Confessions of a Pop Fan

Saturday, July 26, 2008

IT'S AN UPHILL CLIMB (TO THE BOTTOM)

I received an advance copy of Popgun, vol. 2 yesterday, so this tome is on its way to stores this week. It's a lovely book, perhaps prettier than even the first one, and that Paul Pope cover is super nice.

Joëlle Jones and I have a ten-page story in it, as you may recall. "Reverberation (Doubt)." This one has been long-delayed on its way to release, originally scheduled for another anthology, and we've been sitting on it for about a year. I'm really proud of it, so the long wait has been frustrating. I feel Joëlle and I really came together on this story, and I think both of our performances are very strong. Writing the script was one of those dream experiences where everything just fell into place exactly as it needed to be, and given that there is kind of a soft-serve double-flavor ice cream cone swirl to the structure of the story, it was the happiest of circumstances that it came into being with such ease.

Here is a sneak panel from the series. It's a shocker!

Coloring is by Keith Wood, lettering by the Harvey-nominated Douglas E. Sherwood.

Our story is not to be confused with this Ellerbism.

More Popgun preview materials here.

On an unrelated note, last night was a night of weird dreams. One involved defending Joëlle's drawing of Audrey Hepburn with a sword against someone who was insisting that it showed Audrey as unhealthy and representing a negative body image for women. I vaguely think the conversation was with Philip Bond, but I'm not sure.

This was followed by a longer, more complex dream, where Joëlle and I were traveling through some mountain jungle that was either Las Vegas or the Amazon, or maybe we were heading through the Oregon mountains to California. It's fuzzy. But essentially, myself, her, and Bette Midler were all going to travel to wherever we were going by swimming through a long river that would take us all the way to our destination, and it was considered a real athletic feat to succeed. The first half of this journey required swimming uphill, to pass through the mountain range, but people regularly did it and if you could succeed, you had a straight shot down the mountain from there. Joëlle and Bette Midler had some kind of bet going that involved their careers, where the first one done with the course would have the advantage and could debut new work first. I don't know what my purpose was in this race.

So, after much swimming, we ended up at a village just before the peak of the mountain, where a kind of gypsy-like mountain tribe held big festivals to celebrate swimmers coming through. We had lost Bette by that point, and Joëlle hoped we were ahead of her, not behind her. The next step on the course was climbing the mountain peak, which was made out of packed, wet sand and had multiple faces of the sphinx carved into its side. It was a little like a Mt. Rushmore made out of sand. A couple of experienced hikers were going to help us. One was a tall, gawky man with glasses, and the other was actress Julie Delpy. Joëlle and the man shot up the side of the sphinx sand mountain with almost no problem, and I was doing okay until I got under the biggest of the sphinx heads. Julie Delpy was trying to instruct me, but I just couldn't get over the sphinx headdress, I was worried I would fall. I knew all I had to do was get to the top, and then we'd dive back in the water and head straight down, but I didn't know how I was going to do it. I woke up before I had to find out.

Current Soundtrack: various Santogold

Current Mood: blah