I’ve been pretty lax about posting for the last couple of weeks, due to a super-secret project. Well, I’m happy to announce that the project is complete, and can now be unleashed upon the world.

A little background for the uninitiated: Watchmen, in its original graphic novel form, featured a gigantic squid-like monster in a rather prominent role. The movie version of Watchmen hits theaters on March 6, and director Zack Snyder has promised it will remain faithful to the source material. With one small exception: he left out the squid. His movie is squidless. Whether the movie is good or bad, whether the new ending works or not, the fact will remain that we won’t get to see New York under attack from a monstrous cephalopod. What to do?

Sell “I [squid] NY” T-shirts, that’s what. You can’t change the movie, but you can sure as hell put a few more squids in the theater. People are excited about this movie, and you can set yourself apart from the Johnny-come-latelies by saying to the world, “Screw you, I read the book!” And if the movie turns out to be bad? Distance yourself from it by displaying your dedication to the original ending! Either way, the other nerds will love you.

If you don’t want one, you probably have a friend who will. Maybe it’s a Watchmen fan, maybe it’s a scientist who studies squids or something; I don’t know who your friends are. I just know that I don’t have much of an advertising budget for this project, so a little word-of-mouth couldn’t hurt. So come on; make the other nerds jealous.

I probably don’t have much English Major cred left at this point in my life, mostly because I actually enjoy comedy, and spend an inordinate amount of time dreaming up clever T-shirt slogans. Still, I’ve always been proud of the fact that I never went through a Stephen King phase. I have never read any of his novels. I take a perverse pride in that confession — it suggests (falsely) that I have never sullied myself with popular fiction.

I’ve seen movies based on Stephen King’s work, of course; everyone’s seen Carrie and The Shining and The Shawshank Redemption, and probably some others that I’m forgetting. More recently, I’d been following Marvel’s comic book adaptation of The Stand with some interest. I figured it was worth a shot, what with my fondness for comics that aren’t about superheroes. And that’s where my troubles began.

In January, they published the fifth issue of the planned 30-issue series. The story was finally starting to get good and weird. I, like generations of comics fans before me, wanted my next fix as soon as possible. When I checked Marvel’s website, I discovered the next issue wouldn’t be out until the middle of fucking March. If I wanted to see what happened next, I had three choices:

A. Wait until March like a fucking caveman.
B. Track down the crappy early-90’s TV miniseries based on the book, which seemed cool when I was 13 but which I can’t even remember now.
C. just read the goddamn book.

I kicked my principles to the curb and chose “C”, dreaming up rationalizations the whole time. “I’m not really reading this book,” I told myself, “I just want spoilers for the comics! The fact that I’m willing to slog through this 1200-page doorstop just shows how committed I am to comics as a medium!”

Turns out, the book isn’t half-bad. The story isn’t bad, at least; I frequently take issue with King’s choice of words, and his fondness for old cars and Americana in general. I’m not here to talk about any of that. It’s an old book, and my feelings about it are neutral for now. Anyone who wants to read it has read it, and I’m still not sure if I like (or hate) it enough to make a case for (or against) it.

Instead, I want to talk about what King doesn’t do. Specifically, he doesn’t just dump exposition on us at the first opportunity. He waits until it’s appropriate (or at least he did at this phase of his career). The more I considered it, the more fully I realized that most of my complaints about “genre fiction” — horror, mystery, science fiction, “thrillers”, etc. — trace back to authors’ inability to pick their moments.

For example, how many books begin this way:

Max Douchington was having a bad day. At 41 years old, he wasn’t quite as fast as he used to be, but his 6′2″ frame carried his 190 pounds well, and he still had his hair, even if his temples now showed more salt than pepper. He was handsome enough — that’s what Cindy had always said, back when she was still willing to talk to him: “handsome enough” — but he had always preferred to spend his time alone. Anyway, he was having a bad day, so let’s try to swing back around to that subject again.

Why the fuck are we learning this? Are sitting there, watching it happen, or are we reading a story about it (written in the past tense, no less)? This is no way to tell a story! If Mr. Douchington is running around by himself, apparently under duress, he’s not going to fill out a mental eHarmony profile just in case there are readers spying on his thoughts. If I was pitching a movie, yes, all this information would be helpful: male, 41, 6′2″, 190 pounds, going gray, kind of a loner, used to know someone named Cindy. Got it? Great! Now let’s put some lifts in Tom Cruise’s shoes and make this movie! But in a book? It sort of blows.

If Max Douchington is going to be the subject of a longer story, there will be plenty of chances to tell the readers what he looks like. Maybe he’ll meet another character, who will take note of his appearance. Maybe his bad day involves getting arrested, and all that information will appear on the paperwork at the police station. Maybe he’ll get into a car accident and lose a leg, and spend the next five years spiraling ever-deeper into an inescapable depression, just sitting around the house eating terrible food and getting fat and never washing his hair, until one day when he’s hobbling his one-legged ass to the store to buy another fucking box of Ho-Hos, he catches his reflection in the window of a parked car and thinks back on how much better-looking he was five years ago.

See? Those are all better than “man having a bad day pauses for no reason and talks about how sexy he is.”

So to all you English Majors, all you aspiring novelists and memoirists and bloggers and Star Trek fanfic writers, I say this: Stephen King knows better than to write about Max Douchington. Stephen King, the guy who writes books about haunted cars and sells them to angsty teenagers and their doughy, suburban parents, knows more about how to construct his stories than you do. And more than I do, to be fair.

And that, my friends, is a humbling thought for anyone who wants to write respectable books someday. Learn your lesson, and leave Max Douchington out of it.

It’s early January, and everyone on the internet is busy putting together their “Best of 2008″ lists. On top of that, it’s a Sunday, which many websites regard as a content-free day. Lucky for you, I discovered some mind-blowing weirdness earlier this week, and am now compelled to share it.

Behold, Lasagna Cat! Created by someone or something called Fatal Farm, the site takes a truly unpleasant premise — “What if we made poorly green-screened live-action versions of old ‘Garfield’ comic strips?” — and uses it to find humor in what would normally be stupefyingly unfunny. On top of that, each strip reenactment is followed by a musical tribute to “Garfield” creator Jim Davis.

These tributes range from simple parodies of well-known music videos to explorations of the complex inner life of Garfield’s owner Jon… You know what? It’s easier to just show you:

See? Jon’s got it pretty rough.

I don’t know what it is that makes these videos work. Maybe it’s the grotesque, ill-fitting costume worn by the actor portraying Garfield, or the inappropriateness of the songs, or the not-quite-concealed contempt for the source material. Maybe it’s the way that all these forms of banality — lame comic strips, painfully earnest pop music, ugly wigs — come together and transform into something almost sublime. Maybe it’s the fact that your average “Garfield” fan would probably think a lot of these videos were sincere, loving tributes.

Indeed, because this is the internet, I must assume that an intrepid fanfic author is, at this very moment, composing a heartrending tale about Jon’s miserable bachelorhood and Garfield’s cold indifference to his plight, and really meaning every last word of it. Before you start thinking too hard about that, here’s another video:

If that one doesn’t convince you of the goodness and rightness of Lasagna Cat’s mission, nothing will. Really, the only problem I can see is that it took me almost a year to discover this madness.

I’ve never really done New Year’s resolutions. My birthday is January 1st, and surviving another year usually feels like enough of an accomplishment that I don’t bother setting any more implausible goals for myself. This year, though, I’ve got a good one:

My resolution for 2009 is to convince somebody to pay me for something I actually like doing.

Which is to say, I want to finish at least one comic, and sell at least one copy.

Which is to say, if I manage to complete one of my many, many unfinished comics, I plan on seriously showing it to people. Not just passing it around among my friends or posting it here, but giving it to wealthy strangers who might want to publish it. It will certainly work better than my current strategy of doing nothing.

As much as I enjoy writing on my very own fancy-pants website, I’d rather be selling unreadable comic books to an obscure niche audience. I don’t want to “break into the industry” or anything so grand; just sell a couple books to complete strangers. Hopefully they’ll like it, but that’s not really necessary for my plan.

Mostly I just want an excuse to blog about comics as I work on them, and to vent about the miserable slowness of the creative process. Maybe post some art every now and then, but probably not. At the very least, I’ll always have something to write about on slow news days, and that’s reason enough to try this.

Nearly everyone in my life had been talking about it for the last few days — by sheer coincidence, probably — so I finally said, “Fuck it,” and decided to re-read every single issue of Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” in order, from the beginning. Not necessarily the extra stuff, or the standalone Death stories, but definitely the 75 “real” issues, starting with #1. After all, it had been just long enough for me to forget the details of basically all the stories, and the endings to every single one (because, as I have long maintained, if you’re good at writing crazy mystical shit, you will always cop out on the ending).

And, all right. With my teen angst and stormy college loves behind me, I can say: they’re still pretty good. Sure, it’s nearly 20 years later and no one has called Gaiman out on the fact that he obviously wishes he looked like his protagonist. The art was clearly produced for a company nervous about dipping its toes into the scary “alternative comics” universe. And I still don’t get how people can treat Norse gods and faeries as equally non-silly. But none of that matters!

You know why? Because from 1989 to 1996, Neil Gaiman wrote these stories. Without Google or Wikipedia.

Holy shit.

Do you have any idea how fucking dusty half his research materials must have been? Apart from The Endless, his dysfunctional family of immortals (who may as well have had a sibling named Dysfunction), and a few of the humans, nearly everything in those books comes from somewhere else. Sometimes it’s just a forgotten corner of the DC universe, but usually it’s some obscure bit of history or mythology that’s been around for centuries, but lost to all but the most obsessive scholars. And he dug these bits of trivia out of the libraries and wrote comics about them.

Who the hell was Neil Gaiman writing for here? Clearly he hoped to entertain, and maybe draw some people toward his own highly esoteric interests. But was he really counting on his readers to stroll down to the library and fact-check his work? To read up on Japanese storm deities or the life of Christopher Marlowe or the calendar used after the French Revolution?

I want to believe, as much as the next geek, that we comics fans are a clever bunch, but there is just no way that happened. A good number of his fans were, and still are, strictly interested in the gothy imagery, sitting around wondering which of the Endless they would be*. And most of the rest simply assumed he was inventing most of it, and got all excited when they spotted a reference they understood. (”Wow, he must have read something I also read!”)

These references have become much easier to spot this time around, because I have been using Wikipedia. Seriously, everything is there. Most of it is, at least. At this point, I’m more surprised when something doesn’t have a thousand-year history than when it does. At one point, a very minor character (literally, some dude chained up in Hell) loudly and repeatedly declares that, 1100 years earlier, he was Breschau of Livonia. Could Wikipedia help? As far as I can tell, there was no Breschau. There really was a Livonia, though, and the other characters were correct in their assessment of its present state: “I doubt one living mortal in a hundred thousand could even point to where Livonia used to be, on a map.” I looked at a map, and 24 hours later I’ve already forgotten where Livonia was. Apparently, the real-life Livonian language is nearly extinct.

So I guess that’s everyone’s homework, from now until the zombie apocalypse: pick up a book you haven’t read in a while, and look up everything that made you ask, “Is that true?” the first time you read it. It’ll take forever, and you’ll spend the rest of your life interrupting people to assault them with random bits of trivia. But at least no one will be able to claim the internet made you stupid. Kind of annoying, maybe, but not stupid.

*Nobody ever picks Despair. If scientists discovered a race of depressed, turnip-shaped trolls who had all read “Sandman,” even they wouldn’t pick Despair. If someone you know picks Despair, congratulate them on their frankness, then get them the fuck into counseling.

The last “Opus” has run. The only consolation is that it’s technically two strips; the first part is running in newspapers, and the second half is here.

Apparently, there is some kind of contest involved. I didn’t enter it. Steve Dallas is old, and the penguin that’s jerked me around for the last two decades appears to really be gone this time.

The world needs to promise me that I will never see Opus on the back of a truck, peeing on whatever the driver hates. Losing one childhood hero to that fate was more than enough. Bill Watterson never approved those, and you’re right to scrape them off of strangers’ vehicles.