Previously, on …

I thought it might be nice to round up the least-sucky stuff I’ve done in this blog and on Badmouth proper (two words I wouldn’t have expected to see in the same sentence, much less side-by-side). I also thought it would be nice to invent rum-based cocktails in lieu of cooking dinner tonight, so, <shrug>your mileage may vary</shrug>.

Since my baby left me, I haven’t had to find a new place to dwell, exactly, but I have been letting my heartbreak hang out at this here hotel. Things have taken a turn for the slightly more personal. Stealing a Tom Waits song title, “New Suit of Clothes” holds a mirror up to myself, and “We Laugh (or drink) So We Do Not Cry” is a small slice of family life. “What Love Doesn’t Conquer” covers a few moments in our struggle with this less than certain phase, while a more permanent break, and probably the best of these pieces, plays out in “Lost Hours.” In the immortal words of Tommy Flanagan: “GET TA KNOW ME!”

I did a series of posts called “The Heroes’ Journey,” in which I pondered some of my fictional heroes throughout my life. There are the super-heroes, the tarnished knights of Chandler and Hammett, the lyrical inspirations of Bruce Springsteen, and a quick menagerie of later influences, from Nick and Nora Charles to Paul and Jamie Buchman.

Over Christmas, I posted a five-part remembrance of my holidays spent in Japan, where Christmas is not the Christmas you know. I slept in an alley, I slept in “capsule” beds like morgue slabs, I slept in the apartment of a complete stranger, who gave me her keys and left the country because I’d asked one interesting question in a bar. This was a weird time in my life.

One morning a coworker sends me a link and a “can you believe this?” over IM. The NSA and Co. are creating their own MySpace. And the first joke that pops into my head is soulless CIA assassins pulling Internet pranks on company time. Thus was born “LOLspies.” I had it up inside of half an hour, and I liked it enough that I sent it to BoingBoing, which drew a decent boost in traffic. Which made me wish I’d spent more time on the art, though the Bond one never fails to crack me up.

Dog days of summer bring on the nostalgia, I guess … I did back-to-back posts in late August that went back years. In Sevilla in 2005, I became infatuated with the graffiti tags of some unknown Sevillana. The fact they were the only way I could keep from getting lost was the main attraction. Also, perhaps explaining two obvious questions raised by the foregoing, I detail the history of my wary love affair with drink.

I thought I had two good sentences buried in the Rough Draft version of my look at Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein, in the recurring “Current Read” feature. I polished it up a couple days later and smacked it up on Badmouth. It’s better, especially since I improved both the sentences I liked. I recommend the Badmouth version.

Next — The movie was unbearably bad, and left me so infuriated I couldn’t make even a pretense of writing a coherent review, so instead I dumped 2,000 words of unrestrained angst onto the Internet. Probably my best-received review ever, though I was at least as pleased with how much flak the High Tension review drew.

Vegans Make Me Want to Eat Bunnies — I’m hoping to upgrade this for the main Badmouth sometime soon. I know it needs work, but I’m very pleased with the goofball character who inspired it, and the title.

The Mad Birth of the Silver Surfer — Ahead of the premiere of the second Fantastic Four movie, I finally read the forty-year-old comics that the sequel’s plot would be drawn from. Still utterly intoxicated by Jack Kirby’s insane vision, I (over)wrote an entirely overwrought paean to those two-and-a-half issues in which crazy ideas collide like loose electrons in an uncontrolled chain reaction. Got me called a total dork on Fark, which, I say affectionately, is like being called an old biddy by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Time Knows You’re Not Cool — The first time I took a Rough Draft entry and tried to polish it into something for Badmouth. There’s more to be said about the issues that, for me, underlie my exasperation at Time’s knee-jerk contempt for culture that’s more niche than mass.

I Hate Angels — When I was in Osaka in, I think, 1994, I and the college buddy who’d drawn me there in the first place tried to start up a literary magazine for the Kansai area. This was an utter mess. But I was pleased with exactly two things: One of our associates, Ivan, had a sister who was pretty hot. I managed to photograph her standing in front of a cemetery sculpture in such a way that she appeared to have stone angel wings growing out of her back—it went with a short story, comic-book format, that I did for the issue. I thought the writing was halfway decent, but the art was terrible. My friend Adam showed it to a fellow cartoonist and pro storyboard artist, whose sole question was, “Does it physically hurt him to draw?” but I also put together this diatribe against divinity and spiritual laziness that I’m still marginally proud of.