"I always think it's a pity when one cannot somehow apply one's aberrations to one's work." --Andrew Loog Oldham, 2Stoned.

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At the moment, I am not writing anything.

Finished the polish draft on FISTS the other day-- 168 pages of script for 100 pages of comic-- and now have the wee-ist bit of time before it needs to be sent away for lettering. So I'm just gonna let it stew and make little tweaks here and there but, for all practical purposes, that bitch is done. With that, and with JUAREZ not only done but all drawn and lettered and printed, I'm sorta not really writing anything right now. I got the comp for #8 in the mail before I took off again but didn't have a chance to read them all in one sitting. So who knows. And last night I sent off the lettering script of the Wolverine story to Warren Simons at Marvel for XMEN UNLIMITED #9; going between Sam's pages and the script and tightening my shit around Sam's. If your a Sam Fan, this story's gonna be pure crank and candy for you: it's Sam doing Sam, Sam doing Wolverine in all of his crazy guises and personas... it's full of crazed Sam spectacle and, amongst other things, Sam drawing the coolest sideburns in the biz. Maybe there'll be some back and forth from Warren, which is always welcomed; when one's written a story that Sam Kieth has drawn, one should dot the i's and cross the t's as much as one can.

THUG will come next, of course, as it's contracted and all that, but I need to pool the research together in an organized way (the difference between FISTS and THUG? One had actual research.) and start batting it back and forth with Kieron to hammer the thing into its actual shape. I've got scraps and notes and doodles and roughs. It feels like how on a cooking show, they have the ingredients for the dish all ready and laid out on little plates but the cooking hasn't started yet, you know? So there's that.

THUG is, like I said, Actually Researched, but even then there's going to be a fair amount (read: a lot) of ignoring, fictionalizing, and otherwise distorting it all. That said, it's a different animal that FISTS. Whereas the premise of FISTS is, in fact, God's honest true, the plot is wildly fictional (if based in fact). THUG uses real events as its central organizing structure: the larger places and events are stead-fast and true, if the characters are all analogs, fictions, half-sketches, and outright fabrications. The mission is adding these little fictional instruments into the ebb and tide and tempo of Real History, and layering it all together into a larger narrative. Layers and layers and layers, all moving as one, the weight and punch of a graphic novel with the trash pop power of a good comic. Which, in the end, is what it should read like. What if Marvel published straight crime comics in the Seventies? That's maybe not the most accurate or appropriate of analogies, but, fuck it, I'm tired, and don't care that much about accuracy or appropriateness right now.

The opening scene, at least as it stands, is our main character (who has a name, but I'm not sure it's the right one yet) on a repo run somewhere in Memphis. He's repo-ing an El Camino (the first arc is called, at least between Kieron and me, EL CAMINO SOUL) and beating the holy hell out of a guy. While dunking the guy's head in a toilet and smashing the lid on the back of his neck, he notices that Neil Armstrong is about to walk on the moon. He drowns the guy while watching Armstrong's come down the ladder. That's how it starts.

Well, it's either that or watching a sixty year old man drive out of the desert in a nice car. Whichever is more dynamic.

Anyway. THUG is the story of the sixties ending and the seventies beginning in Los Angeles.

But right now it's a bunch of fucking notes. That I'm not really writing.

The Common/Kanye West music video is shot and, knock on wood, the cut is locked. We got label approval and therefore hopefully network approval; we want all that shit approved across the board so there's not another Faint-style snafu and, besides, there's sex and that's a real dangerous thing right now. I stayed an extra week in NYC to work, came home for a week, and then turned around and came back and I'm in the city through the end of next week. And since, comics-wise, I ain't doin' shit, that means no night job, just MK12. Which means the AMC project and the, uh, Guided by Voices music video.

That's not really a music video, but we're making THE LAST GUIDED BY VOICES MUSIC VIDEO. Shhhh.

I've been asked to keep our cards close to the chest on the nature of the project by our client. I can say that we'll be premiering a near-done version of it in NYC on Saturday, though, when Ben and I speak at the AIGA hootnanny. There's a link out there to the show, which is two days long and full of panels by all kinds of amazingly awesome people, but finding the link would require a degree of looking for it that, right now, I can't quite muster.

There are some pitches I'm working on, each in various stages of completion and quality. I assume those will be getting attention here over the next couple weeks. Three? Maybe four pitches? Depends, I guess. I need to shake some answers down and see what's what and who's looking for what and why. Or not. The music video is a cruel tyrant god.

Iggy Pop is singing "The Passenger" on my headphones right now. La la la la lalalala. La la la la lalalala. Everything was made for you and me.