Thanks to Lin Workman, creator of Bushi Tales, I have finally located some photos from Midsouthcon 25 which are not only from events I attended, but where I'm at least semiconscious, to boot. Surprisingly, while I felt lousy in the morning of the day I had four panels, I perked up as we went along — and the Star Wars 30th anniversary panel, speaking between Memphis Fan Force President Tim Brown and X-Wing Rogue Squadron artist  Jim Hall (seen below) was probably the most fun I've had at a panel in a long, long time. The room was packed and there was a lot of energy. Just goes to show I should schedule my first panels no earlier than 7 in the evening, and then go from there...

Check Lin's site for more pix including of  Mark Waid's signing that weekend at  Comics & Collectibles.



By the way, Greg Mitchell  (alias Hedec Ga, a poster on this site) dropped me a note at the convention to check out Outsider, and online zine he's been working with. Be sure to check it out!

And we've lost another cool actor, no pun intended. I first saw Roscoe Lee Browne when he played Box, the robot who worked in the freezer section (and took his job a little too far) of the City of Domes in Logan's Run, but he also played in two of the best episodes of All in the Family (the elevator episode) and The Cosby Show (the card game, where he utteres the immortal "I'll bump your rump with my trump!") as well as following Robert Guillaume as the Tates' butler on Soap. An unmistakable voice, that will be missed...

Hard to believe, isn't it? But that's what you'll find in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic #15, the climactic chapter to "Days of Fear"!

The production notes are now available — click the link above. Then be sure to click back here and share your thoughts on the issue!

While a lot of the obituaries of Johnny Hart have focused on his more controversial cartoons later in his career, I'm always reminded of his earliest work, as reprinted in the old Fawcett mass-market paperbacks like Hey! B.C. and What's New, B.C.

These are pretty hard to find, so it's not surprising more haven't seen them. I had a discussion with a couple of cartoonists  a few years ago (Ted Rall and John Kovalic, not to drop names) about Hart's body of work, and I mentioned that if all readers had seen were the later stuff, they might be surprised to learn how edgy B.C. was regarded in its earliest years, versus everything else on the comics page.  Charles Schulz was a huge fan, and  The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling wrote the foreword to B.C. Strikes Back.

The strips of 1958-60, when the characters first discover simple items (and more complicated ones, like women) really make the best use of the concept. And there's a fatalistic ring to many of the early strips that speaks a lot more to the late 1960s than the late 1950s -- but then, it's hard not to be fatalistic when you're a caveman! Where Schulz had Happiness is a Warm Puppy, Hart had Loneliness is Rotting on a Bookrack.

I'd really like to see a decent reprint program for these early strips. The mass-market paperbacks are out there, but are all abridged — and if there are larger versions like there were for Peanuts, I've never seen them.

And Midsouthcon 25 is done and in the books. Always a fun and exhausting adventure, my allergies made this year's panel schedule more challenging than most. (Eighty degrees — in March?!) Still, I soldiered on — and it was great to get to meet so many new fans. It was also cool to talk with Mark Waid, both there and at his signing at Comics & Collectibles.

Thanks to everyone who made this event so memorable — let's do it again soon!

And now that collecting comics are my hobby again (as opposed to writing them, which is part of my job) — I've moved all my circulation research efforts off into a new site, The Comics Chronicles.

If such things as what comics were selling half a century ago interests you, drop on by. I've got rankings from the 1960s up already, and as time allows I'll be posting more of my reseacrh (actually, saleswise, it's all downhill from the 1960s until Star Wars comes along).

Hopefully it'll provide a good resource for people who need that kind of data — and it'll allow me to focus this site here more on my fiction and gaming.

Off to Midsouthcon!

For those of you in the Memphis area, I'll be attending MidSouthCon once again this year. It starts on Friday, March 23 and runs through Sunday ... and I have the schedule now for my panels.

It's my hometown show — as mentioned in my column on the subject in Comics Buyer's Guide #1629, reaching readers now. Mark Waid will be there — he also has a signing on Friday afternoon at Comics & Collectibles on Poplar — and as I've just learned, another CBG contributor, Shanda creator Mike Curtis will be attending the show as well.

Friday evening is the opening ceremonies and the "meet the guests" events, starting at 8 p.m. Then for Saturday, I'm on a 10 a.m. panel on handling publicity in the creative field (that one's me, Mark, and the Commercial Appeal's John Beifuss) and then one at 12 noon with Mark on "Writing Comics" (and I expect to learn as much from him as the audience will).

There's a signing session for the early afternoon — I'll have along a small amount of my stuff if there's issues you don't have — and then at 4 p.m. is my own panel on Knights of the Old Republic and what's coming up in the comics series this year. At 7 p.m., there's a panel on the 30th Anniversary of Star Wars – that's with Jim Hall (Star Wars: Rogue Squadron) and Tim Brown.

Finally, if I'm still breathing by then, Dean Zachary and I have a panel on comics-spawned movies Sunday morning at 10 a.m. Given how late the Saturday nights usually run — especially with Carlin Stuart and Captain Comics' "League of Superfluous Heroes" parties — those Sunday morning panels tend to be entertaining just to see what condition the attendees are in!

The official site is here. Drop by if you're in the area!

I've just completed my first week in the home office — and, boy, is it taking some getting used to. Last week I realized this was the first time since just after grad school that I didn't have somewhere I had to be first thing in the morning. Still, I'm trying to maintain my same work hours, just in the house — just to remind myself that I'm not on vacation. It'll be an interesting experiment in work habits, since all my creative work until now has been done in the moonlight hours and on weekends.

I know I said more frequent blog posts, too — but I'm still getting ramped up. Just getting the office here cleaned up enough to find things was a big assignment on its own!

In other news — yes, I'll be at Midsouthcon next weekend, and yes, there will be at least one and probably two Star Wars panels that I'll be participating in. One will be my own, on the comics series. Click the link for details; I'll update when I know times.

Finally, I was sorry to learn of the death of John Inman, who played on one of my top-ten favorite sitcoms of all time, Are You Being Served? I was already depressed realizing that BBCAmerica had taken it off its afternoon schedule, where I might now see it. Inman's character was mentioned in one of the Faraway Looks strips from the book — if I'd been on anything like a schedule posting them, I could link to it now. Just one more thing to get going on...

Earlier this week, I mentioned the addition of the MMORPG Sword of the New World to my writing slate for 2007, in addition to my comics and other creative work. There are only so many hours in the day, however — and last week, I announced my that I would be leaving F&W Publications in order to contribute the bulk of my time to my creative projects. My final day in the office is Tuesday.

There are definite mixed emotions. I was editing a line of lumber trade magazines more than 13 years ago when the opportunity arose to join what was then Krause Publications as the editor of Comics Retailer magazine, working with my fandom idols Don and Maggie Thompson. Since then, I've had the opportunity to reinvent my job several times. I was able to incorporate my interest in games into the magazine, which later became known as Comics & Games Retailer. I worked increasingly with Maggie on Comics Buyers' Guide after Don's passing in 1994, serving intermittently as a columnist and becoming the magazine's managing editor in 1998.

In 1999, I was involved in the purchase of the game magazine Scrye and became its first editor at Krause. I became editorial director of the resultant Comics & Games Division in 2001, leaving the day-to-day magazine work to focus on launching book lines (including the Standard Catalog of Comic Books and the Scrye CCG Checklist & Price Guide) and, most challengingly, transforming Comics Buyer's Guide from a weekly newspaper to a monthly magazine in 2004. More recently, my work has focused on the Internet. I became editorial director for the whole collectible category in 2005 during which we rolled out CBGXtra.com, and since last year I've been editorial director for interactive media, working with dozens of websites and e-mail newsletters and their editors, ranging from Log & Timber Homes to Tuff Stuff. I've learned a great deal in my time there — about comics and games, of course, but also about publishing and the internet —and I hope to incorporate some of that knowledge into my future print and online projects.

My CBG column, "Longbox Manifesto," is continuing — and I expect to show up a little more frequently now at CBGXtra now that I don't have 48 other websites to look in on. Comics circulation history remains a major interest of mine, and I will continue to generate my monthly sales analysis.

So I'm no longer moonlighting — although that doesn't mean I won't be working into the night to get ahead on my ongoing projects like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic — and the new creative projects which this change has already enabled me to take on. It's a good thing — keep an eye on my site for announcements!

Anyway. "Brave new world" and all that. I've treasured all the friendships I've made over the years, both within the company and without — and between conventions and such I expect see as much of if not more of everyone in the future.

Now, I've got to get back to writing ... or — he says late on a Saturday evening — to my "day" job!

Continuing what is turning out to be a busy news week for me...

I have been signed to write for Sword of the New World, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game coming soon. The game is already hugely popular in its native Korea under its original name, Granado Espada.

It's got lush baroque- meets- fantasy visuals, as players build dynasties in the exploration of a strange and unknown world. One of the features that's been written a lot about is that the player can run three PCs through the game simultaneously. That's somewhat familiar to Knights of the Old Republic players in that it gives you the ability to level up multiple characters evenly. In Sword, however, all three characters are PCs fully run by the player — which is something of a new thing for the genre.

I've done video game work before, but I'm a role-player from waaaay back. Heck, I was the president of the Dungeons & Dragons club in eighth grade, before the church group had us shut down. (Yeah, it was that long ago!) So writing adventures is old hat for me — and I'm already working with the team bringing the game over.

I won't be able to provide any specifics about the game beyond that... but check out the official website for updates!

Again, this will not negatively impact my comics-writing plans — as I'll talk about on Saturday, it'll be quite a plus in that department...

And the kitchen is open in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic #14, on sale now at your local comics-oriented bookstore. With #14, the descent into the “Year That Will Live in Galactic Infamy” really gets underway. Once again, Zayne finds himself at the center of events through seeming mischance – and finds a burden completely unasked for. If he had a tattoo on his forehead like Jarael, it’d be Aurabesh for “why me?"

Grab the issue — then take a gander at my production notes and let me know your thoughts. And drop back by for more important news in the next couple of days...