AT TIMES LIKE THESE, ANY FOOL CAN SEE...

ITEM! Another fledging example why Delphiforums shouldn't mimic real life...it seemed that yesterday during the late afternoon- a internet aquaintance of mine and fellow Doc Savage enthusiast, Micah Ian Wright came underfire....like a spritzer all over his military records- Wright has been cooing liberals for a few years now against those dispicable right wing Iraqi testicle frying conservatives who prance day in and day out of the White House. Micah's main priority in life is to sit down in a nice comfy easy chair and entertain the mass populace with sharp brilliant animation and comic book script- but somehow he got caught up in some sidebar popularity with putting out a book about right wing propanganda by utilizing his photoshop skills and magically transformed a bunch of silly old World War I and II posters to suit his liberal needs by inserting in his own witty slogans such as Uncle Sam wielding a wrench under the moniker: Ashcroft...you're next! And beneath Uncle Sam's knees it reads: Break Our Constitution, I Break Your Face! And another depicts a smiling Army private raising a coffee cup in a slight salute telling us all to 'Help Yourself to a Piping Hot Cup of SHUT YOUR FACE and you'll feel a whole lot better. After all you're not a terrorist, right?' So this and other witty examples can be found in his book Back the Attack! Remixed War Propaganda published by Seven Seas Press or something of that nature.
For some insipid purpose, some reporter from the Washington Post did a real though background check on Micah and discovered that Micah did not really serve in the ROTC, which was the basis on which Micah supposedly landed this book deal (as opposed to his photoshopping or comic book/prose writing skills). This topic exploded on his forum- so much that new posts kept going on and on for forty eight hours straight- which further demonstrates that some people have no lives outside of the internet have nothing better to do than lodge verbal WMD (weapons of mass discussion) at each other on a Saturday night when it's SUPPOSED TO BE A DATE NIGHT OR A NIGHT TO GET SHITFACED ON . !!

I knew all the time that Micah Ian Wright had nothing to do with military service. I suspected it from the very beginning just by looking at him. 34, beergut, out of shape, proclaimed that most of his service was done in the mid-eighties over at the Panama Canal and Suez Canal which would have made him a freshman in high school when all that Reagan Era bullshit went down.

I wish I could go on in length about this, but...I rather talk about progressive rock.

ITEM! I like it when I get packages in the mail- especially those I forget that I order with via the internet.

A couple of weeks back, I recieved the new Marillion album and my life has instantly become assimulated like a Marillo Borg. My whole life has become consumed by new snippets of Marillion lyrics and musical passages- so much that I've started using them now as e-mail subject headings.

Now I've got Fish's new one, A Field of Crows. Fish was Marillion's first singer. I wonder what profound effect this will have on my daily life.

~

Coat

The Deposit Man Daily Report: MAS and I have rescheduled our exchange of artwork for Thursday evening. MAS has church and I have a 'fresh' episode of Smallville to tape tomorrow.

AND WHEN THE DUST HAS SETTLED.....

The official daily tally of what's been done so far on the DEPOSIT MAN AND THE LAST GREAT GATE OF MORTALITY - ACT TWO

Oliver has done finished pencils on the first fifteen pages...

MAS has nothing to but bit and pieces of inking scattered on the first ten. MAS has just got off the phone with me and said that he'll have them ready Tuesday evening.
He originally wanted to do it Wednesday - but I reminded him that Wednesday is Smallville and Angel night - and I don't want to break away from that. So Tuesday it will have to be. I pay off MAS in cash for work he's done on these pages and on the cover to the DEPOSIT MAN AND THE LAST GREAT GATE OF MORTALITY - ACT THREE - of which I will be premiering to my newsletter group next month after Alan Sinder settles back from his year long honeymoon in Japan, so he post them up.

Trying to contact Larry for two reasons - A) To start pencils on the third act and hopefully he has time to do finishes. I may split the inking duties between Oliver and MAS- as MAS is slightly behind my targeted schedule date. I was hoping that 20 pages would just about be completed by now - leaving a timeframe for Oliver and me to insert the dialogue- I don't know, maybe I'm jumping the gun on this one. I also need to know if Larry even has a copy of the script to the next one- if not- I need to go back and revise a couple of items for consistency sake. There's a a couple of loose ends that need revising- and to think that I had it all figured out.
And: B) To tell him that I struck some gold in unearthing a rare Sequential Tart review on the Deposit Man & The Survival Guide to the Afterlife off the web. The reviewer, she didn't much like it - but hey, it's better than having no review at all. Steven Grant's review of my latest was a cakewalk compared to the remorseless hate she felt for it. I wonder if I should apologize.

After the downer of my last two entries - not everythign was entirely bad this weekend. Friday was the arrival of my new Marillion- Marbles special fan edition double CD- Marillion's PR people have been kind to give me permission to plaster the ad for the new album (domestic release is next month or June- and it's only a single disc- so stuff will be edited on these editions). It doesn't take a Oxycotton addictic to tell that I'm rabid about these guys. Have been for twenty years. Well anyway, i'm surprised all that drugery has been coming out the past few days -when listening to this album over and over has been giving me a sense of euphoria that I've been missing for a while.

Earth 2, my local comic book store in Sherman Oaks hosted a 24 hour in a day comic event that Nat Gertler and Scott McCloud must whipped out over a case of Newcastles one evening. The entire country, if not the entire world must have partcipated in this event - (the best of the lot will be published in tradepaperback from ABout Comics later this year) So local talents such as Tone Rodriguez (Violent Messiahs and Snake Plissken) and some guy whose name I forget who does work on Red Star sat chained from 12 noon Saturday until Sunday noon, the next day with a completed 24 page story- roughly a page an hour written, drawn, and inked. Other artists were there as well, but I didn't bring my scorecard. I got there around 5 or 6, taking a break from moving my stuff from the old house to the new place to shoot the shit and crack wise with the people nutty enough to volunteer for this thing. A lot of it was caught on a camera by someone making a documentary- and just his luck, when Scott McCloud equiped with family, popped in for a cameo to do some interviews as he was touring shops along the west coast.

The LA Times Festival of Books was at peak capacity at usual. I kept running into people who I knew that enabled me not to make a complete sweep of the all the booths. Howard Chaykin strong armed me in purchasing the Escapist No 2 from Dark Horse Comics before it's initial street date. Always fun to run into him. I sometimes think I learned everything I know about life from Howard or least a major influence on why the Deposit Man has such a filthy mouth. Some guy who I know as Captain Mike from the Shrine Auditorium show was telling me rumors that the monthly Sci-Fi and Comic Book Convention might be making a permanent home over in Pasadena. Former LA Times- Palm Springs edition ace reporter, Pam Noles - the Beyonce of hot looking African American journalists spent the rest of the day catching up with stuff we've been up and we hung out with Wildstorm comics writer and Mystery Annex bookseller. Jeff Mariotte. So there was plenty to do to forget the bad stuff in life.

~

Coat

WHAT IS IT THAT DISTURBS YOU, CARY COATNEY?

Well it turns out that one of the people in question who got shot in Lancaster last week was the daughter of my co-workers in my department. What has got me irked that FOX News reported it wrong. I didn't know his full name, but when the name was dropped, I didn't recognize it- however my supervisor clarified to me - you know him as 'The Lotto Man' - the guy who comes in twice a week collecting money for the Lotto pool - you know, the one you don't partcipate in - 'cause you're always telling everyone that when and if you win the Lottery- you're going to hoard the money for yourself and not share it with anyone? Oh yeah- now it's coming back to me.

Well- I shoot the shit with him every now and then- so his misfortune does warrant a contribution from me to whichever memorial fund he will have set up for her.

But like I empathesized before- FOX reported it wrong. Fox claimed on their newscast that the family was gunned down by unknown assailants and the couple were due to be wed in a few months- very mysterious circumstances indeed - but from what came down the office pipeline was that the daughter had a restraining order from her fiance due to repeated incidents of abuse and just showed up at the park in Lancaster where she had taken her son to play and simply emptied five shots into her, saved the last one in the chamber for himself and blew his head off - ALL RIGHT IN FRONT of their seven year old son.

The kid, is needless to say, scarred for life. And it probably will make great subject matter for a future LAW & ORDER episode.

What did FOX hope to gain by misrepresenting the facts? This crudeness is all over the map with this network - Murdoch, along with CNN and MSNBC has been sugarcoating the events in Iraq - all due to what? Just because General Electric is in the business of bringing good things to life doesn't mean they reserve the right to take it back.

But misrepresenting the facts isn't something new- it goes back to the dawn of the century when my former roommate, Jerod lost it at Forest Lawn. Despondent over a friend who died of cancer, and was surrendering himself to the reality that he may never walk again after a work related accident, Jerod took it upon himself to try to commit suicide at a cemetary (To off oneself at a graveyard is simply trying to find the express route - One stop drive through to your picked spot of where you want to be laid out) by taking his walking cane and gun and waving it around like a lunatic causing conflicting stories to emerge and fasting than one could say, can I destroy that for you mister, media helicopters are in the sky and newsvans are parked at the gate waiting to interview fleeing witnesses. The one angle that both FOX and Channel 5 (KTLA) kept pushing at the five o'clock hour was that live on your tv - a handicapped man, obviously high on his meds (and that's a story for another time) has threatened a great many lives with threats of suicide and HAS A BOMB IN THE TRUNK OF HIS CAR.

Well- as soon I heard that I knew it to be total bunk. I knew Jarod didn't have the financial know-how to obtains materials for a bomb, let alone have steady hands patient enough to construct one. So the media, especially FOX NEWS will go to any lengths to get ratings. My former roommate, Jerod (who has since died of a major heart attack at the tender age of 32) had achieved the attention he craved if only just for a little while - but everything became knotted like a pretzel, he sought to get the people's attention due to his plight of needing major medical treatment he was seeking due to interstate political snafus (he had his work related accident out in New York - but the only doctors qualified to perform surgeryon him were out here in LA - but yet, the doctors said that he couldn't travel 3000 miles back to New York State after the surgery was completed. So he was forced to live here again- but New York in turn refused to provide him with disability checks- which was the message he was trying to get out. But the copters filming him from up above made him out to be a crazy man and therefore was generalized as certified looney tune. Never got around to making his point- No thanks to FOX and their biased reporting and we all sit in comtempt like the armchair judge, jury, and executioners that we are.


More fun tomorrow, I hope.

~

Coat

~

THE ONLY UNFORGIVABLE THING...

Yet another hiatus - not due to not wanting to contribute entries, you understand- but due to the polarized issue of things getting in the way again.

Dirty rotten things.

But yet an eventable past few days.

Some good, some just awfully, awfully despicable.

Well while I wait to clock out in the next fifteen minutes, let me get things started.

The news media are asses- let's get that straight out in the open. From everything that's being covered (or not uncovered - everything that has the conspiracist turtle bursting his head from out of his shell) to the local stories that could happen just around the block from you. News media coverage such as you see on your local ...let's grasp for an example here....let me think..... AH HA- such as FOX distorts and twists things like an old sweater clothespined to your granny's old clothelines.

Such was the case on last Friday.

Last Thursday night- an incident that occured in Lancaster- a place where nothing usually happens a lot - it's main reputation of late, is where some African Americans are migrating to finding their own piece of suburbia, (from what a African American female acquiantence once told me) but I on the other hand fondly remember hearing that it is the birth place of Frank Zappa. But to get to the point - apparently last Thursaday - a family was massacred in a park - a family gunned down in front of witnesses. THAT's WHAT FOX REPORTED.

The next day, a co-worker and me are called in the supervisor's office. First thing that enters one's mind when called in anybody's is...the ax has fallen. Well, such was the case. My supervisor asks us whether we watched the news last night and happen to hear about the incident in Lancaster last night?

Well, this is shaping up to be a puzzling conversation. Wish I had time to finish it up- but I've got to clock out and meet Oliver about some finished artwork.

~

Coat