Comics & Cities

The weekend continued with more temperatures in the 20′s. Pretty much everyone was in a T-shirt on the streets, except for some men-folk who actually went topless. Man, that blows my mind, considering that you can stay out all day without breaking a sweat. Or at least, you can if you’re more used to equatorial heat.

The Wife and I wandered the neighborhood, specifically the northern area where Casa Loma lies, taking pictures of said castle, and anything else that looked visually interesting. I’m quite surprised by how the pictures turned out; her camera manages to just drink in the details quite nicely, but then it’s not a tourist grade, point n’ click affair, so I guess its obligated to perform better than that. Afterwards, we spent a good part of the evening in the backyard, having a dinner with the neighbors and just talking about anything and everything while the sun set. It was a nice way to see the day off.

I have also found out that Sonny Liew, the guy with a link here, who recently got nominated for an Eisner, is putting together an anthology. He’s been inviting artists he knows to create short stories for a comic book anthology that’s going to have the theme “cities” although there’s no name for the actual book yet. As to be expected, he’s got a lot of interesting (and extremely high quality) talent joining in for the project, and the Wife is one of the people he’s calling in to make a contribution. Although I haven’t actually received the Siren Call, the Wife assures me that if she’s in on this, Sonny just wouldn’t have the heart to turn me down, so I’m already working on a script, and enjoying it a lot. Of all the writing I’ve been doing in the last few months, this is actually the one I’m enjoying the most, for some reason. I discussed some ideas with the Wife and she came up with a really great one that fired my brain off, and now the story itself is pretty much screaming at full volume to get out, so I’m just releasing it in bits and pieces into the cage known as the comic script format, where hopefully it will find the environment comfortable enough.

One of the scary things about this anthology though is the level of talent. I’m not particularly competitive about this, especially considering most of the people involved are artists and I know I’m not just not in the same league, I’m not even in the same game. But Sonny has managed the trick of getting his recent collaborator, Mike Carey to agree to write a story which Sonny will presumably illustrate. Mike Carey has done some very impressive work following up on the legacy of Neil-O with his Lucifer series, a Sandman Presents one shot called The Furies, and currently writes for the X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four. So yeah, that is one damn serious heavy-weight that’ll be making an appearance, and it goes without saying I feel just a teensy bit monolithically stupid and playing the wrong band to think that anything I write will have to share space with this guy.

Oh well. All I can do is write it, try to have fun with it, and see how it goes.