DOOMED WIZARD DIARIES

When I got an email from Yahoo Geocities that, starting in October, they'll no longer be offering their free website builder, I downloaded all of the image files I've posted there over the years. As I trolled through them, I uncovered images I'd all but forgotten. So, in the interest of wackiness, I'll be posting some of them here and there. This little photo comic strip came together when my Swedish buddy Mike Hill of Badmouth was in the States a few years back. Screw the Surgeon General, you've just gotten the real warning about cigarettes.

For years, I've played around with the idea of a "wide-screen" comic. It finally happened awhile back with "Salem, AZ," a book I'm working on with my good friend Nik Havert of Pickle Press and artist-in-arms Bill "Inkslinger" Wilkison (both of whom you can find links to on your right). It proved to be not only an artistic challenge for myself, but a publishing challenge for Nik. Nik's challenges are hopefully at an end with the first issue, which has had so many problems I believe the book to be cursed. But my motto has always been "Nothing worth having ever came without a fight." My first attempt at "wide-screen" was an online comic I did a preview for several years ago now called "The Epic of Bio-Wolf." My Sweedish friend Mike of the rock band Badmouth, back in 2001, asked me to make him into a super hero. "The world just needs more heroes," he told me. This was just a few months after 9-11 and h...

A man's home is his battlefield*, even when he's dead and especially when he's a super villain. This past weekend marked the second full-fledged game night of my as-of-yet unnamed super hero role-playing game. It was the biggest turn out of players I've had under one roof in quite sometime. It was me and my imagination against five of my friends; "Machine" Mike Indovina, Marc, Guy, Zander and James. I was beginning to think I was having a panic attack at the last minute because of it, but my wife reminded me that the headache pill I'd taken was loaded with caffeine, which accounted for all my symptoms. That settled, it was game on! While laying low in a cheap motel, licking their wounds from their first attempt at going straight , Stinger, Thermo & Big Horn (the last two still haven't picked names for themselves) meet two other like-minded erstwhile villains, Boogeyman & Magnetron ("Magnetron" also just the name I'm using for...

Everything I ever learned about writing, I learned from reading men's adventure books. Along with the SOBs, there was another great series. The Zone! The series, masterfully written by British author James Rouch, took place in an alternative near future where the Berlin Wall did not fall. Instead the cold war suffered a meltdown. A war across Europe imploded, concentrating itself in a great contaminated swathe of no-mans land slashed across the continent. Imagine if "Kelley's Heroes" was written and directed by Sam Rami and you'd have "The Zone." Given the original publishing date of the books, I think it's safe to say that Rouch's "near future" was now and the "alternative near future" is a more recent re-imagining. I've discovered, much to my delight, that along with there being a role-playing game based on the series, Rouch recently wrote a TENTH book in the series that is available on CD, so Santa, if you're ...