Just 20-25 pages left to write of the script for On the Ropes, the sequel to Kings in Disguise. Hope to have that done around the end of January or very early February.

Will begin blogging again shortly thereafter. Please check back and see what’s left of me.

At the beginning of the decade, writing comics had become something that I used to do.

I can’t tell you why to this day. There was no watershed moment that killed my interest, no dramatic revelation that led me away from the world of funnybooks. When I’d first started writing them ten years before, there had been a genuine thrill in exploring what I could do with them, walking the thin line between the medium’s wide possibilities and narrow limitations. But one day I woke up and the thrill was gone. I’m not sure how long it took me to even realize that.

By the late ‘90s, Kate (Worley, my late wife, for those just joining us) and I had been slowly disengaging from the form for several years. Urgent real-life situations had led us both to putting aside more personal work in favor of concentrating exclusively on a series of quick-money, work-for-hire gigs.

Kings in Disguise was something I’d done ‘way back when; the awards it had won were gathering dust on the walls or stacked in boxes with the books. Despite the continued interest of its many fans, Omaha the Cat Dancer had dribbled to a standstill, the victim of professional misunderstandings and personal hard feelings between Kate and Reed Waller. For the last few years of the ‘90s, Kate and I had mostly worked for a single editor at Dark Horse, turning out scripts that were (on my part, at least) more the product of reflexive momentum and simple application of craft than of personal inspiration. After a final licensed series on which we semi-collaborated, we simply wandered away from the business and didn’t give it much thought.

We were challenged enough by raising a family and finding new things to do with ourselves. I was mostly turning out freelance journalism (some of which eventually led to a full-time newspaper gig that I held until last year’s massive print implosion) while Kate explored the still-nascent world of online writing and noodled with new projects. For awhile, we were both paying the bills and living in a constant state of irony by writing pithy descriptions of crappy TV shows for the Preview Channel, that scrolling blue screen service which would become, God help us, the TV Guide Channel.

The world of comics still cropped up from time to time in unexpected ways. Out of the blue, Howard Chaykin raised the possibility of representing Kings to TV producers. (Despite my respect for Howard, I passed. That book, to me, was ancient history, and I was frequently too stubborn for my own good in those days.) Kate still heard from the legion of Omaha fans, a large number of whom had formed an online group that thrives to this day. Vertige Graphic put out a beautiful – and unexpected – French reprint of Kings, and a Swedish version was reportedly in the works. And Will Eisner hired Kate and me to write a novel about The Spirit.

That Spirit project proved to be a revelation. Kate was a collaborator’s dream, turning out marvelous copy and urging me to take no prisoners in melding our alternate chapters into a uniform style. Though we were adapting someone else’s brainchild, in the process we were also doing real creative work for the first time in years, and it was inspiring to flex those muscles again. Will was happy with the final result, and our agents Denis Kitchen and Judy Hansen were urging us to write more novels of our own devising. I was shocked to find that the part of our lives that we’d packed away so unceremoniously turned out to still be exciting.

The only downside had been Kate’s inexplicable lapses in energy that slowed the process and occasionally frustrated all of us, Will included. But we’d managed to capture the essence of the feature in its late-‘40s prime, and – with an eye toward selling a series of Spirit novels – Will asked us for another. If we weren’t exactly back in comics, we were actively involved with its in-laws.

Around the same time, we learned that a well-known European publishing house was interested in bringing all of Omaha back into print – in color for the first time, in big prestigious volumes aimed at an international market. The only caveat was that Kate and Reed would have to finally provide an ending to the story. Tentative phone calls were made, and to everyone’s relief we learned that all the old hatchets had been buried, and the two of them could work together again with something resembling the mutual respect and fondness that had been a hallmark of their glory days. While I got to work laying out the new Spirit book, Kate went into a frenzy of activity outlining and writing new scenes of the Cat Dancer and her friends.

She was still battling the odd fatigue, and a visit to the doctor on an unrelated matter revealed that she had terminal cancer. I’ve written here about her final days and here about the way friends and strangers rallied around to offer her support; what I haven’t recorded was how hard she worked to finish the conclusion to Omaha during the rare hours when she wasn’t too drained by radiation and chemo to sit at a keyboard. It was hell for her to do and, frankly, hell to watch; but she was determined to finish, not only for the sake of the story but as her last chance to create a legacy for our children. At one point a few months before the end, she turned to me and asked if I’d finish it for her if things worked out so she couldn’t.

She couldn’t, as it turned out, and I found myself writing comics again for the worst and best possible reasons. Fortunately, she left me a strong outline and a scattering of fully- and partially-completed scenes for me to work around.

Shortly after her death, the Omaha deal suddenly went south – the big publisher changed its tune and began demanding full ownership of the property, which had never been part of the discussion. Reed and I mutually agreed to pull the plug (to paraphrase Reed from memory: “Thank God Kate didn’t live to see these assholes trying to rip her children off”) and shop the book around. It didn’t take long for it to land at NBM; with Terry Nantier’s international connections and commitment to publishing quality work, it struck me as an ideal fit. True, the volumes wouldn’t be in color, but I’d always found Reed’s black and white work to be gorgeous as is, so it seemed like a small loss.

Pretty much simultaneously, WW Norton offered to reprint Kings in Disguise with the provision that Dan Burr and I create a sequel as a companion piece. Already facing the terrifying task of following in Kate’s footsteps, my first impulse was to take a pass. But I knew that if Kate were still around, she’d be kicking my ass. Back when I used to wax snarky about my days in comics she would wave a copy of Kings in my face and remind me of what she thought I’d accomplished with it. She always regretted far more than I did that I’d never gotten around to writing the sequel I’d talked about long, long ago. Like completing Omaha, getting Kings and its follow-up into print was one for Kate.

For those keeping score, the second Spirit novel wasn’t abandoned, but it did go onto the back burner for a while. I eventually found a new collaborator in my friend the novelist John Wooley, and we turned out several damned good chapters before the recent Hollywood fiasco ended all interest in anything related to the character.

It was just as well for my sanity, for I was suddenly back in the comics business in spades, and I’ve spent the rest of this decade finishing those commitments. Writing the new Omaha and the Kings sequel – On the Ropes – simultaneously has dragged both out far longer than I would have dreamed, but I’ll have both finished early in 2010. In the meantime, I’ve been amused (and amazed) to see a pile of those old work-for-hire projects coming back into print:

I started the decade by walking away from all this, and – “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” – now I’m ending it with hundreds of pages back in print and hundreds more poised to come off the presses. I’d trade it all, and infinitely more, to have Kate back…

but, settling for the real world, I think she’d approve of the moments these days when I find myself caught up again in the challenge – and the thrill – of collaborating with talented artists to build worlds on the comics page. Whether it’s to celebrate her memory, like the pieces I’m completing now, or future work done purely for myself, I’m looking forward to the decade that lies ahead.

Welcome to 2010, and all that comes with it.

When I was eight years old, a librarian refused to let me check out a book.

The issue wasn’t a matter of content; the book was a biography of Houdini, and the most salacious thing I can remember about it after all these years was a single occurrence of the word “nude” (used to describe the color of Mrs. Houdini’s tights while she was assisting him in his act). The librarian probably had never so much as opened the cover, and wasn’t concerned for my moral well being. The problem was that this book was shelved in the Adult section, and I wasn’t a member of that post-pubescent club.

My father was no great reader, and probably didn’t care if I ever cracked a book that wouldn’t earn me a good living someday. (Uh, sorry about those hopes and dreams, Dad.) But he knew pointless pedantry when he smelled it, and resolved the situation with a simple and authoritative, “Let him check out the book.” Which she did, and I read the hell out of it. End of story, happy ending.

I can’t help thinking that the recent flap at the Jessamine County, KY library over Alan Moore’s and Kevin O’Neill’s The Black Dossier (link courtesy of Tom Spurgeon) could have been resolved as simply if the adults involved had behaved as sanely as had my father and that long-ago librarian. She expressed her concern, and he responded by taking responsibility for his own child. When children are involved, this is the way things should work.

Librarians have plenty to do, and I’m not suggesting that they should be tasked with raising our kids any more than teachers should. God knows, they shouldn’t be expected to get a parent’s okay every time a minor wants to borrow a copy of Twilight or the Harry Potter series, or most books from the Adult section, for that matter…but I think there’s a case to be made for parental approval in certain instances.

There are a few images in The Black Dossier which I’d be uncomfortable with my pre-teenager seeing, the unexpurgated version of this one, for example (it isn’t Quatermain’s spent and flaccid kneecap which I’ve cropped out here):

Why? Not because I want my children to pretend that selected parts of the human body don’t exist, but because there are certain specifics about human sexuality which that individual child isn’t ready to confront yet. That’s my decision, and if you feel differently about your own children, no problem. But if my child had reserved that book – and someone on the staff happened to be aware of its contents – I would have appreciated a heads-up from the library so I could exercise responsibility.

It isn’t censorship for librarians or anyone else to ask parents to behave like parents. It isn’t the same as ripping pages out of books, or (as in the Jessamine County case) withholding titles from the entire community. There will always be thugs around who’ll try to control what everybody reads in order to satisfy their own constipated view of the way things ought to be…

which is exactly what the Jessamine County librarians in question were guilty of doing. They tried to subvert the system by keeping the book permanently out of circulation to not just kids, but everyone in the county.

For all we outside of Jessamine County know, those librarians may be wonderful people, locally beloved figures who sincerely care about the children in their community. Maybe, if they’d taken their concerns to someone in charge, something as simple as a parental-approval system could have been arranged, and they’d still have their jobs. But they took it upon themselves to play moral arbiters, uninvited Thought Police, and they deserved to get fired.

Nobody wants egregiously inappropriate material to end up in the hands of children. For all their freewheeling excesses and gleeful campaigning to screw the system, the underground comix of the ‘60s and ‘70s were labeled “Adults Only” with little or no complaint from their creators. I lived for more than ten years with the writer of one of the best and most popular adults-only comics ever produced, and it was clear to me that both Kate Worley and her collaborator Reed Waller were all in favor of having that label on the cover of Omaha the Cat Dancer. Material created for adults, they thought, should be read by adults and only by adults.

Books aren’t labeled like comics are, and it isn’t reasonable to expect every librarian to be intimately familiar with the contents of every volume in their collection. It isn’t unreasonable, though, to ask parents to get involved in what their children are reading when there’s legitimate reason for concern. Maybe the option of requesting parental permission in special cases doesn’t exist in the Jessamine County system, but maybe it should. The Jessamine librarians had a leg up on a lot of their colleagues – they had first-hand knowledge of what was inside the book – and they squandered it by making their primary concern not the children or even their parents, but all about themselves and their own narrow views of what everybody should be allowed to see.

Nothing on the Net has made me smile as much lately as my discovery that the wonderful cartoonist Howard Cruse has a website and blog up and running.

Howard and I have never laid eyes on each other, but in that odd way of people who ride on the many and vaguely-related tentacles of “the arts,” we’ve kinda-sorta known each other for about 20 years.

We first intersected shortly after the random events that led me into comics, but our dealings with each other back then had nothing to do with the business. At that time, I was making a living doing theater and had been invited to take part in what had become an annual AIDS-awareness benefit performance.

This was around 1990. Coming out of the Reagan “ignore ‘em and maybe they’ll all die off” years, efforts like that benefit were grassroots attempts to circumvent the apathy of the Gipper Gang by raising money for research and treatment and giving a human face to the sufferers. What some of us were doing in those days, with our little shows or pamphlets or marches, was pitifully inadequate – but when the government that should have been protecting its citizens was doing little more than simply pretending the problem didn’t exist, we did what we could.

This was my second year to perform in the benefit, and again my job was to provide a spoken-arts interlude in the midst of a show that was otherwise all song and dance. I’d done an abbreviated version of a terrific Harvey Fierstein play the year before, and wanted something equally memorable for the new show. Somewhere I came across a magazine article about Howard that mentioned a drama he’d written called About Scott.

His play had been given a low-budget workshop production in Birmingham, but it had never gotten the full-scale mounting that it cried out for. I was donating my own time and working with zero budget, so I had even less to offer in terms of remuneration or production values, but the play sounded to be exactly what I wanted and I knew I’d kick myself if I didn’t try. So I crossed my fingers, tracked down Howard’s address and sent him a letter.

He didn’t know me from Adam, but he graciously agreed to let me cut his big multi-media play to ribbons and reduce it to a 10-minute monologue cobbled together from the Howard Cruse character’s narration. Having already waived royalties, he showed even more generosity by throwing in a handful of the slides that had been created for the original production. They added just the right element of simple spectacle, lifting the experience beyond that of watching some guy droning on and turning it into a genuine, if brief, dramatic work.

I didn’t even know what Howard looked like in those days, so for the physical part of my characterization I opted to suggest the way he drew himself in his autobiographical strips: glasses, jeans and a simple plaid shirt. Since he came from Alabama, I added a hint of a Southern lilt to my delivery – one which Howard doesn’t have, as I learned later. Howard, of course, had come out several years before and made his sexuality public – a pretty brave act for the time and place. Since I was essentially playing him, I’d mentioned early in the process that I was straight, and asked if he had a problem with my pretending to be something I wasn’t while speaking his words. His response was a quick and direct “That’s what actors do,” which in the theater is always the right answer.

The result was an intimate, funny, and very moving slice of theater. Even boiled down to the ultimate Readers Digest version of itself, Howard’s remembrance of the life of a friend who’d succumbed to the then-mysterious virus had the audience in tears by its conclusion. It had been a privilege to deliver his message…and over the years since then, I’ve been both surprised and gratified to discover that the memory of About Scott has remained with some of those who were in the audience.

On more than one occasion, strangers have approached me to express how much that 10-minute monologue had meant to them. A couple of them even remarked mistakenly on the industry I’d shown in finding a talented artist to draw a caricature of myself for the slides: testament to the power of a simple plaid shirt.

Howard and I maintained a sporadic correspondence in the years after that, and I’ve done my best to keep up with his career. His Wendel stories remain among my very favorite comics, his savage take on former attorney general Ed Meese’s anti-pornography crusade still makes me chuckle, and his ahead-of-its-time 1995 Stuck Rubber Baby remains one of the finest graphic novels any American has ever created.

I lost track of a lot of people when Kate died, and hadn’t spoken to Howard since shortly after her funeral. So I’m delighted to see him online, to have a new chance to get reacquainted, and to recommend that everyone else check out his site and pick up some of the new work available there.

And I’m equally delighted to see that Stuck Rubber Baby has been slated for republication next year, sporting gorgeous new cover art. A lot of people weren’t ready for it in 1995, but in 2010 there’ll be no excuse not to pick it up and let one of the too-often unsung masters of the craft show you how it’s done.

Way too many deadlines, and endless boxes still to be unpacked all over the house – but I’m pleased that at least one tiny sliver of the new office is in some kind of order now. Chaos is still ahead on points, but there’s hope that order may yet have its day.

(Comics archaeologists should note the old school Harvey and Eisner Awards, still legible after all these years.)

My admiration for Omaha notwithstanding, furry porn’s not the kind of thing that gets my tail wagging. But artist Taral Wayne’s brief reminiscence of a wannabe furry mogul of the ‘90s caught my eye and is worth passing along. This is a sadly familiar story for anyone who’s been around any kind of fandom for long, and Wayne’s piece deserves particular notice for its smart and evocative look at what can happen when equal measures of obsession and incompetence collide.

(There’s also a link to a demented if tiresome Dr. Seuss parody perpetrated by Wayne’s subject, for interested parties with exceptional patience.)

Say it ain’t so, Sam I Am…

Frank Coghlan, Jr. passed away last week, on Sept. 7. He was 93.

An actor whose career ran from the silents into the 1970s, “Junior” Coghlan played Billy Batson, the young alter ego of the Big Red Cheese in the 1941 serial Adventures of Captain Marvel.

Coghlan was a personable eternal juvenile with a sunny smile and a voice that never seemed to quite make its way out of puberty. He worked with stars ranging from Charlie Chaplin to Steve McQueen and served his country as a career Naval officer. He was in some extremely good movies and more than a few lousy ones, made TV appearances following his retirement from the service – including a guest shot on the 1974 Shazam series – and recounted his 50-plus years in show business in a 1992 autobiography, They Still Call Me Junior.

If he never became a household name, he was nonetheless a solid working actor with a colorful career. But it was his performance as Billy Batson that made him a popular figure at nostalgia conventions long after he’d stopped acting, and for which he’s still remembered today. For Coghlan, “Shazam” was the magic word, indeed.

So far, I haven’t managed to muster any interest whatsoever in the Disney Buys Marvel OMG!!!! story. Bet I won’t anytime soon, either.

It was mid-August 2008, just a little over a year ago, that W.W. Norton sent me a copy of David Small’s Stitches for editing, and I’ve looked forward to seeing it in print ever since.

Small’s graphic memoir was still in semi-rough shape when I laid hands on it, but even in less-than-finished form, it was clearly a piece of work that was both deeply felt and strongly expressed. I’ve never been a great fan of autobiographical comics; however, there are a few exceptions that transcend the dopey self-indulgence of their fellows, and Stitches is one of those.

It’s the fiercely remembered story of Small’s childhood in the ‘50s and ‘60s, a god-awful tale of dismissal, neglect and worse perpetrated by people with no business reproducing themselves and a criminal ignorance of the rudiments of decent parenting. The book is filled with ghastly anecdotes, perhaps the most unsettling being young David’s visit to the home of a grandmother who’s depicted as being utterly and violently bugfuck, a state of affairs which none of the other adults will acknowledge. Though it’s a relatively brief passage, it’s an important one, epitomizing Small’s vivid memory of the helplessness of children when faced with the insanity of adults. The book, in fact, was originally titled Burning Down the House, a phrase that refers directly to crazy old Grandma.

The published title, of course, refers to Small’s ordeal following a diagnosis of throat cancer – the frightening treatments, the ugly family dynamics, and the botched surgery that left him disfigured and mute for years. In relating this material, Small is honest enough to feel sorry for himself – who wouldn’t? – yet the self-pity never removes us from his narrative or asks us for more than we’re willing to contribute to the reading experience.

Small, who survived all this and went on to become an award-winning illustrator of children’s books, combines illustrated narrative with traditional comics pages to tell his story. There are moments – notably David’s flights of fancy in his younger years (the kind of thing one expects from a character who will one day discover that he’s an artist), and an encounter much later with an understanding psychiatrist – that are almost too twee for words…but then those same segments turn out to carry an unexpected emotional punch or tough-minded narrative coda that jerks the book safely back from the land of embarrassing artsiness.

Small’s most effective moments are those that feature his mother. Though he eventually comes to an understanding of how her life was deformed by her own demons, the portrait he’s created of that bitterly unhappy woman and her banal brutality lingers, and is absolutely haunting.

My editing on Stitches was a freelance gig, like the work I did on Norton’s Eisner volumes, so I’m praising the book here not because of any professional connection but simply because I thought highly of it. It would be nice to claim some credit for how well Small’s book turned out, but my contribution was pretty much one of correcting spelling and making little suggestions like “If you refer to this background detail that you established earlier, we’ll have a better idea of where this panel takes place.” Small’s work was complete and potent in the rough pencil stage, and I’ve been waiting all this time to plug it.

I’m pleased to see what a good job the publisher’s done with the final product, and hope that those who appreciate serious and well-done comics will give Small’s harrowing and ultimately uplifting work a look. There’s always room for material of this caliber, and I’m heartened to see people like David Small entering and enriching the field.

Half moved. Love the new house. The old one remains painfully slow to give up its contents.

The word for the day is: Ben-Gay.