Notes from Mitch Waxman... call it a blog if you like.

2/19/06-

Ahh, sweet mad little Kastanet. Remember her from the Starry Ones? Check out the early versions of the Golden Horde and their queen at these links, here- here- here-, and remember, if a Hordeman says anything at all- that's a continuity error. One of the remarkable things about Ancram's little metaverse is how it all hangs together. The vagaries of a daily comic strip mean that sometimes an action sequence can stretch unconsionably. A punch gets thrown and connects like a week later. Often, we use this to our advantage, when we do one of infamous -meanwhile:- sequences. Sometimes, I have to move certain storypoints forward to make up time for a sequence which is 3D rendering at a blazingly slow speed. What I've always thought is cool is the way that our little comic's self referential stuff connects the dots if you go to the archives and read the older strips. In a lot of ways, its all one big story. I'm probably letting some kind of cat out of the bag here, but in fact- IT IS ALL ONE BIG STORY.
So, I'm right now around 2 months ahead of the strip, with lots of very cool stuff coming. We're going to be doing rather short story installments for a while. By the Numbers almost killed me by the end, and I need to just do different stuff for a while. It's cool to draw again, but I'm still a little rusty. Bear with me, by the third Horde story, I start getting back to myself.
More adventures in Queens with Mitch- So, the wife and I are celebrating a personal milestone with some pals at the local pub on the most cold as a witch's titty night in recent memory, when some guy taps me on the shoulder and says "gimme your hat". I say "no". He calls me a bitch for not giving him my hat. I say "Bitch? Hey that's not cool, man". He starts making little fisticuff motions at me. Rather surprised by this turn of events, I just stared at him while I wore my hat. He eventually drifted away in a drunken fury, but man- I just don't understand the world. My hat is my hat.

2/7/06-

1) Next week, at last, the hordemen cometh. Prepare for lamentation, cruelty, and a callous disregard for law.
2) So I'm sitting down after dinner, at my desk as usual, around 8ish. Talking to the girl about our lost weekend (lost the tv series, which we watched ALL weekend) when I hear craziness just under my window. Some kid is stomping the heck out of a woman who is stomping him right back. I throw open my window and say: Hey lady, do you need help? The kid yells back up- "call the police, get the police here right now". Showing just how many Batman comics I have read over the years, I find myself hurtling at maximum boogey down to these rough queens, ny streets to mete out justice- or at least seperate the opponents. Turns out the lady was a shoplifter, the kid a supermarket store detective.
My trusty wife had called 911 and the cops arrived toot sweet. Also seems my block is absolutley crawling with cops. That guy with the motorcycle- cop. The tall hot woman across the street- cop. When I first moved here, I had 2 cops living right across the hall. They had loud cop parties, and you couldn't call the cops, because then there would be more of them.
I'm not down of cops, per se, but I don't like being around anyone whose "word" is more trusted than mine- automatically- and who can carry a gun into an airport. I don't like hanging with gangsters for the same reasons.

2/1/06-

Lately, I'm thinking a lot about the deep earth. Not the "deep" earth, home only to the extremeophiles whom some have theorized are the true source of petroleum. I'm talking about that zone which men and women could reasonably be expected to adapt to. What is there to eat? Is the water ok? What about light? After, say- 10,000 or so years, would the decendants of ancient spelunkers be a distinct racial/national grouping amongst the tribes of man (in the manner of the Inuits of the arctic or the Pygmys of central africa)?
The Neanderthals were a distinct group, holed up in the Middle East and Europe, isolated from our ancestors by ice and distance. In many ways, they were the ones who should have extincted us. Stronger than us, their bones were thicker and thickly ridged with muscular groups far denser than ours. They were clever and survived a hard land for a long time, until we came along. At least thats what the archaeologists tell us.
Most of what we believe about the past comes out of the ruins of stone buildings that were built to last. Hence- we know nothing about cultures which used wood and hide. When the current age is dug out of the sand, the Hell's Angels will be remembered because some part of their choppers will survive. So will the current Sheikh of Dubai be commented on for the enormous earth works done at his command. New York, London, Berlin, & Paris will be legends, like Alexandria, Persepolis, Uruk, and Tenochtitlan. Ever heard of the Stone House of Great Zimbabwe? Can you name an african empire that isn't Egypt, Nubia, or British?
A people can just disappear, in my worldview, into the ground.
I've been thinking a lot about the Deep Earth, lately.

1/25/06-

Armonk Ossining got started in news a long time ago. For years, the weird stuff has just been showing up at his door, via express mail. Weird stuff like unknown hominids, vampires, a bunch of alien abduction cases, ghost stories, and a wagonload of conspiracy tales. He's been to Innsmouth and Ponape, Cambodia and Antarctica. Most of Armonk's old reporter buddies think he's gone nuts, throwing away his career on these edgy stories no wire service will ever accept. Through the sale of a reel of found footage, Armonk managed to pull his Alternative Information Network together. AIN broadcasts to satellite & web. It's audience includes more than a few high ranking employees of the United States government.

1/24/06-

Mom is on the mend and the war with russian spammers begins anew. What these clowns are doing is exploiting the anonymous nature of our guestbook code. Y'see, what they do is post a "legitimate" email address along with a link at a website that google (etc.) knows is valid. This association in the googlebot cgi gives the spammer what is known as "link popularity". The more links that point to a certain site, the more popular google (etc.) thinks it is. So, russian spammer has set up an ad or spyware trap somewhere and intends for the buyers of high quality widgets to find his site legitimized by a high search engine rank. He bombs his link to thousands of sites like our beloved weirdass.net. Customer orders widgets, loses identity and money, russian spammer disappears. I don't want any part of this. I am a good guy - my favorite superhero is Superman, and I believe in truth, justice, and the american way. Anyway...
Take this "kontuper" character. Posts the same drivel every couple days everywhere, even though your previous links are gone. Doesn't matter, because all that matters is the link. Anyway, that's why we've been editing the gusetbook. If you sign, and leave an e-mail addy, insert some nonsense into it somewhere. "mitch@"nospam"domain.com works. Would be fun to know how fast the prior addy starts getting spammed, huh?
Updates every day this week. Don't miss friday.

1/16/06-

Another epic day of driving across the city of greater new york for old mitch today. Feeling better, myself, but Mom is still mending & needed some arranging. So, off to Staten Island. Behind me, 8,000 gallons of burning oil- in front- a vista of strip malls & holiday traffic.

1/14/06-

Well, today is going to be a sword-day, a red-day, a comics day. As I've got to return to a proper schedule with the comic, I'm planning on setting up a few dozen panels for "By the Numbers". The 3D renders have been taking an unusually long time on the last set. (panel 3 of the current installment took a whopping 8.75 hours to complete. That's why we don't do animation, usually.

1/13/06-

I write this at 3:30 in the morning, sick with a chest cold that is driving me to distraction. Cough, Cough, Cough. That's what I have to say. And sneeze. I decided to leave the marital bed out of some sense of pity for my still uninfected wife and her alarm clock setting which is 3 hours earlier than mine. Right on schedule, a bunch of work issues seem to sorting themselves out. Hopefully, I'll be returning to a full time schedule of annoying ad agency work soon. Hate doing it, but it sure does pay the bills. Unfortunately, weirdass doesn't.
On the ghost front, which Ancram & I are really into at the moment, I'd like to recommend a trip over to one of John Zaffis's sites. JZ seems to be connected into whole Ed & Lorraine Warren scene, and I think that the "Mr Bojo" link is very cool and a little disconcerting.
Can't let Friday the 13th go by without a link or two. Wiki has this to say on Triskaidekophobia, and don't forget the mad murdering mongoloid of camp crystal lake (what he was called in a less PC age, when I literally used to live down the block from Andrew Dice Clay), Jason Voorhies- its his birthday.

1/11/06-

Mom is on the mend, but her hemoglobin is mysteriously disappearing. What goes on? Not much to say for today. Seem to have gotten the strip back on schedule for now. Working furiously on a Golden Horde story called "redshift" y'all will see later this year. Here's a taste.

1/10/06-

So, friday night I call my mom. We have the usual meaningless conversation unitl at one point, she asks me if my girlfriend has come back from her trip yet. As I'm married, and my mom is somewhat obsessed with my wife, this is an odd question. Well, a call to her doctor meant to annotate this latest manifestation of my mom's shipwreck of medical problems solcited the following medical advice- CALL 911, NOW. Oy vey.
I tranversed the spectacular city of New York, a journey of around 50 miles through the densest series of traffic jams known to man (the BQE from Astoria to the Gowanus to the Verrazano to the Staten Island Expressway), in a startling 34 minutes. I arrived at the hospital, visited with my Mom, and gave a cogent medical history to the ER docs. Turns out, my Mom had a recurrance of a cellulitis infection which had made her all weird and goofy and incredibly sick. Not the first time, with the infection or the scenario detailed above. She's on big-time antibiotics and will be off her feet for a while. Diabetes sucks.
The hospital she's in is Staten Island University Hospital. This is a weird place. My wife posted her observations of this anomalous institution here.

Just received the latest series of entertainment discs from amazon.com

The Call of Cthulhu- Wow. A truly independent film, this is a BW silent movie staging HP Lovecraft's story. The story is the core of the Mythos, and the HP Lovecraft Historical Society has done it justice. They used the tricks of the silent era to compensate for budgetary restraints, and the "mythoscope" camerawork is great. Cthulhu itself is a stop motion actor. Worth your bucks! For those who just want to hear Ronald Coleman read it, click here.

More on the audio front of cyclopean madness- "Jeffrey Combs reads HP Lovecrafts's Herbert West: Reanimator" is a treat. Yes, Combs- the actor who played Herbert West in the movies. Yes, Combs of From Beyond. Combs of Babylon 5, Combs of Star Trek. Combs, who is to Lovecraft what Christopher Lee was to Bram Stoker.

1/5/06-

I really feel like I need to apologize for the sketchy update schedule lately and explain a couple of things. I started working on this comic in 1999. It launched in April of 2000 and was dependably daily for nearly 5 years. The 3D stuff is so incredibly complex and time consuming that it really has shut down whole sections of my life. Ancram and I never asked for money, we do this work because we love doing it. Xmas, new years, 9/11- we updated. Then we started publishing the print on demand comics, which doubled the workload. Most of these, I'm drawing/coloring/lettering. Add in my full-time advertising job, a marriage I strive to keep happy, and whatever friends I've managed to keep through all this and suffice to say this results in around 4 hours of sleep. By the Numbers, believe it or not, is coming to an end at last. This ending will literally change everything. These massive changes will kickstart a new cycle of stories which will be appearing at weirdass and in our p.o.d. books. As you may have noticed, Ancram and I are into continuity. The web comics and the p.o.d. books will compliment each other in pursuit of this continuity. The Golden Horde book at Comixpress introduces a new character (The Brutician) who will figure mightily into the next set of stories. Hopefully, next week, I'll be releasing a few new web stories that will reveal some of what I'm talking about. The first will be called- A gilded witch.

Comics I read today-

DC's ouvre- Infinity Crisis isn't floating my boat. I hate multi-series crossovers where all you get is 2 pages of storyline from say... Firestorm and then drop it to do 2 pages from Huntress. These kinds of crossover events designed to sell not so popular books are really overdone at the house of the bat, and it's time to find a new device for these kind of universe rewrites. I did dig Marvel Zombies, although its the dumbest idea I've ever heard.

My pal Bissette has been writing a lengthy treatise on the new King Kong movie, over at his blog- http://www.srbissette.com/theblog.html. I've been avoiding actually reading it because I haven't seen it yet.

George Lutz of amityville horror fame has a web site. Appropriately enough, its called http://www.amityvillehorror.com/.
Quoth Lutz re: the recent remake of the film- "It's true that we moved into a house where murders took place. It's true that we knew about the murders before we bought the house and moved in. It's true that the people that moved in where named George and Kathy Lutz. And that we were married recently. That when we moved in, we were five months married. It's true that the house we moved into had a boathouse. And that we had a boat. It's true that we had a dog named Harry. And it's true that we had Kathy's three children. And that we had a telephone. That's it."

1/4/06-

Hi all, Mitch here. This page is going to ramble a bit over time. Readers of the daily comics should be familiar with this. Check in here for news, information on the comics, and whatever other bizarro stuff I happen across in my daily process.

For some reason, I spent the holiday weekend listening to podcasts, mainly because the TV let me down.

Movies I saw:

Caught Oliver Stone's Alexander on HBO, which was astoundingly bad. Miscast, Colin Farrell did his best, but there really was no saving this flick. Stone couldn't decide on a narrative device to tell the story, switching incoherently between a putty faced Anthony Hopkins as Ptolemey and a cgi eagle. Feh. Stone's messed up sense of history, which I'm normally happy to comply with (Platoon, JFK, Nixon) just killed me in this one. Made Troy seem well done.

Not a fan of Liam Neeson as a leading man, I was stunned by his performance in Kinsey. A grown-up movie, well done.
Check it out, but put the kids to bed first.

Godzilla: Final wars. Don't miss this one. Directed by Ryuhei Kitamura, this is the payoff to long suffering G-fans. Everything the Japanese film industry has learned from Manga is represented in this guy. Hooray, make popcorn and turn down the lights.

Books I read:

Well, decided to read demonology books for xmas this year. The Demonologist by Gerald Brittle is back in print, detailing the weird career of Ed & Lorraine Warren. Professional ghost hunters, the Warrens have a manner in which they present implausible events couched in a wealth of everyday detail that makes these events seem possible. This is a classic fringe publication. Don't miss it.

Podcasts I listened to while doing the comic.

The Paranormal Podcast is fun. Get it through itunes for free or hit podcast.net and search for "paranormal".

Also at podcast.net, you can find the Lou Gentile show. He's a demonologist too.

I wish Judge Judy was a demonologist, so she could tell Satan not to piss on her leg and say that its raining.

Weirdass News

Our "Tales of the Golden Horde" is finally in print over at Comixpress. You'll be seeing a preview of this in the next few days. Ancram & I really have to appeal to y'all to pick this one up. The daily strip (toward the middle of the year) will be interwoven with this book. This is a full color, hand drawn scifi comic.