FIFTEEN MINUTE BREAKApril 7, 2003

All the girls at work loooooovvvvvvve Vin Diesal.

Man, what a busy weekend- even with losing an hour, as we all had to set our clocks an hour ahead early Sunday morning. Saturday afternoon, I strolled over to a new comic book store that opened not too far from my house near Sherman Oaks called Earth 2. It's owned by these two guys who used to work in the movie industry. It's been doing business close to a month now- but they didn't get around to having a grand opening celebration until last weekend. Some well notable comic book industry talent in the local Los Angeles area were there to sign copies of their just released projects. Len Wein was signing copies of his new Batman Elseworlds mini-series called Nevermore (Batman sharing the same timeline with Edgar Allen Poe?) lavishly illustrated by Guy Davis. Dwayne McDuffie was talking to people about his work on the Static Shock animated series and the upcoming season of Justice League and signed my copy of the latest Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight issue featuring his new villain, the Blink. Others in attendance, sitting around shooting the breeze and chomping down on homemade cheese crackers were Jeff Parker (the Innerman, Batgirl, etc;) Ron Zimmerman, and Marv Wolfman. There was a guy who is marketing mini-flip books to Dark Horse, of whose name escapes at the moment and they just simply blew me away- he had one collection of Hellboy and another of Concrete.

However, I couldn't help noticing that no one else shopping took notice of Oscar winning actress and former Partridge Family mom, Shirley Jones walking in taking part in the festivities.

Man, I swear- I can't keep to my word. I made a vow earlier in the year that I was going to swear off buying comics so I could save up pubishing and paying off the people who worked on my Deposit Man self published adventures. So why in blue hell, did I blow $120.00 on comic books this past weekend? The bulk of my purchases were of four paperback and hardcover books. I bought Jeff Parker's self published graphic novel, The Innerman, and DC's trade paperback of the last year's Eisner award winning Bizarro Comics and I splurged on Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives Vol 10 at Rookies' ( a store I have some money invested in ) and found The Golden Age Spectre Volume 1 for $40 at yesterday's Los Angeles Science Fiction and Comic Book Show at the Shrine Auditorium. I keep thinking, I'll save a bundle of money by simply dropping monthly titles and waiting until they collect certain issues and issue them in trade paperback. It's a experiment for now, but it doesn't seem to be working out for me at the moment. Well, I guess it's pretty unusual that most of these books came out roughly all at the same time. I had thought at least DC would wait until the end of this month to release the Spirit book since the Spectre one came out just two week ago.

So yesterday, at the Shrine, I also picked up some free giveaway posters and calenders of Vin Diesel in support of the new F. Gary Gary film, A Man Apart and they were instantly gobbled up by my female co-workers this morning. Says who I don't cater to females' fantasies?

My fifteen minutes are up.


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Coat