Shallow Thoughts – 3/29/10
• ITEM! You can read an interview with me and read the first 50 pages of my graphic novel Hero House in this Comics Alliance piece from last week. Big thanks to Chris Sims, author of the web's funniest comics blog, for reaching out to me and making the story happen.
• ITEM! In that selfsame Comics Alliance article, you can also read my very first public comments about my long-awaited (by me) first post-Hero House comic book work. In brief, I'll have a short 8-page story in the online anthology title MySpace Dark Horse Presents this June. You'll hear more about this soon (though not to the point of nausea, hopefully), but suffice to say for now that getting my work published by the company that publishes Hellboy comics, BPRD, The Goon and many, many others (and in the same issue as Levar Burton!) is a dream come true. Can't wait for you guys to see it.
• Last comic book item, I promise: I recently had my first encounter with a Hero House in the wild at Midtown Comics in New York City. If you saw a goofy looking guy snapping a photo of himself with the new releases last Friday…that was me.
• Tonight marks the start of Passover, and a happy Passover celebration to all my fellow Jews out there. Passover was always one of my favorite holidays, and Brooke and I (especially Brooke, who does all the cooking, etc.) are working hard to make it special for our daughters. That said, I find myself struggling with what, exactly to tell my daughters about my religion. I don't want to be responsible for the end of a line of Jews or anything, but over the past few years I find that I just can't bring myself to believe in a god who, for instance, would get mad at me if I ate a cheeseburger for dinner tonight. (And I did.) My "crisis of faith," if you want to call it that, has been exacerbated lately by the government of the homeland of my people acting like raging assholes. You're welcome to believe nearly anything you like (actually, that's not true, but that's a different blog post…), but if you are standing in the way of peace because a 4000-year-old book says that you're entitled to a certain slice of land, you are not invited to my Seder, and I'm not sure I want to identify myself as belonging to the same group as you. Combine that with the recent headlines about the Pope and the Catholic Church, and it's enough to think that religious orthodoxy, no matter what the denomination, is a fundamentally destructive force in the world.
• On a lighter and totally unrelated note, hilarious Fred Schneider humor from The State. God bless you, Fred Schneider. (And David Paggi, who found the link.)
• I've started playing Final Fantasy XIII, and so far I'm enjoying it a lot more than certain people I could name. However, I've been playing a lot more Final Fantasy IV on my DS, which has been occupying my time on the way home from work the past couple of weeks. I love being able to carry the greatest video games of my childhood with me on the DS, and I look forward to being able to play today's video games on a handheld in the next 15 years or less.
• And finally, I had mentioned that my wife had been knitting me a scarf. Well, she finished it, and it looks amazing – dig that checkerboard pattern! Can't wait to wear this bad boy in the cold weather. Or, you know, to the beach. It's versatile.