Eric Adams

STUART (from FOUR STORIES if you will recall) will be making another appearance, this time in the anthology, NEGATIVE BURN #9, due out later this month. He’ll be in good company too. Evan Dorkin has a new MILK & CHEESE in there and, well, here’s the solicitation text and cover art:

story and art by BRIAN BOLLAND, EVAN DORKIN, CHRIS ELIOPOULOS, PHIL HESTER, JOE KEATINGE, DOVE McHARGUE, MATTHEW SMITH, ERIC STEPHENSON, DALIBOR TALAJIC, and R. G. TAYLOR cover by MICHAEL GAYDOS

The Eagle, Eisner, and Harvey Award nominated anthology returns this month with yet another issue packed with todays top creators and tomorrows brightest talents. This issue Milk and Cheese returns and a cover by fan-favorite Michael Gaydos!

The 64pp BW issue will be on sale on February 29th for $5.99.

You might note that mine and Chris Arrant’s names are missing. We were selected for inclusion after the promo text went out, so don’t be fooled. Surely our names would have been bannered across the cover in 80pt type if there was only enough time. Hell, they might have renamed the whole thing to the CHRIS AND ERIC SHOW.

Anyway, we are of course pleased STUART is still getting exposure and we hope the opportunity to give the little guy his own full-length book will present itself someday soon. I’m talk to you Mr. Deep Pockets Publisher…

boingboing.net recently posted about a pirate TV signal hijacking an episode of Dr. Who airing in Chicago in 1987. Here’s the vid:

(YouTube link)

Fascinating. Hollywood had tricked me into believing that this wasn’t all that rare of an incident, but lo and behold this pirate transmission happened 20 YEARS AGO and was the last of its kind. In fact it was really only the second of its kind. Max Headroom, by the way, was never caught.

The other was a more simplistic hijacking by some guy under the moniker of Captain Midnight a year earlier. He basically hijacked HBO only to complain about their prices:

Wikipedia mentions a few other non-detailed accounts. One of which also occurred in 1987 when the CHRISTIAN BROADCASTING NETWORK paid a man to hijack the PLAYBOY CHANNEL.

This kind of thing needs to happen more often today. I might actually turn on my television once in a while if I thought there was a chance that the lackadaisical local news or an idiotic sitcom rerun could be interrupted by a pantomime Jesus Christ corn-holing Big Bird. There are tens of thousands of people hacking the Internet left and right all for the sake of fun, yet no one is attacking terrestrial signals.

Come on, nerds. Show us some magic.

Methinks I feel a story idea coming on.

Signing up for Pittsburgh Comicon and they want a short bio. Here it is:

Eric Adams
Eric is best known as the creator of the indie comic series, LACKLUSTER WORLD, a dark satire following newspaper journalist / albino, Fahrenheit Monahan as thwarts his siblings’ religious assimilation techniques, fends off the slander of his ‘party-hard’ co-workers, and attempts to change the lackluster world at large before it changes him.

In 2006, he participated in the FOUR STORIES anthology, illustrating STUART, a short story penned by Chris Arrant.

Eric is also a contributor to Newsarama.com, writing SEQUENTIAL SMARTS, a thorough series of articles about marketing comics from the perspective of a small press / self-publisher.

Check out Eric and his work at www.lacklusterworld.com.

I’m trimming my comic convention schedule down significantly in 2007 in favor of more time to actually work on comics and whatnot. The list:

April 22-23: S.P.A.C.E. (Columbus, OH) - definitely
April 27-29: Pittsburgh Comicon - definitely
June 15-17: Heroes Con (Charlotte, NC) - very slim chance
July 26-26: San Diego Comic Con - not exhibiting, but plan to walk the floor
August 9-12: Wizard World Chicago - possibly
October ??: SNAP! Comic Arts Festival (Detroit) - possibly

And then…

A lovely piece of LACKLUSTER WORLD art that Jo gave me for Xmas:

A pinup I gave Jo for the back of ROADSONG 2 (which just so happens to be available now):

Chris Arrant sends news that Four Stories had a good review in Comic Buyers Guide #1625.

FOUR STORIES
3 Stars from Tony DiGeronlamo

A nice mini-comic anthology that features, in part, the art of Eric Adams from Lackluster World.

“Integral” is a short story about the father of a young girl that stops a mugging in a busy subway. He may or may not have superpowers ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú it’s unclear.

In “Passenger”, a man, depressed about his ex-girlfriend, dreams about her. The ex-girlfriend shows up in the dream to help the man.

In “Snowblind”, two co-workers drive down a snowy road after an office party and discover that their world is not what it seems.

In “Stuart”, illustrated by Adams, a friendly little self-sufficient boy wanders around a hospital doing good deeds.

The stories are short so telling you any more details would probably give them away.

“Passenger” was the only one I didn’t really get, but I didn’t mind at all. All in all, it’s a nice anthology and I would like to see more. There’s no price on this and that’s a shame. I wouldn’t mind paying a buck for it. Publishers, pleas price your comics, at least so we critics know what to tell people.

Copies of FOUR STORIES are still available. Email me or leave a comment if you’re interested.

Moved this site to a new host last weekend. Looks like everything went smoothly. Email me or leave a comment if something looks amiss to you.

I photoshopped a new design for this site too as this current design causes me to shudder in horror at its, uh, horror. New design still needs coding though, but that will be on the backburner for another week. I’m waist deep in a big client project for now.

Things have been rough in EricLand.

That’s not to be taken as ‘woe is me’ or ’someone please help’. Point in fact, I am perfectly okay. Busy and poor, but okay.

Cue the flashback music and effects.

About two months ago it became painfully evident that I could no longer put off filing my taxes because my extension was coming to pass on October 15. In addition to taxes, I had slacked on my personal paperwork/bookkeeping altogether for whoknowshowlong. So, I sorted the numbers into their little patterns and it turned out that the result of those little patterns was: I OWED THE IRS A LOT OF MONEY.

It came as no surprise though. Granted, it was a higher amount than I had anticipated, but my deductions didn’t add-up (or is it subtract-down?) as much as I had expected. Regardless, I wrote the check and have since been living the Micawberesque lifestyle as I wait for my payroll to catch up.

Luckily, it was right round this time, that the workload at Turnstyle picked up. After a long lull in business activity this Summer and the recent decimation of my bank account, I welcomed the sudden spike as did my partners.

About a month goes by and the spike triples. All manner of design projects and clients are crawling out of the guff. Flash-forward to now and the spike is started to look more like a vertical horizon - we are inundated with great projects and taking every job we can get our hands on.

This kind of condensation of business is truly bizarre, yet it happens often. Basically, the design industry has two modes as demonstrated in the following diagram:

I once heard about something called “like aggregation”. It’s a concept that like objects with similar properties naturally drift into groups via wind, currents, magnetism, etcetera. (I actually heard about the concept via an old Internet joke about a 1.5 mile condom reef floating in the South Pacific.) Anyway, I see a connection between “like aggregation” and the behaviors of people. Zeitgeist is probably the better word for it.

And where the fuck did that come from?

The bottom line: The enormous amount of paying work is a far too fortuitous opportunity to create some financial balance that I could really use right now, and will therefore has been and will continue to be the focus of my devotion for a few months.

In terms of accomplishment, this year has been way under par. Of course, I met some goals, but for the most part I feel 2006 is a failure of my ability to estimate myself and I need to take the steps to prevent that from happening in 2007. So, LACKLUSTER WORLD and the SEQUENTIAL SMARTS book I’ve mentioned have been and are on hiatus for a few more months while I get my shit together.

2006 shall be known as the year that I bit off more than I can chew.

Also, I’m moving in three weeks. Details forthcoming.

Been off the radar for a little while, but I’ll have a table at SNAP! on Saturday.

Anyone else going to be there?