Hello Larry!
Current mood: awake

First off, curse me for a novice!

I went to all that trouble of reproducing the many unvarying stances of Black Bolt here yesterday, and it never even occurred to me to make an oh-so-obvious quip about Larry "wide stance" Craig!! Man, I just hate it when I let the easy ones get away!

(Which, if I'm not mistaken, is pretty much the same thing Mr. Craig has been known to say upon occasion...).

You might also recall me very recently pointing you towards the first of four commissions I did for James Henry that he posted on his Mid-Ohio Con blog. Well, no sooner had I alerted you folks about the first one than he put ANOTHER of the quartet up on his site! This time, you'll find over two dozen X-Men and related characters suffering my quirky artistic idiosyncrasies, so go take a look--and remember to click on the art so as to enlarge it for even better viewing of all the demented details!

Lastly, it's been my tradition to offer a recap of each year's in-season Subway Series between New York's Mets and Yankees. Truth is, I'm feeling pretty low on the enthusiasm scale for the 2008 match-up, but tradition IS tradition, so here goes (I'll make it quick and painless, promise...)

Dues to an earlier rainout, the weekend began with a two stadium doubleheader on Friday, with the Mets blowing out the Bronx Bombers in Yankee Stadium 15-6 in the afternoon contest. Later, in the cozy surroundings of their home park, Shea, the Mets' bats seemingly went to sleep, and they lost 9-0.

Saturday was tight game at Shea--Yanks 3, Mets 2.

Sunday afternoon, in the finale, the perpetually enigmatic Oliver Perez--who can be either as good OR as bad as any pitcher in baseball on any given day that he takes the mound--pitched one of his best--if not THE best--game of the year, beating the Yanks, 3-1.

A weekend split, two games each, and overall, the Mets won 4 of 6.

Yay.

Well, hey, I TOLD you my enthusiasm wasn't what it could be...

Zip on over to Fred Sez to eyeball the Newsday covers, and I'll see you again soon...

Currently listening : Hits: The Very Best of Erasure By Erasure Release date: 2003-11-11

4:58 AM - 1 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

May I have the next stance?...
Current mood: amused

Check out Fred Sez today for some interesting pics featuring the many moods of Black Bolt!

Currently listening : Crisis? What Crisis? By Supertramp Release date: 2002-06-11

9:48 PM - 3 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

JFK, Marcus Welby, Gene Colan, and Chameleon Boy!
Current mood: awake

Several months back, over at The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon very cleverly hoodwinked his readers into helping him build up a backlog of questions for his more or less weekly feature, the Five For Friday poll, by calling for--you guessed it--five potential future topics from each of his correspondents, of which I was one.

Well, one of my chickens finally came home to roost this past weekend, as Tom used a modified version of one of my suggestions as his latest blanket query, so c'mon--how could I possibly refrain from participating?

Go take at look at Five For Friday 125 : Cameos, cuz (as I well know), there ain't nothing cooler than real people co-populating panels with fictitious characters!!

( Or is that "nerdier"?...)

5:43 PM - 4 Comments - 5 Kudos - Add Comment

A Volume Business--One Volume At A Time...
Current mood: chipper

If you head on over to today's Fred Sez blog entry, you'll find some photos, some links, and some shameless self-promotion--so what else is new?

Well, don't let me keep you...

Currently listening : Another Place and Time By Donna Summer Release date: 1990-10-25

12:09 AM - 4 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Onward and upward!
Current mood: optimistic

Friends, I invite you to head on over to Fred Sez for a better-late-than-never recounting of young Julie's recent High School graduation ceremony! Pictures, too (but I'm afraid you'll have to provide your own snacks...)!

4:42 PM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

29!
Current mood: pleased

Friends, it must be noted that today is our 29th wedding anniversary--simply put, "Yay us!" Couldn't happen to a nicer couple, I'm thinking...

Also, I need to mention the untimely passing of George Carlin. A very funny guy whose material always managed to be sublimely clever AND hilarious simultaneously. I have particularly fond memories of a mostly forgotten sitcom he headlined on Fox several years back. While hardly a comedy classic, it certainly deserved a better fate than expiring after a mere dozen episodes, if only to observe how the program's writers utilized the Carlin persona in the context of an ongoing scenario, all the while surrounded by a handful of recurring supporting characters. He'll be missed.

Lastly, what of the recent turbulent turnover at the Mets' helm? A week after the fact, the late-night, west coast dismissal of Willie Randolph still looks extremely tacky, but seeing how the team has responded to new skipper Jerry Manuel in the days since, it more than ever looks like Willie's firing was the right move, just a move made in a VERY ill-considered manner.

Well, that's all for today, sports fans. Me and the missus have dinner plans to get to, don'tcha know? Hmm--Ihop or Perkins--I wonder which has the better seniors menu?...

Currently listening : The Very Best of the Dixie Cups: Chapel of Love By The Dixie Cups Release date: 1999-02-02

4:54 PM - 6 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

Con games
Current mood: accomplished

Yesterday, courtesy of hosts Chuck and Ed Brouillette, I was a guest at their second annual Saratoga Springs Comics Convention (along with Matt Smith, who I'd never met before, and John Hebert, who I've known for decades now--fine artists and fine fellows both!...). The reason I didn't tip you folks off about the show a day or two beforehand (on the offhand chance any of you Central New Yorkers might've been prompted to attend because of my appearance), well, I wasn't a hundred per cent sure I was gonna go until pretty much the last minute. Lemme explain...

Late Tuesday night, daughter Julie suddenly felt as if the flu was coming down hard on her, but by the next evening, things turned even worse, and we found ourselves in the emergency room of our local hospital. We left the house about 10:30 at night, and given the number of tests--and their inevitable duration--we didn't return home until 5:15 the next morning (thank goodness for those overhead TV sets that help while away the time--I know I'll now never forget the "Odd Couple" episode that had the IRS investigating Felix, then Oscar, that we all watched at 3 in the morning as we waited for test results to come back).

The docs thought they'd found an antibiotic to successfully battle Julie's infection--and ultimately they did, but it really didn't kick in properly until Friday night, cuz Thursday evening, despite the medicine, Julie's fever spiked again to near 104, and while we managed to tough it out at home, Lynn made the decision then that she was gonna stay home with Julie on Saturday rather than leave her to her own devices as originally planned. Absolutely the right thing to do--I knew that--but it DID put me in a somewhat precarious position.

Y'see, I have an absolutely horrible sense of direction, just horrendous. And it's not so much that I'm one of those stereotypical males who won't stop and ask for directions--it wouldn't do any good even if I did because I've found in the past that whenever any well meaning stranger gave me directions, it plain just doesn't sink in. They may just as well be speaking to me in a foreign lingo. Yup, I'm THAT bad. So, HOW was I ever going to find my way to Saratoga--a three hour trip up north--without Lynn's expert guidance?

Well, luckily, I have two good buddies--Rocco Nigro and Roger Green--who live in Albany, an hour south of Saratoga and definitely on my way, who were planning to attend the show, so happily, late Friday evening, we arranged to meet at the Crossgates Mall, right off the NY State Thruway (a destination even I could find on my own, if just barely), with them helping get me safely on up to the con! Thanks guys!

At the convention, I had the pleasure of finally meeting Alan David Doane face to face for the first time, after several years of occasionally corresponding via email. A swell fellow in every way, he also covered for my leaving my camera at home and took a bunch of pics. This was especially important to me cuz I found myself situated right across from an actual classic 1966 Batmobile from the Adam West show, with a troupe of "Star Wars" actors off to my right (including a life-sized, radio controlled R2D2).

Alan sent me the photos, but as he's posted them all on his own blog (as well as his own pithy comments regarding the event) you can see 'em all simply by going here.

Hey, might as well let HIM do the heavy lifting! (And check out both the recent Father's Day gift of a shirt I'm wearing--direct from the local Goodwill (I'm NOT kidding)--and observe the unassailable evidence of a "bald spot" up top my dome whose existence I've been denying for years, despite wife Lynn's protest to the contrary--why is she ALWAYS right?...).

Besides chatting with Alan and bantering with table neighbor Matt Smith (who warned me to take another route out of town from the one that brought us in to avoid the masses who were descending on the area to attend a Dave Matthews concert that very evening--again, I'd've been cooked without Roger and Rocco's knowledge of the back ways out of town), I met a couple of very talented gents named Mark Gonyea and Sam Girdich, aka Strongarm Labs. Mark gave me a pair of his story posters (go take a look--they're truly dazzling, and even more so in person), and I picked one of the comics he worked on with writer Girdich, THE TALL AND THE DEAD. VERY nice stuff! If talent means anything, these guys should do just fine--nice to meetcha, fellas!

I also met Roger Rautio, Chief Executive Officer of the recently established Comic Book Hall of Fame. It'll be interesting to see where things go with this institution in the months and years ahead, as Roger seems to have a lot of exciting ideas--here's hoping they come to pass! See you again at my induction ceremony, Rog!!

Overall, a delightful day, as I got meet a score of other nice folks, AND spend some time with my two long-time buddies. We successfully got out of town before the Matthew-ites could overwhelm the burg, and then, after dropping Roger off at home (to spend a little time giving wife Carol some relief from attending to the many needs of their sweet young daughter Livia), Rocco and I had a nice dinner before I finally headed on home.

Julie's back up to snuff, I made it to and from Saratoga without getting lost, saw my peeps, made some new friends. AND I sat in a room eating pizza with a guy dressed as Obi Wan Kenobi--all in all, pretty much a perfect day, wouldn'tcha say?...

9:18 PM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Belated MoCCA Recap
Current mood: lethargic

Over at Fred Sez, you'll find a short recap of my day at the recent MoCCA Art Fest, with photo--go look!!

2:31 AM - 3 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Memo From The Man (aka Face Front, Fred!)
Current mood: cheerful

It's been one wacky whirlwind of a week around here, what with my day at MoCCA, followed by Julie's extended High School Graduation shenanigans--with temperature's nearing the century mark all the while, no less--and hopefully, by the weekend, I'll have cobbled together a short summary of said events (photos included), but for today, I wanted to share with you an email that arrived only minutes ago. My publishers at Image Comics sent off a comp copy fresh from the presses directly to one of the noted contributors to my recent book, and today, unsolicited, I received the following note.

Hey, Hemby,

Just received a copy of "The Nearly Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus."

After typing that lengthy title I'm too exhausted to write what I intended to say. So goodbye.

Five minutes later--
Now that I've gotten my second wind I just wanna tell you that it far exceeded even my wildest expectations. I knew it would be good, I knew it would be entertaining, I knew it would be brilliantly done, but honestly-- my Introduction was even better than I could ever have imagined!

Oh, the book itself? Lemme tell ya-- I had to do 100 push-ups daily for two weeks before I could lift it. All those heavily-laden pages, each one a veritable book in itself! It sure gives the reader his money's worth. So far I'm up to page 2,567, and that's only the first chapter.

Seriously (a word I hate) (and a mood I hate even more) the book is terrific, a great homage to you and your really brilliant work. I tossed away three copies of The Harvard Classics in order to give it an honored spot on my bookshelf. Loved the cover, even though I looked and looked but none of those faces seemed to be mine.

I'd like to keep typing this meritorious missive to you but have to stop now because of the horrible case of eyestrain I got by refusing to skip over even one precious word of the twelve-zillion you managed to crowd onto each page.

But I want to leave you with this comforting thought-- When I receive my well-deserved royalty for the book, I promise to try to convince Image to give you a portion of it, no matter how small, for the well-intentioned contribution your pages have made to my Intro.

Now I can't wait till the unabridged version comes out!

Excelsior, ol' friend. May it keep selling and selling and selling!

Your Man Stan

Thank you Mr. Lee! I'm happy to report that readers are responding ever so favorably to your imperishable words of introduction--and many are even sticking around to scan a few of my verbiage laden pictorials!! Mucho gracias, Senor Hang Loose!!

And, (Warning: blatant plug directly ahead!), we DO still have plenty of copies available for those of you who'd like a personalized edition (with or without an original drawing included)--click here for further details. Despite all the stuff going on in Hembeckland lately, I've nonetheless been diligent in keeping up with my book orders, with all the current outstanding ones going into the mails tomorrow! So, I'm ready for more--just drop me a line! (Blatant plug over...for now...)

Oh, and for yet another installment of the newest web-wide obsession, "Stuff Fred Left Out of His Omnibus", you may want to take a peek at the latest bunch of missing Hembeck pieces unearthed by good ol' BookSteve! Gee, I sure don't know how I coulda missed any of THOSE!

More later, friends.

3:26 AM - 6 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

Job search
Current mood: amused

Julie's been looking around for a summer job. After submitting several applications at various places, yesterday she was called back to interview for a position at our local "Just A Buck" outlet. Now, there are plenty of reasons why she's hoping to get that particular job, but you know what the biggest benefit of all would be?

Employee discount, natch...

10:28 PM - 8 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment