American Fantastic (from Busiek.com)

Hey, everybody. Today I’m going to cheat and repost something from another blog. It’s from www.busiek.com, belonging to the infinitely talented comics writer Kurt Busiek. (Thunderbolts, JLA/Avengers, Superman:Secret Identity.) To appropiate a term from the last movie I saw, he’s The Tits.

I could ramble on about my incessantly aching face and the terrible boredom of sitting through a double molar extraction on Tuesday…but I’d rather re-post this. And I suspect you’d rather read it.

However, to come: A thoughtstream approximating my impressions while ‘under the knife’.

Bollywood style.

But until then…

American Fantastic Tales

The Library of America is one of those wonderful and massive collections, like The Criterion Collection, that make me think I should read (or, in the case of the Criterion Collection, see) everything on the list, for my own intellectual and aesthetic betterment.

And then I realize I’ll never have the time, so I just think wistfully about it.

But then something like this comes up on the horizon. American Fantastic Tales, a two-volume boxed collection of what they call “the American Gothic tradition” (so you can see where that’d grab my attention, but hey, even under another label it’d have the same effect), “from Edgar Allan Poe to today’s masters of terror and the uncanny.”

Two volumes, 1500 pages. 86 stories. Designed by Chip Kidd. Featuring:

Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fitz-James O’Brien, Bret Harte, Harriet Prescott Spofford, W. C. Morrow, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, John Kendrick Bangs, Robert W. Chambers, Ralph Adams Cram, Madeline Yale Wynne, Gertrude Atherton, Emma Francis Dawson, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Frank Norris, Lafcadio Hearn, F. Marion Crawford, Ambrose Bierce, Edward Lucas White, Olivia Howard Dunbar, Henry James, Alice Brown, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Julian Hawthorne, Francis Stevens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Seabury Quinn, Stephen Vincent Benét, David H. Keller, Conrad Aiken, Robert E. Howard, Henry S. Whitehead, August Derleth, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, John Collier, Fritz Leiber, Tennessee Williams, Jane Rice, Anthony Boucher, Truman Capote, Jack Snow, John Cheever, Shirley Jackson, Paul Bowles, Jack Finney, Vladimir Nabokov, Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, Jerome Bixby, Davis Grubb, Donald Wandrei, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, T.E.D. Klein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Fred Chappell, John Crowley, Jonathan Carroll, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Ligotti, Peter Straub, Jeff VanderMeer, Stephen King, George Saunders, Caitlín Kiernan, Thomas Tessier, Michael Chabon, Joe Hill, Poppy Z. Brite, Steven Millhauser, M. Rickert, Brian Evenson, Kelly Link. Tim Powers, Gene Wolfe and Benjamin Percy.

Hoo-ahh.

The second volume alone looks like an astounding collection of modern horror.

The first volume, though, looks like a treasure trove.

“The Moonlit Road.” “Grettir at Thorhall-stead.” “The King of the Cats.” “Thurlow’s Christmas Story.” “In Dark New England Days.” “For the Blood Is the Life.” And on and on.

I don’t know about you, but I’m hooked. I can’t look at that picture above without wanting to pick up the books, heft their weight in my hands, page through them slowly, dipping into a story here, a story there.

I want them. Now.

And so do I, Kurt! Thanks for this.

MickeyTits

This is just weird.

I Know, I Know…

There I was, weeks ago, looking down at this beautiful WordPress layout and thinking, “I’ll definitely blog or whatever more often now. I’ve grown. I’m more mature and responsbible. Never again will friends and family and mysterious lady stalkers have to wait vast stretches of time for indepth updates and twinkling literary indulgence.

But here I am, nearly a week after getting back from the San Diego Comic-Con…beginning to feel like myself again…and I look down and this sad excuse for a blog looks like an abandoned shipyard of tossed-off effluvia and concatenating snarky ‘Tweets’.

So I’m back. But…I’m tired. So I’ll post something tomorrow.

Maybe.

Ha.

Love,

Captain Miraculous, State Farm Employee of the Month

Sometimes You Wanna Go…Where Everybody Knows Your Name….

Hey, Everybody!

(That always sounds like ‘Dr. Nick’ in my head when I write that. Not that it does to anybody else.)

Today I just wanted to share some links to some very talented people I know.

So enough blabbering and on with the friend-strafe:

This here is a great new comics/pop culture podcast by my old High School friend Thomas Houston. Tom is just like Batman…if he were as witty as he is tacit and as insane as he is…okay, he’s closer to Batman than I thought, even. Enjoy, fellow Geeks.

Remaining on the comics tip, this is some brilliant artwork by my favorite comics collaborator (okay, my only one, but still…badass) Benjamin Reid Phillips.

And another illustrator. I just met this guy, but his stuff blows me away. He works at my local comic shop, and is a nice fella who enjoys good comedy and shares with me the unique and awkward trait of being starstruck by people 99% of the population doesn’t give a shit about.

Now going up the ladder (arguably, though I don’t consider myself much of a book-snob) to word-based art, we have my good friend Kelcey Wells, who does things with sentences and memes that would kick my ass into inspired literary action even more often than it does if I could extract myself from the slack-jawed wonder I find myself in, reading the incredible work he produces on a staggeringly consistent basis.

…and that’s enough for now. I have more amazing friends, but I’ll save them for next time. Partly because I want to tease you into returning to the site (devious but honest?) and partly because the cold medicine I took half an hour ago is rapidly turning my skull into an inane plush teddy bear who only speaks in bizarre platitudes badly translated from Japanese.

Thanks for reading,

JBLs

Initial Blog Post Number Seventy-Eight or Something

Hello, Imaginary Readers!

This is my first blog post for my wordpress blog. It’s probably the eleventh blog I’ve started. Let’s see if this one takes.

Above you’ll see a very insane picture of me taken when Eben (my old pal, business partner, and perpetual elbow-in-the-ribs, whom you’ll be hearing about quite often, probably) and I visited New York for the NY Comic-Con back in January.

I wasn’t drunk or anything.

I think I’ll be putting some fiction up here, as well as random cranky and/or nonsensical posts at a rate that could, at best, be predicted as ‘irregular’.

I like that word. I buy my pants that way.

And with that, I’m off. To figure out how to make this thing look halfway appealing. Which will probably take me seventeen and a half days. Good luck to me!

-JBL