Music 2007

In no particular order:

Spoon: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (each Spoon album is a grower...better and better with each listen)

Dinosaur Jr.: Beyond (great listen...they haven't missed a beat)

The Broken West: I Can't Go On, I'll Go On (beautiful folk pop...or something like that)

The White Stripes: Icky Thump (after a misstep, a return to great)

Radiohead: In Rainbows (best thing since OK Computer)

Bettye LaVette: Scene of the Crime (soul survivor teams up with Drive-By Truckers , tears it up)

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings: 100 Days 100 Nights (soul neophyte belts it out like the old days)

Field Music: Tones of Town (easily one of my most-listened to discs this year--catchy catchy pop)

Loney, Dear: Loney, Noir (pretty music)





The Clientele: God Save the Clientele (harmonious pop!)

Candie Payne: I Wish I Could Have Loved You More (Bond music for a new generation)

Band of Horses: Cease to Begin (a step up from an impressive debut)

Jens Lekman: Night Falls Over Kortedala (beautiful realization of potential)

Celebration: The Modern Tribe (uplifting dance-punk, soul pop)

Dan Deacon: Spiderman of the Rings (electronic kookiness that hooks)

Stephen Duffy & the Lilac Time: Runout Groove (fucking beautiful work from a guy who's done a lot of beautiful work)

Pale Young Gentlemen: Pale Young Gentlemen (technically a late 2006 release, but I love it...catchy, bittersweet low key pop)

The Lodger: Grown-Ups (classic sounding Brit indie rock)

Christmas

It's going to be different this year. To say the least.

I was in Orlando for Thanksgiving, but I'll head back to Wichita for Christmas. Probably the last time I'll ever spend Christmas in Wichita with my family. I think my father's going to sell his house, and try living down on Grand Lake in Oklahoma for a while. He and Mom sold their condo and bought a house big enough for my sister and I to bring our families down to visit. With Mom gone, there's no real reason to stay in the house in Wichita, so Dad's going to try to sell it and put the money in the bank while he truly retires.

We moved to Wichita (or Andover, if you will) just prior to my eighth grade year, and then into that current house during my second year of college. During high school, and for years after, we'd gather at our house on Christmas Eve with my friends and play games, drink beer, watch a movie. Generally Christmas Eve was more fun than Christmas, although there were some slightly rough Christmas mornings.

Anyway, we'll head back there, and spend Christmas Eve and part of Christmas day together one more time, before Dad drives down to Oklahoma to enjoy the day with some new friends, as the new chapter in his life continues to develop.

Having moved all over the place as a kid, Wichita is the closest thing to "home" I ever really knew. Most of my truly formative growth took place there, and there are a lot of people there I truly love. Those people will still be there, but with my parents and the house gone, it feels like "home" is fading away...

"Moore Gives Good Karma"

CBR interviewed me about '76:

http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=12555

Hawaiian Pee-Pee

Kelly Tindall posted this over on the Image boards, as part of his "Image Babies" concept, and it made me giggle:

Things I can't believe I think about

There's an early episode of the Jeffersons on right now, and it features an intro I can't remember seeing for years. Instead of the familiar intro featuring clips from the show, this one is a grainy film into featuring the Jeffersons following their moving van from their old life to their new high-rise.

I assume that when the show went into reruns or syndication, this intro was axed in favor of the later intro, but I dunno. It would be just like TV Land to dig out the original intro. After all, they resurrected the original intro and bumpers for I Love Lucy, which, from what I can tell, hadn't been aired since the show first entered syndication, when they were replaced by the giant "I Love Lucy" heart. If memory serves, the original animated "stick figure" intro was dumped because it displayed a sponsor's name (which would have been removed by TV Land).

Until these old intros were revived, I had no idea they'd ever existed, but I had always wondered why such a popular, and (one would assume) well funded show would have featured such a static, dull opening and closing.

Along those lines, you can't beat the original "Rock Around the Clock" intro for Happy Days, a show that had one good season, and truly jumped the shark long before Fonzie did.

Contracts! Office!

Got the contracts for the project with Tony Harris sent off.

Pretty jazzed to get rolling on this one.

I've been trying to get my office organized over the past couple of days, and have had very little success. I have way too many copies of my own books lying around, for one thing, and despite dumping countless boxes of old comics, I still seem to have piles of them stacked up all over the place.

I also have a stack of unpaid bills that reaches the ceiling.

In reality, this is what I want my office to look like:

Snow Days

God bless readers

This was posted in a Newsarama thread about HAWAIIAN DICK #1 selling out (and after a comment of mine about using more pidgin English in the book):

Ho wow man, I can't wait! I love Hawaiian Dick, I've purchased all the issues of the previous series as well. I'm a Hawaii girl currently living in Florida. I'm old enough to remember old Waikiki Beach before all the high-rises were built, my dad built his own HUGE surfboard (6 feet long) and used to surf Waikiki all the time. We used to live a short walk from the zoo in one of those rinky-dink 2-story apartment buildings back in the '50s. My husband is a local boy, grew up in Kaimuki and Palolo Valley, so we know the old Hawaii. I love Mo and Kahami, and Chinatown ... So few writers and creators "get" Hawaii (that Michener guy - nah, his book junk in my opinion), that we who grew up there get very excited when someone does it right. You guys have been getting it right. I would love to see more pidgin in the local characters' dialogue, but I know you have to balance it with the need for all readers to understand what is being said. So, geev 'um, Mistah Moore!

In this same thread, two Hawaiian readers (who admit knowing each other) had taken us to task for abusing Hawaii for our entertainment purposes, as they had both done on boards in the past.

I've always suspected that those guys were less about dogging our book and more about grabbing a platform from which to pontificate, and that's fine. I understand that.

I've seen the book attacked for some pretty ridiculous things. One "reader" in a forum noted that Byrd dressing in long pants would have immediately outed him as a "stupid haole." Well, you know...that's what he IS. And anyone who tells me no one wore long pants in Hawaii in 1953 is just being stupid. Likewise, people have taken exception to the notion that Hawaii played up its Polynesian culture to lure tourists in the fifties, which is equally absurd. But I try to avoid debates over that stuff. I fully understand that when people who feel they usually get the short end of the stick get an opportunity to make their voices heard, they're going to take it.

So, anyway, while I've never claimed HAWAIIAN DICK was a realistic reflection of 1950s Hawaii (see my earlier post about "Heightened Reality"), we have gone to great lengths not to be condescending or insulting, and to try to somewhat give people a feel for what it might have been like back then.

So, thank you, Librarykat. You've made my day.

2007 can't end soon enough

Sometimes I feel like a Merle Haggard song:

If we make it through December
Everythings gonna be all right I know
It's the coldest time of winter
And I shivver when I see the fallin' snow
If we make it through December
I got plans of bein' in a warmer town come summer time
Maybe even California
If we make it through December we'll be fine
I got laid off down at the factory
And their timing's not the greatest in the world
Heaven knows I been workin' hard
I wanted Christmas to be right for daddy's girl
Now I don't mean to hate December
It's meant to be the happy time of year
And why my little girl don't understand
Why daddy can't afford no Christmas here
If we make it through December
Everythings gonna be alright I know
It's the coldest time of winter
And I shivver when I see the fallin' snow
If we make it through December
I got plans of bein' in a warmer town come summer time
Maybe even California
If we make it through December we'll be fine

Well, I guess we do have a tree.

Latour's cover

For the second printing of HAWAIIAN DICK #1:

Dick Bit

One of my favorite pieces of DICK ephemora, whipped up by Steven when we were stumped on covers ideas:

Disisisisney

So, after a trip to the Magic Kingdom, I started thinking about the genesis of Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Pretty amazing stuff, really, and probably the greatest testament to whatever vision Walt Disney possessed.

For me, the real appeal of Disney World is the creative thinking and engineering that went into conceiving and building the thing. I find it pretty fascinating, and find myself studying the mechanics, psychology and methodology of the rides as much as anything. Walking around Disney World is, in a lot of ways, like walking around inside a giant comic book.

One of the terms thrown around a lot by Disney's "Imagineers" is "Heightened Reality," and this definition, provided by Imagineer Alex Wright, is also the perfect way to describe the way I think about my comic book work:

Take the things people "know" from the world around them, select the ones
that suit the story you wish to tell, and combine them into something that is
entirely new but that still feels oddly familiar.

That's a better way to describe something like Hawaiian Dick than anything I've come up with. Of course, I'd substitute "things from history and pop culture" for "things from the world around them" in the case of Dick.

SPEAKING OF....

Nice reviews of the new Hawaiian Dick at Wizard online, Newsarama, Comixtreme, etc.

Be nice to imagine retailers and readers notice.

I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane...

What to listen to on the trip? I'm opting for an mp3 collection featuring:

A selection of My Bloody Valentine eps

What Made Milwaukee Famous's Trying to Never Catch Up

Blue Note Plays Bacharach

David Axelrod's The Edge

And maybe some old Roxy Music

Speaking of MBV, I think I might put together a track-by-track mix of the original Loveless, combined with Japancakes' recent cover disc. (Isn't this fascinating?)

I'm just wrapping up Erik Larson's Thunderstruck, so I'll grab something new to read, too. Maybe The Golden Compass.

Much writing to do, though. Hard to read when you know you've got writing to do.

DICK NUGGETS:

Suddenly a lot of plot directions are running through my head for HAWAIIAN DICK. Just finishing up a quiet little stand-alone story that introduces a new character I'd like to keep, and re-opens the door to Byrd's past. Also, Byrd has another brother we have yet to meet.

Annual Days

I loved Marvel's annuals as a kid, especially when they were squarebound (which was probably only in my first year or two of childhood comicbuying).

Here are some of the first annuals I remember reading:

I really had no clue who most of the characters were yet, but that was part of the fun. Beautiful Don Newton artwork that really didn't look like anything I'd seen up to that point. I thought Arsenal was a pretty scary bad guy at the time. As I recall, his origin was tied into Avengers backstory one way or another, but that didn't stop me from digging it.

This one featured George Perez and Terry Austin instead of Byrne and Austin, which I barely noticed at the time. The cheesy melodrama grabbed me when I was young, and the Frank Miller/Terry Austin cover gave me a charge. I always loved depictions of Cyclops in action.

Another one that relied on a lot of backstory. Franklin Richards and Agatha Harkness, and Franklin's latent powers...stuff I knew nothing about, but, as usual, those elements gave it an air of mystery that grabbed me. I remember this one being pretty creepy, but I haven't read it in years. One thing I do recall is Pablo Marcos inking George Perez...always gave Perez's pencils a unique look.

This was a two-part story that introduced me to the modern Dr. Octopus/Spider-Man dynamic (previously my only exposure had been in Silver Age reprints of the classic Lee/Ditko stories). Some cool imagery that I can still recall, like Doc Ock being pulled underwater when his tentacles got stuck in a submarine hatch.

Or something like that.

Old Dick New Dick

Chris Brunner is coloring a short DICK story that Shawn Crystal and I did a couple of years ago for NEGATIVE BURN.

It'll appear in one of the first five new HAWAIIAN DICK issues, I think. Brunner's amazing:

Blues in the Night and Priscilla Lane

I love Turner Classic Movies. This week they've got guest programmers on with Robert Osgood. Last night they had James Ellroy serving up some little seen crime gems. Tonight it's Matt Groening. Right now he's introducing a really fun jazz romp called Blues in the Night that I've been a fan of since I caught it a year or so ago.

For one thing, "Blues in the Night" is one of the greatest songs of all time. For another, the flick stars Priscilla Lane, one of the cutest damn female leads to ever grace the movie screen. For proof, see Arsenic and Old Lace. Hell, just see Arsenic and Old Lace because it's completely awesome.

For more proof, check her out with her sisters:


That gal's got pizzazz, I tell ya! Pizzazz!

iFanboy on the Leading Man

Nice video blog attention from those fine fellows at iFanboy. They also chat up Chantler's Northwest Passage:

http://www.ifanboy.com/archive/weblog/ifanboy_episode_82.html

It...is...BALLLLOOOOOON!

Here's the Word Balloon interview I did with Siuntres:

http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=135654

Also, you'll find me there engaging in pointless discussion about Hawaiian Dick.

EN-JOY!

Warning: Sports Ahead

Sure, it sucks knowing your boys are playing twenty minutes up the road and you're not there.

But watching them win from your living room is almost as good.

Oh, Comics...why?

Here's what's "wrong with comics."


A guy who can do this:

Is appreciated about 1/100th as much as a guy who's worked his whole life learning to draw superheroes half as well as Jim Lee.

Ed Tadem's art on '76 is light years beyond most comics you'll find in stores. I'm holding out hope that Europe will embrace us when the U.S. wonders why Ed bothers with things like learning how to use a brush, impressive storytelling, and creating real environments.

Such a bitter man, eh?