February
2001
"Always be
smarter than the people who hire you."
-- Lena Horne
Welcome to the first dispatch of 2001. We
hope this newly minted missive finds you all healthy and relatively happy.
We’ve been pretty busy here at the H.O.F, which means we have a lot
of projects to tell you about, so I hope you don't mind if I quit talkin'
and start chalkin' -- er, well, actually, I guess I'm still going to be
"talking"... sorry, that old "8-Ball Deluxe" pinball reference just sort
of popped into my head and...oh, forget it. here's the latest from
us.
Oh, wait – before we get down to it I
just wanted to belatedly express our thanks to everyone who came out to the
World's Funnest signing at Jim Hanley's Universe last November,
as well as those folks who stopped by our table at the National Comic Book
Expo that same month. Thanks as well to those who've written in to the HOF
in regards to World's Funnest, Dork
#8, as well as this, that and the other
thing. Okay, let’s get
down to it now!
ELTINGVILLE IN
HOLLYWOOD
As most of you reading this probably know,
we’ve been working on a half hour animated
Eltingville Club pilot for the Cartoon Network since early last
year. Here’s where we stand
at the moment: Pre-production took longer than expected, but all in all it
went very smoothly. We’re now in
triple-dog-dare honest-to-gosh
production, which will hopefully go just as smoothly. The storyboard was
approved, it looks like we have a director (a real one, with credits and
everything!), and Sarah and I are working with a voice casting agent to see
if we can find decent voices for our indecent characters. That’s really
all I can discuss about the show right now, but hopefully (there’s that
ever-present word again) everything will work out and we’ll end up with
a halfway decent pilot episode on our hands.
In the meanwhile, we’re still spending
time in the comics mines – so read on and see what we’ve been up
to!
ACTION GIRL COMICS
NEWS!
Hey --
Action Girl #19 is
at long last out in stores and available to you, the reading public! As current
WWF heavyweight champ would say, “It’s true! It’s
true!” Featuring a
newly-designed logo and some new interior tweaking, the latest issue of
Sarah’s anthology features contributions from longtime AGC stalwarts
Patty Leidy and Christine Tobey, newcomers Debbie Vasquez and A.J. Trujillo,
and a 7-page strip about Satan’s kid sister -- written by Sarah from
an idea by real-life kid contributor Madeleine Replogle and illustrated by
Elizabeth (Charm School) Watasin
and Sarah. So here’s a head’s up if you’ve been looking for
a new AGC fix. And look for #20 sometime down the road, as well as the Action
Girl Co-ed Special, which will feature a 16-page Kid Blastoff spin-off tale
featuring One Punch Goldberg, girl boxing champ of
space
HECTIC GOINGS ON
The third
Hectic
Planet trade collection,
"The Young and The Reckless", has been solicited for an April 2001 release
from Slave Labor Graphics. This 96-page book will collect HP #5 and 6 and
the Vroom Socko: Paid in Full one-shot,
with about a dozen or so new illustrations for the repackaging, a new story
page, and a back-up gallery section including HP cover and t-shirt art and
a selection of punk and ska album covers Sarah and I have done during the
early-mid ‘90’s. That same month SLG will also release
The Bummer Trilogy, a one-shot comic collecting the three 8-page
HP stories I did for Dark Horse presents in
1997. With these releases, all
my HP material will be available from SLG, paving the way for my eventual
return to the series, which I hope to be able to do later this
year.
LATEST DORK
DOINGS
SLG will be putting out the first
Dork trade collection in June, which will be called
Who's
Laughing Now?. The book will clock in at 112 pages, and will collect
most of Dork #1-5, excluding the
Milk and Cheese strips (already collected in their own comic), the Eltingville
strips (slated for their own eventual collection) and the "Kyle and Evan:
Critics at large" live show review strips (it's a long story). Everything
else – the Murder Family, the Devil Puppet, the Fun strips, Fisher-Price
Theatre, et al -- will be organized into their own chapters, rounded out
with new chapter heading art and strips, new packaging art and a gallery
section featuring covers, inside front covers, t-shirt designs, and other
odds and ends.
July will see the release of the ninth issue
of Dork, featuring mostly all-new
material -- the only reprint being my 3-pg autobio strip from the TwoMorrows
Streetwise anthology of 2000. The
new issue will include at least one Fun page, a new Murder Family episode,
a 2-pg strip about the plight of racist candy, and more of the usual Dork-style
nonsense.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO MILK AND
CHEESE?
I get asked this every once in a while, and
now I can tell people that work has begun on a new batch of strips for their
long-awaited (by some, at least) eighth issue. I don't know when I'll be
finished with it, but I've got plenty of material, and the itch to start
drawing the two little creeps has been getting stronger these past few months,
so I'm hoping to have it out before the end of 2001 if all goes well. I'd
love to say you're going to see something all-new and all-different this
time around, but since it's Milk and Cheese we're talking about, you know
it'll be more of the same thing, only with as many different gags and targets
as I can cram on a page. Consider
yourself warned!
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MILK AND CHEESE
BOWLING SHIRTS AND BEER MUGS?
Production problems have led to both items
being delayed indefinitely. I'm more disappointed by this than you are, believe
me, but SLG is working on getting everything smoothed out ASAP and hopefully
these items will be available by the summer convention season.
DC COMICS STUFF WE STEPPED
INTO
I'm going to be one of seemingly hundreds
of creators contributing to the already-infamous
"Bizarro comics" project being
produced at DC Comics (and overseen by
World's Funnest editor Joey Cavalieri).
This massive endeavor seemingly features enough alternative/indy cartoonist
to fill the SPX and APE conventions
combined -- apparently anyone
who's not in the damned thing chose not to be or had their phone turned off
for not paying their bills and never got the call. We’re talking about
people like Eddie Campbell, Hunt Emerson, Ivan Brunetti, Tony Millionaire,
Paul Pope, Dean Haspiel, Jessica Abel, Sam Henderson, Craig Thompson, et
al, etc, ad nauseum, all screwing around with DC's canon of costumed and
uncostumed goofballs. After World's
Funnest, I was completely burnt out from doing superhero satire/parody
stuff -- but then I figured, what the hell, I yam what I yam, why not get
in on the fun, get paid for it, and work with some really nifty people? So
I'm writing 11 pages of strips to be drawn by other folks (Carol Lay, Bill
Wray, D’Israeli and others [!]), and I'll also be drawing an Ivan Brunetti
(!!!) script, which Sarah will color. Dunno when this sucker will be out,
but you're sure to hear about it when it does. It am crazy!
Also for DC (and also for Joey Cavalieri),
Sarah and I finally completed the first half of our
Superman
Adventures two-parter entitled "Power Play”. We've started work
on the second issue’s script but the Bizarro book is taking priority,
so we dunno when we’ll wrap the storyline up. Soon, of course,
soon!
MISC COMIC BOOK
ROUND-UP
Some happy news for us is that
Nickelodeon Magazine is finally
running the Nutsy Monkey strip
we did a ways back -- we've been told it'll run in the March issue, on stands
in February. I'm really glad the strip is finally seeing print and I hope
the kids really like it. Honest! We
care!
As I type this Sarah is inking a one-page
strip I penciled from a script written by real-life kid Jake
Carney. This collaboration will
be featured in Ian Carney and Woodrow Phoenix’s SLG mini-series,
Where’s
It At, Sugar Kat? , A spin-off from their fun
Sugar Buzz series.
Look for it in March, if you
dare.
I don’t think they want or need it anymore, but I’m
done drawing the art elements for my Sin
City pin-up that Diana Schutz asked me for a year or so ago. It still
needs to be assembled and finished on the computer, but it’s almost
there. I’m going to send it to Dark Horse even if it’s unusable,
I said I’d do it, and I meant to do it, it just took forever. Anyway,
if they have no use for it in a future Sin City series, look for it to pop
up on the HOF site in a planned
“basement” section featuring unused, unseen and conceptual
artwork we’ve done in the past.
UPCOMING
APPEARANCES
Once again Sarah and I will be guests of
the Pittsburgh Comicon this
year (April 27-29), and once again I will be emceeing the
Harvey
Awards. Other guests who have been announced thus far include Frank
Miller (who will give the opening speech at the Harveys), Jeff Smith, Al
Williamson, Gray Morrow, Ed Brubaker, George Perez, Jimmy Palmiotti, Amanda
Conner, Joe Quesada, and Erik Larsen. Once the Harvey nominations have been
announced it’s likely that some nominees will be appearing as
well. It would be great if some
of you folks who are planning to be at the show would consider attending
the awards, everyone seemed to have a really good time last year and we're
trying to drum up an even better turnout this time around. The Harvey Awards
are the only award voted on only by the creators themselves, but the public
is more than welcome to the event. The dinner before the awards costs money
to attend, but the money goes to support the awards program and it was a
lot of fun in and of itself last year to be part of.
WHERE ELSE TO FIND US
ON-LINE
You can also find me (Evan) posting on the
Slave Labor Graphics message boards,
so check it out while you're there getting the latest on SLG's
releases.
on behalf of Evan Dorkin, Sarah Dyer and the
H.O.F.
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