Holy Hot Rod!

After almost 9 years of driving the same car (my beloved 2000 Dodge Neon), I have taken the plunge and bought a (nearly) brand new 2007 Chevrolet HHR.

With the arrival of my boy Jack "Lucky" Meredith over a year ago, my small but growing family placed a bit of a strain on our vehicle situation. My Neon and Amy's Hyundai Elantra were just not big enough. Oh, sure, we could get around town easily enough with all five of us packed in to either car, but we were packed in. Not exactly a lot of room left for the little things, like space or comfort.

On top of that, my work at the Comic Stop calls upon me to pick up shipments on a weekly basis, not to mention any trip out of town for family or business.

So, with all of that in mind, Amy and I kept an eye out for a new vehicle, preferably something not too expensive, decent gas mileage, and enough room for everyone and everything we would need it to do. Our list of requirements left us with a very short list of cars. One of these cars was the Chevy HHR.

After about a month or two of looking around, Amy found a sweet deal on a used HHR at a nearby dealership. This HRR had only 1,000 miles on it, and was a lot cheaper than other comparable HHRs we found.

After making an appointment to see and test-drive the car (which handled great), we found out the previous owner had just bought it a couple of months before. It turned that his mother suddenly turned ill and he needed a large mini-van to get her around (I believe he traded it in for a Dodge Grand Caravan). We thought about it overnight, and went back in the next day to see what kind of deal we could make. in the end, we got a new car for about $7-8,000 less than had we just bought it brand new.

Of course, the downside to this great deal is that I have car payments again...

Free Comics?! WOW(IO)!

Apparently, Modern Pulp and the rest of the Rorschach Entertainment titles have gone digital!

James Taylor, publisher of RE, just told me that all of our titles are now available online as PDF downloads from WOWIO. For those of you unfamiliar with the site, WOWIO is an online bookstore that enables people to download all sorts of "ebooks" for free. Instead of a normal "pay to download" system, they use commercial sponsorships to pay creators and publishers. The people have zilch. Not too shabby of a system...

The only drawback I've seen of this site is the registration. In order to download the books, you must register and set up an account. No big deal there, but you have to wait a day or so until they get back to you with account verification before you can download any books. Still, those with a bit of patience (and I know you are out there!) can easily wait a tiny bit before downloading a book.

Each book is in PDF format, so anyone can read it using Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you don't have that, just go to the Abode website and download it.

For all of the Rorschach Entertainment and Modern Pulp books currently available, head on over to the RE page at WOWIO to start downloading!

Not With A Bang...

...nor with a whimper. The new year of 2008 appears with nary a noise, and a few false starts (anyone watching the ill-fated and poorly executed fireworks display in Seattle can attest to that). Granted, it's only been a day, so who knows what this new year will bring.

For me, nothing has really changed. I still have Blue Shift and Steve Lawlis and Sprecken and Dallas McCoy in the works, with other projects festering in the background. I still have the upcoming Emerald City ComiCon to work on, as well as The Comic Stop to run.

If all goes well, the next issue of Sprecken: Kalabus Rex and Steve Lawlis will be out for ECCC, if not sooner. The first issue of Blue Shift is also slated to debut at that show, but may not debut until later in the summer, such as at San Diego or Chicago.

I'm hoping to get the launch of the Dallas McCoy series out by the Fall, as well. And who knows, if all goes well, there may be a Gibson Dent miniseries starting, too. Beyond that, I think I'll keep my schedule open and see what happens...

One Lucky Year

Today's the day. One year ago, my son JACK CLIFFORD AVERY MEREDITH was born, giving me the best birthday present I've ever gotten. It even beats out the iPod I got the previous year!

My family and I had a simple birthday party for him; some vanilla cake and a few presents for him to play with. We presented him with a cake with candles, sang to him, and blew them out for him. He had no clue what the hell was going on, but he seemed to enjoy it. Lucky is nothing if not curiously happy. Then, we cut him a chunk of cake and let him at it. He was actually rather subdued, not making too much of a mess, as you all can see from the picture to the left.

Afterwards, we opened up a few presents that he received: a toy dump truck for babies, some cool learning blocks, a super-textured moose, and a couple of other things. All in all, not too bad of a night for the Little Man.

Now, sharing my birthday may not seem like a lot of fun to some, but it's actually pretty neat. I have that little extra connection to the boy. There's no way the rest of the family will forget our birthday. Plus, as I'm old and decrepit, I no longer have cake for just my birthday. This way, I'm guaranteed to get cake for now on! Sugar Coma, here I come!

Pulp Refreshed

It's been a while since I've made an update concerning my Modern Pulp projects, what with all of my recent time and energy going into Blue Shift, so I figured I'd make a quick rundown on what is going on...

Dallas McCoy

The new Dallas McCoy series is still in the works, but we are now looking for a second artist for the book. Although we have several scripts ready to go, our regular DM artist (Sidney Lima) is now too busy working on the Blue Shift book to get it off the ground. We're looking at an artist now, so hopefully we'll be back on track with this soon.

Sprecken: Kalabus Rex

The second issue of the Sprecken: Kalabus Rex mini-series is still being lettered. I had hoped to have it ready for the middle of October, but I was just swamped with getting Blue Shift off the ground. Now that the preview book is done with, I'll be getting back to finishing it up. By the way, the art shown here was drawn by Pedro Pablo, the artist for this mini-series.

Lucifer Fawkes: North of Here

The final issue of the one-shots, Lucifer Fawkes: North of Here, is still in in production, albeit very slowly. At this point, it really just needs to be lettered, but we're just not certain what we are going to do with this. We may release it as a one-shot for next year, or we may just compile it into a trade with the others.

Gibson Dent: The Amulet of Sa-Ra

This has been bugging me for awhile. I've really been wanting to get back to this character, but I wasn't quite sure what to do. Should I finish the old online story where I left off? Do I rewrite it as a novel? I just could not make up my mind. But, truth be told, neither idea seemed to work for me. However, the thought of rewriting the original online story as a full comic did have a certain appeal. In order to make the deadline on the old online strip, I had to cut out a lot of stuff I wanted to do with him and his supporting cast. So, I may be re-doing this as a straight adventure comic...