Coming Clean

Smack in the middle of my first issue editing The Rockit, our cartoonist flaked. Distraught, I called Jeaux Janovsky, who, aside from being a great cartoonist, has also been a friend of mine since ninth or tenth grade.

"Jeaux, can you do a comic?" I asked.

"Well, I always thought we should do something together," he replied.

So we did. But, since I was writing (or ghostwriting) half the paper, I thought it would be best to use an alias. I picked Violet Peters because it was my great-grandmother's name and it sounded kind of like a surly goth chick name. Then we sent ideas back and forth until we came up with a record store filled with snarling but adorable animal hipsters who find joy in making fun of bands and customers.

That was Animal Sounds.

In honor of Morrissey's new single (not sure I'm feeling it yet), Jeaux reposted the original strip.

He also created some cute profiles for the protagonists.

Comic Books and Politics

Check out my story about Presidential Material and the corresponding party at Golden Apple on Melrose.

Neil Gaiman and More

It was one of the most exciting things I've had the opportunity to do as a journalist, I got to interview Neil Gaiman.  Monday night, he read half of Chapter 7 of The Graveyard Book (it's a really, really long chapter), showed a preview of the new Coraline film and read the poem he wrote for Tori Amos, Blueberry Girl.  I met with him a half-hour before the reading, stayed for the entire presentation and then came home to start transcribing and writing.  The hardest part was editing the transcript to fit into the word count.

The story ran in the LA Weekly online yesterday.

What was amazing was the response from my friends within minutes of posting the link on MySpace.  Apparently, we all read The Sandman comics in our teens.

In other comic related news, I picked up a copy of the latest issue of Giant Robot, which features a Box Assassin Hitman comic strip from Jeaux Janovsky.  Jeaux is an old friend of mine, in fact he might have been the person who turned me onto The Sandman back in the early 1990s, and we have collaborated on projects in the past (maybe the future too?).  Check out his work.

Sometimes...

I think I need to stop reading Perez Hilton and move to Europe. At the very least, I should stop reading Perez Hilton.

It's bad enough that I waste my time scrolling past posts about teenage hasbeens-in-training while searching for one item on the further adventures of Pete Doherty (not a lot of those lately). Today, though, I think was the final straw. Today, he poo-pooed Tintin to the sound of Perezophiles asking "What's that?"