Hey, remember me?

I just LOVE this song. Someday... Someday...

bangbangbangbangclick

I was looking for this...

I'm at the end of my sanity, here.

I can't stop worrying about any of my problems long enough to accomplish anything about them.  As soon as I feel like something hopeful might happen, another couple of horrible dilemmas loom up and there's even more to stress about.

Not that working to solve my problems is doing anything to solve them.  Looking for work has been a nightmare that won't find a morning.  Anything I'm remotely qualified for seems to always have a loop hole that excludes me, be it some obscure qualification or simply existing in the wrong city.  And since I did what I did to my back, the list of things I'm suited for has gotten viciously shorter. 

I hate being alive, lately.  It's no fun.  All I can see from here is bad getting worse, and worse doesn't seem to have a bottom end to its scale.  It just keeps on going.
(I'll add here, because I know how these sorts of posts get read and invariably go, that I'm NOT in a mood to do anything rash to myself, or anyone else.  I'm just saying it plainly: NO FUN.  HAVE LOST INTEREST.  THAT IS ALL.)

I'm in a lousy mood because I'm tired and frightened and lost and worried all the time about more things than I can properly keep track of.  Which just makes me worse at being in any sort of state to do anything about it all. 

And I think I've made it plain that I have no idea what that is.  I don't know what to do, and I've got no one I can turn to.


So, how're you?

The rare double post, today.  My lines aren't playing nice with the paper today so far anyhow... 

I've been 'away' for six days and was thinking about talking about lots of stuff before I 'left'.  Also, I just had to get that previous post up there and done with.  Interesting experience coming back from a week in the info-gulag to find that had happened.

Anyway, I had stuff to say, right?

I definitely need to get more organized about making this a business, what I do.  My first real New Year's Resolution, if I ever make any.  So I need to do some research and study of how to go about that, and/or if I even need to until a certain 'point' is reached, financially speaking.  I have no idea, honestly.
I mean, I imagine it doesn't matter, since pretty much all businesses get made BEFORE they make any money - which is the other thing I need to work on learning.  How do freelance artists ever get started finding work?  So, market research.

I don't think any of this will be hard.  Tedious maybe, but then again, I like to learn.

To that end, I've done what I can to reorganize here at home, and re-re-re-rearranged the living room ( aka my studio ) to better accommodate working.  I've got my two big tables all free now, one with my computer and Wacom on it, and the other one with all my paper and projects and junk stored under/on it.  Next to those I have the scanner and a shelf of reference/inspiration, respectively.  Beside me on the wall is a good sized corkboard.  I find having a good sized piece of my memory stuck on the wall next to me is rather handy.

It's nice, in that it gets Leslie and her computer out of the corner of the room, and somehow managed to both free up and open EVERY table we had in the room, but I've also got legroom under my tables for the first time in ... ever.  And somehow I managed to balance the draw on the electrical circuits around the room, so most of our machines aren't lugging from the same plug.

It's all a bit alarming at how much better it seems to work.  None of which I'm sure you care about at all, and I didn't really mean to go on about it anyway.  Sorry about that.


So recently, I've had an inspiration, the story behind which goes a little like this.

Once upon a time I was a little kid, like most of you probably, and Saturday morning cartoons were my church.  One of the best ever - besides the original Scooby Doo, anyway - was Thundarr the Barbarian.  It would be years yet before I learned WHY it was so awesome, other than that the hero had a motherfucking lightsabre duh.
Stever Gerber had a hand in it's creation - and both Alex Toth and Jack Kirby did design work for it.  So, seriously.  Between that and the fact that Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons had had hot sex and made the ultimate cartoon baby, I was deeply hooked.  Of course, it was this very awesomeness that saw the networks kill it immediately.

Right, so I really liked Thundarr the Barbarian, you get it.

Turns out though, finding it is maddening.  The copyright on it is apparently pursued rabidly, and finding an episode of it anywhere online is nigh impossible.  And this was bugging me.  I knew the DVD of the whole series was out there.  ALSO very hard to find.  And I really wanted to find these because a) they're just awesome, and b) I needed to do hardcore research.

Because I had this idea, you see.  Terrible, like most of my ideas, but I grew fond of it.

What if Thundarr had been a comic, and for NOT kids? 

So now you know.  I'm planning on making something eventually called Tharrdun the Berzerker.  It will be a magical tale of weird machines, horrible violence, and other high nonsense and low humor.  Or at least, that's the plan so far.  But it's been a lot of fun re-designing the main characters, and re-imagining some of the goofy shit that made that cartoon so very special.  Other things that need doing first, but that's my plans, roughly.  It might never go farther than that, but I can hope it will.

Incidentally, if anyone out there can find a copy of, or images from, something called "THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN IN THE FLOATING PALACE", there will be a reward of some kind.  Apparently this a coloring book published by Harris Comics, and there you go.

I should add that I had the exact same idea for the old Dungeons and Dragons cartoon itself.  If ever there was a cartoon that needed a shot of 'not lame', it's definitely a contender.  Surprising, since it was written by a LOT of names.  Steve Gerber again, Paul Dini, and some others I forget but you get the idea now.


Finally, I'm not sure how long I'll be keeping this here up.  I'm looking for a better place around the web to put all my brain leavings together.  They still feel too scattered about, and I'm keeping an eye out for something new that isn't stupid or dead on it's feet.  Let me know if you're hip to something better out there.

But more I think I'll getting around in more public forums, and not in these joints.  And getting that poor damned website up and gunning maybe. 

Anyway, lunch time.