’t sell any Wednesday, as I was still feeling under the weather and left the shop early. I decided that morning that after I pulled the comic savers, did the mail order, did some reordering, and took care of some other business I had to take care of at the shop, I was going to leave early and let Employees Tim and Aaron handle the rest of the day.
I managed to leave 45 minutes before closing. Ah, well.
Other new comic day notes:
As for Final Crisis #3…man, so densely-packed, so full of good stuff. It’s nuts, and I love it.
I know it wasn’t as long as a break between issues as Gemstone’s publishing unpleasantness from last year, but it still had some of our Disney customers getting a little testy.
So, “minor nitpick of the month?” Maybe so. I remember seeing someone out there suggest that elements of Two-Face’s scarring from the Dark Knight movie would be a better way of portraying Hex’s injury.
Nothing to do with comics, but everything to do with fans of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000: the third Cinematic Titanic film, The Wasp Woman, should be available for download as you read this, and the DVD release should be available by Monday.
…since I still feel bleah and I’d rather let everybody else do the work for me.
I almost had a “100 Things” Valentine’s Day tradition going, inspired by Hembeck and Alan David Doane, doing my list of 100 in 2005 along with a bunch of other people, following up in 2006 and 2007, but I blew it this year when, um, I forgot until it was too late. Ah, well. Maybe I’ll try again in 2009.
Of course, we all must bow to Tom Spurgeon’s list of a thousand things, which he did because he’s Tom Freakin’ Spurgeon and he shows us How Things Are Done just as a matter of course.
Also, just to note: the article mentions that fifteen years ago many professors would have mocked the idea of studying comics in the classroom. Well, not the late Professor Frank McConnell, whom I had as a professor at UCSB about 18 years ago, and was assigned in his courses The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. My memories of those classes was one of the earliest posts on this site.
There’s a totally unnecessary slam on Captain Planet at the end of the article, too. That’s hard cheese, old bean.
It’s a sickness.
I’ve been under the weather for the last couple of days, and I’m still running a fever, so I’m going to continue my Low Content Mode for today, if you all don’t mind. Also, some advice: if you’re feeling sick on your day off from work, don’t decide that you’re going to rearrange the garage and build some shelving anyway. You’ll regret it.
So, here’s some linkage to material generated by other people:
FULL DISCLOSURE: I like Kevin ‘n’ Birdie. And I’ve written two installments of the strip.
…And I just saw via Johanna that the store has backed down.
Hmm. That was just as much work as a real post. Some “Low Content Mode.”
Like this one:
Thuvia, Maid of Mars in 1963:
