Ye Olde Comique Booke Airte Struggle

In the early 90s I got my hands on Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art. I never read it. Not really. I flipped through it a lot, and took notes from some of the examples. I might have read a few pages. But reading dry texts like that was not my strong suit. I'm sure I missed a lot of valuable lessons from Will.

Which makes me think about comics as an art form and how that a lot of folks talk about it, ponder it, and theorize about it. I love that they do that, but it's not my bag. Just like with tabletop roleplaying games, I love making them and playing them but I am not sure I have much to say about the philosophical side of it or the theory side of it. Why does it work if I put three dots after a word to convey a pause or some unspoken thing? It just does. I'm sure there are good psychological reasons and I know it's rooted deeply in the actual material history of language and writing. But all I know is I put three dots when I want to suggest that sort of thing. It's all feels.

It's ALL FEELS.

And I might not even be good at it. I don't know. I know that people always enjoy my comics, but is it because they like how I draw or because they enjoy reading my stories? I don't really know. But I suspect, honestly, it's because they like how I draw. I know that's why I pick up books from Philippe Druillet, Vaughn Bodé, or Richard Corben. It is not for the stories. Those are fine, and sometimes good, but it's all about the visuals. I love the styles, the colors, the lines. I love the mark making. And how those marks come together to convey movement, meaning, narrative. Even when the story being told is, let's be honest, forgettable as hell. Or disgusting. Or ham fisted. If it looks cool to my eyes, I'm still gonna love that shit.

For example, I just read Druillet's Vuzz for the first time and holy motherfucker what a nakedly savage and nihilistic read. Vuzz is a psycho and a killer and a rapist. He JOYFULLY rapes and murders. Yet Druillet's exquisite lines and pacing and figures are so compelling you have to love the god damn book.

I kept all this shit in mind while working on Hellion Cross. This is the first full comic book I've created in a long time. I look at the finished pages and I ask myself "are these good enough?". Dangerous question to ask yourself. I could scrap them and start over and improve them, maybe. But why the fuck would you do that? I'm not a perfectionist. The next iteration would also have flaws and I would have exactly the same thoughts.

But I worry about stupid things. For example, I kept the 4 fingers style. In the original Pan-Gea comic, all the characters have 4 fingers like in old cartoons. So I thought... well, this is a successor to Pan-Gea, I might as well be consistent. And that's cool. I like it. But there's a devil on my shoulder going "Do you really wanna do that? Some guy will pick it up and say those hands look dumb."

But I can't help that. When I did the original Pan-Gea comics I had a few comments that the hands were weird or that the chicks were too fat. I can't be bothered with any of that. What am I trying to do here, make art for the masses? This is my shit, and folks who like my shit will like this comic. That's really all I can do.

Perhaps the story is lame, perhaps the hands are dumb. I don't know. It's not for me to say, is it? I make the art, the world judges it. That's just how it is.

The Aesthetic of Old Comic Colors

I love how old comics look. This is a panel from Groo the Wanderer no. 1 (Pacific Comics, not Epic). The coloring is very simple, but kind of elegant. Notice the subtle variations in the textures and tones.

And, of course, none of that is "real". Meaning, the colorist didn't achieve those textures, for example. The colorist, Gordon Kent, was probably using Dr. Ph. Martin's liquid dyes, which was extremely common for colorists of that day. They would lay down some dyes so they could have a fairly exact concept of the actual hue and saturation to tell the printer, who would then try to approximate that hue and saturation with the printing press on cheap paper using little dots.

The printing was fast and cheap on cheap paper and it would be imperfect. Little variations in the coverage would create some variations in the texture. Over time, the pages would fade, exaggerating some of that.

The nostalgic look and feel of this kind of comic panel is purely an artifact of the way it was produced after the artists did their thing. That's why, when comics started to shift to digital tools and better paper and better printing, those colors suddenly POPPED and were actually pretty garish. The imperfections of the older methods and cheaper paper helped tone down the vivid dyes, giving us that soft, slightly yellowed comic book look we know and love.

You can attempt to mimic it, digitally. There are entire brush packs and other digital tools you can buy that specifically give you a similar look to your finished digital art. I don't prefer to use those, myself. You can also sort of "kitbash" the colors by scanning your stacks of old, beat up comic books and using the textures and tones from them as source to color your artwork. I've done that before and the effect is kind of fun.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make is mainly that this old, nostalgic comic book look is not really due to the craft of the colorist as much as the state of the printing processes of the time. Hard to duplicate today, but not impossible. Part of me wonders why anyone would want to do that, but a bigger part of me totally gets why you would want to do that. It's an aesthetic, accidental or not. Many of us grew up on this aesthetic and it holds just as powerful and dear a place in our heart as any other artistic aesthetic, such as loving the way an artist's brush strokes can still be seen in some paintings or how a record can have those intermittent popping sounds from the needle meeting the grooves.

Here's an example of a panel from an issue that came out more than a decade after the first comic. You don't see all those little dots. The printing methods and paper choice has changed by the 90s. I don't know the ins and outs of the process with pros of the time, so I can't speak to it. But I have to assume the colorist needed to be more cautious in their color choices since what they got in print was going to be a lot closer to what they put on the paper. No more exaggerating to help the printer. I think.

Hellion Cross Cover Art?

Here's the cover I drew for issue one of Hellion Cross.

What do you mean those worms are phallic?

Now... I'm on the fence here, but I might do a different one and use this for the back cover. My reason is simple: I made this one as suggestive as possible without making it actually erotic.

This is not an erotic piece of art. This is a woman locked in a fight with a worm monster. Worms are phallic. I drew the worms the way I picture worms to be in my head. I didn't actually look up any worm images because they're gross and it wasn't necessary for the piece. I drew Fawn in a way that suggests she is nude (she is) but isn't overt about nudity (it isn't). She isn't having fun, obviously, and the worm monster isn't having fun either, obviously. It's a battle.

But god dammit, that's a lot of phallic stuff she's holding in her hands, right?

I'm such a bad, bad man.

Anyway, the comic is done except for any changes I might make in deciding the cover art. I'm on the fence. I'm not sure if this is the image I want on the cover. It might end up on the back cover instead.

Random Order Comics Revisited

Way way back in 2002 I did a whole series of comic strips called Random Order Comics. I did them in this big ass 11x14 hardback sketchbook, which I only filled by about 20%. So I dragged it back out recently and started drawing new strips. For giggles.

 

Richmond Comic & Toy Show

Kenn Minter

Today I went to a comic book show. I don't do that very often. I don't go to cons or shows, pretty much ever. But this was only an hour or less from my house and it was small.

I don't have a ton of experience with comic shows so I can't say the Richmond Comic & Toy Show was fantastic. But I had a good time hanging out with a couple of friends, met some cool artists, and picked up a stack of books. So I call that a success.

Oh, and there were nerds walking around in Star Wars and Sailor Moon uniforms, so that was cool.

Here are the creators I met and interacted with. I spent pretty much all my pocket money on these folks.

Kenn Minter of Near Mint Press with Country Creatures comic.

Bryce Oquaye of Mad Hundreds.

Tressa Bowling, who has some amazing sketch zines.

Ken Kirk doing fun sketches on skateboards and writing comics.

J. D. Thompson with The Hound of Cold Hollow: Vengeance comic.

William Leslie of Blackwill Comics.

Joe Slucher doing fantasy art for Magic: the Gathering.

Hard Justice, by Wes Gift, Bryce Oquaye, and Taylor Esposito.

 

Tressa Bowling's cool art books.

Comics

I've updated my website to finally include some comics. Because, y'know, I used to do some comics back when I was young and stupid. Now that I'm older and growing stupider by the day, I'm doing some comics again. Yay comics! If fuckin' love comics.

So go read Eggsuckers, First and Last Love, Red Path, and more!

THINKING OUT LOUD

I have been pumping myself up to publish a comic book again. I'm not sure what the plan is, exactly, but perhaps I'll do an old fashioned black and white. I have at least 18 new pages for it, after all, and more to come. Time will tell, as it always does.

Witzend

I only know about Wally Wood's Witzend zine by way of seeing Vaughn Bodé's cover for issue #7, pictured below in all its violent glory. I have never see a Witzend in the wild nor held one in my hand. This post is just going to be me learning about this zine and sharing the knowledge for posterity. Mostly my own.

Vaughn was nothing if not subtle.

Wally Wood launched the comic in the summer of 1966 as a way to give his artist friends and upcoming artists a way to showcase their own work, owned by them, by their own hands. This is important because back then the major comics publishers owned the absolute FUCK out of everything the artists did. If you wrote a comic or drew it or lettered it and it was published by Marvel or DC then it was Marvel or DC who owned that work, top to bottom. Creators were paid labor, period. So things like Witzend attempted to change that dynamic.

Here's a nice write-up about the zine by Charlie Meyerson, I believe from Grimjack.

Limited-edition comics publications until then had almost all been projects by fans, interested mainly in writing about or drawing characters owned by Marvel, DC or out-of-business publishers. Witzend was one of the first efforts by professionals to publish their own work, featuring characters they created and owned.

Publicized mostly through those other limited-edition magazines, the first issue of Witzend came out in the summer of 1966. It featured work by Wood, and a collaboration by Al Williamson and Frank Frazetta. “Most contributors got nothing except their work in print,” Pearson says. “It was very important for them to get their copyright on the material. Look back at those issues: our copyright notes were in 18-point type. We wanted to be sure everyone would see them … because at the time there was none of this ‘sharing the rights with the creators.’ It was a real breakthrough.”

Looks like Pearson continued to publish Witzend after Wood sold it to him for $1.00. They published 13 issues over 19 years (sounds like MY kind of pace). There's a lovely looking hardback collection you can snag if you're willing to drop a couple hundred bucks.

I love that this ad tells you to remember to put your zip code on the order!

Ultimately: I want all 13 original issues. Currently I own zero. Given the prices and conditions of these rare books, it is unlikely I will ever have them all. But that's ok. Gives me something to look forward to, right?

Hunter Ravn

I did a few comic panels recently. Started out as a guide to my fantasy world of Yria. I have no idea where this is heading now.

The character Hunter Ravn was formerly Hunter Raven... but I left out the "e" on the inked version and didn't want to adjust digitally. So now he's officially Hunter Ravn. Maybe that's why I took the whole thing in a slightly different direction. Is this God of the North a frat dude?

Anyway, I've just been having fun with my old traditional art tools and these panels were an excuse to use them. Digital colors to follow...

Zarp in Pan-Gea

Lately I've been thinking about comics again. I used to be a comic guy, not an RPG guy. I was an active small press creator, self publishing an array of titles such as Anomalic, Blacksheep, and Random Order Comics & Games (which represents a transitional phase for me from all comics to mostly games).

Comics is hard fuckin' work. This is why I probably stopped doing them. The insane amount of time you pour into it may or may not pay back. It's fine, of course. Nobody owes me their attention and I learned decades ago that I'm an underground guy forever, not a highly successful artist in terms of doing it for a living. So I'm cool with screaming into the void. But I gotta be passionate about a thing to scream with comics.

Anyway... Zarp! I was thinking about doing some new Zarp comics. Which lead me to doodle the little devil more and more lately. Now he's showing up in works that were meant to be pure pinup. This one started out as a sexy bit and morphed into a cool Pan-Gea bit. And I'm super happy about how it turned out. This is the vibe I hit in the mid-2000s with Pan-Gea and is, I believe, my most authentic, unfiltered self.*

So this might end up on a comic cover or it might end up in an art book. I'm giving serious consideration to publishing a collection of my favorite art and putting it out there for those that might like to have it.

*Well... sans the naked bits dangling out. Which I'll happily draw as well.

Real Art

Fuck the gatekeepers.

Judging a Book By the Cover

Ah the power of a cover. The absolute magical power of a cover. I would buy this magazine without opening it. In fact, I did. I bought this off the rack as soon as I saw it, no questions asked. Of course the interior was nice. The Michael Golden Vietnam story was compelling. But still... the fuckin' cover comes in blazing and shouting and screaming and I was like "FUUUUUUUCK YES."

Artist: Tom Sutton

Tom Sutton kicked some ass. He was the first artist on Warren's Vampirella series, as well as doing a slew of other comics. I love his lush drawing style.

This page is so amazing. So much energy with the inking and the papers flying around and the kinetic lines. And check out that sexy title lettering!

This is from Ghostly Haunts #38. I love how much this looks like a Sandman comic! When I first read Sandman I really had no history with horror comics. I didn't know about EC and all that stuff. So I didn't pick up on the heavy heavy influence that horror comics had on Gaiman's storytelling.

But check this out. It even features some white-on-black word balloon text.

Here's a blog I found that has the whole story.

Richard Corben

Like many people, I probably laid eyes on Richard Corben's work for the first time on the album cover of Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell. Epic pic for sure. Left an impression, kind of like David Fairbrother Roe's unforgettable cover for Nazareth's Hair of the Dog.

(Ahhh... what happened to great album cover art? Like so many book genres, I suppose the switch to digital and the need for clear thumbnails has lead to a decline in cover art and a rise in simple design. I'll proudly wear my grognard suit on this one and say I miss great covers on books, music, etc. These days it's just a bit of graphic design with huge letters. Then again, I haven't really LOOKED at album art in a while. Maybe I'm wrong? Tune in to the end of this post for the answer.)

Richard Corben's art is weird. It's in that category with Frazetta and Vallejo (two artists I do not consider to be equals, sorry Boris but you're often boring) as sort of "epic" and "fantastic" but also it's underground. Richard Corben was a comix artist, after all, and he liked to draw tits and schlongs on his characters. His figures were also in the "I just stepped out of the gym and boy am I ripped" category, while also being in the "I'm big and soft and round" category. His proportions were strange while not being exactly wrong. And that inspired me. I have said many times how much I despise things that are too clean, trim, and polished. Corben's art, even when it has a careful polish on the surface, is never perfect. And I love that.

I keep saying things about Corben in the past-sense, as if his life is over. But he went on to achieve great things in the 2000s, doing Hellboy arcs and being inducted into various halls of fame. He is one of those great artists, like Vaughn Bode, who achieved greatness but not flatness. He was never a household name. They say Rush is a band's band. Richard Corben is an artist's artist.

Album Covers

Well, I did some Google-fu on recent album covers. What I found was that things haven't changed so much. Most of the pop type stuff or hip-hop is a face shot or body shot of the artist with the title. Kind of normal. Metal album covers are same as always... lots of epic themes, Satan, sci-fi landscapes, etc. So not much has changed. I suppose it's mainly the book market, particularly fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, that has changed in response to digital books. You need a clear thumbnail for your e-reader so you can see the author and title on a screen of a dozen books. That's the function that a book's spine used to serve on the bookshelf. Then you'd pull it out and see the awesome cover art. There's a lacking of awesome cover art in books right now. /rant

Mutant World

I went in on the Kickstarter for Richard Corben and Jan Strnad's Mutant World reprint. Got the hardback graphic novel that includes Mutant World and Son of Mutant World. In the forward, Strnad states that this edition was built from scans of the Fantagor prints, tweaked by Richard Corben.

I just finished reading the first 60 pages. It's the story of a poor dumb mutant named Dimento who just wants to find something to eat. During the course of these 60 pages he encounters an outrageous bunch of backstabbing, hunger-gnarled muties with names like Weasel and Dimlit. He also encounters a woman in a horse-drawn cart. The woman, whose name hasn't been given, is drawn in Corben's typical style. Large-breasted, full-bodied. But also, given Corben's origins in the underground comix scene, she is weird. Everything is weird in a Corben comic.

There's the idea of the male gaze that permeates pop culture. It is on display here, as it always was in the pages of Heavy Metal, 1984, and pretty much all the pulpy-styled comics of the 70s and 80s. Women are usually drawn with an eye to their sexual characteristics. Men are usually drawn as beefy, possibly ugly as well. Corben's style falls in line with this. His male forms, if not monstrous and misshapen, are muscular and beautiful. Even poor ole Dimento, bent and seemingly mutated, has an Olympian physique. The unnamed woman, who recurs throughout this part of the story, is busty and full and lovely. And she has a horse.

So anyway, everyone in this world seems to be mad and vile. Every single character Dimento encounters is less than stellar if not outright brutal. Not just to Dimento, but to each other as well. It's a harsh world, as one of the characters states. The woman helps Dimento at one point, perhaps for fun. Then she betrays him to save herself. Dimento, who is the nicest person in the comic, is prone to fits of anguish, rage, and sorrow, and he leaves her to her fate with some nasty mutants who rape her and beat her. The beating is on-screen, but the raping is not. It isn't pretty, nor is it titillating. I get the sense that even though Corben draws the woman in a slightly sexy way (again, the male gaze at work), he is sympathetic to her plight and doesn't try to capitalize too much on it. I don't know this to be the case, but given the fact that the story was written in chapters on a deadline and wasn't scripted out, Corben started off by just having a hottie show up and then, as the story evolved, he realized he didn't want to do a hottie comic. Her story unfolds brutally, and she is drawn less-and-less like an object to be looked at and more-and-more like just another brutal individual being brutalized in a brutal world.

Then again, maybe I'm lenient in my critique because I'm biased toward this genre of comic art. She is, after all, tied up much of the time. That could be read a certain way. Yet Dimento is also tied up much of the time. So... I dunno. Perhaps a person with a different perspective would find this entirely misogynistic. I couldn't argue too much with them, though I've seen far worse. All I'd have to say is that if I'm looking for prurient comic book art with hotties I wouldn't choose this. It is not for that purpose.

This part of the story is disjointed and random. It feels like random events in the daily life of poor Dimento. And as Jan Strnad points out in the forward, he was writing the episodes under deadline pressure one at a time. He hadn't plotted this thing out. And it shows.

I kinda like that. I like that it's raw and random. It is a hard read, though. I'm not a fan of bleakness or moral depravity. I stopped watching The Walking Dead because it felt like one episode of despair porn after another. It wore me out and I dropped it.

Mutant World is a bit like that, but in shorter bursts. It's a comic about a fallen world in which people - mutant and human alike - trick, beat, rape, and brutalize one another to survive. And through it moves this truly pitiful figure. Dimento. Poor, dumb Dimento (as he calls himself).

Regarding the art itself, it is classic Corben. Rich and lush and also ugly and crude. Nobody does misshapen like Corben. When I read comics like this, which are richly painted and detailed, I cringe at just how much work must have went into them. Comics are fucking hard work, people. You spend days, weeks, months, fucking years on a comic book that someone can literally "read" in five minutes, then promptly forget. I can't tell you how many hours I labored over comics in my youth. I loved it, mind you. I was totally into it. But at some point the endorphin rush I felt at having created a nice comic page just wasn't enough to justify the labor. Hats off to Corben and any comics artist that can and does endure.

It's weird that I hadn't actually read this comic before. I know I own some old Fantagor books and I have been a lover of Richard Corben's style since I first laid eyes on it in the mid-80s. I know I've seen this comic in the past, yet somehow I failed to actually read the damn thing. Reading it now is like reading a mildly-horny teenager's stab at Gamma World fanfic. There's a lot of good inspiration in here for post-apoc gaming, so if you're into GW or Mutant Crawl Classics and you haven't checked it out you should do so. Just be aware that it was intended for adults and it doesn't pull many punches. Also, it is not a sexy comic. That is, I would not classify this as being pin-up in nature whatsoever. It is raw and ugly in the underground comix manner and I really love the shit out of it for that reason alone.

Dimento is a lonely soul.

FOLLOW UP

I finished Mutant World, which was only a few more pages than I had read when I wrote the original post above. Spoilers ahead.

So basically Dimento and this normal dude are set free by the weird post-apoc military facility and both end up with a clone of the woman from the story. In both cases the woman is wearing a tight top showing her nipples poking through and wearing shorts. In both cases she has been sent by the post-apoc scientist dude to, I suppose, see if he can get them to breed. The comic ends with Dimento scoring with his clone (he has no idea she's a clone... he's only 6 years old, after all, being a genetic experiment himself). He seems happy in the end with his large-breasted woman in their post-apoc ruined trailer.

Next up: Son of Mutant World! I'm guessing, given the setup here, we're going to meet Dimento's offspring. I seem to recall a bald female being on the cover.

What Am I Doing??

We are in a global pandemic, it is entirely possible we Americans will re-elect a psycho reality show clown as President, and I turn 50 this year (if I live long enough). Yes, it's mass fucking chaos everywhere. Not cool, universe. Fuck off.

So in the midst of all this mess what exactly have I been doing? In terms of creativity, of course. Nobody wants to know what I'm eating for breakfast or what I do at my day job.

I've been keeping busy. I recently did a character sheet for The Other Side Publishing, I did a special Virtual Gary Con shirt design, I'm working on a GM-screen thingie for a client, and I did a cover for a future issue of Phantasmagoria. I have also turned down some recent offers because I am working on personal stuff and trying to keep my bandwidth under control.

What started out as a serious attempt to finally write my sand and sorcery game Dead Wizards, which changed to Sand in the Bone, morphed into a completely different game idea about a month ago. It is called GOZR (pronounced GO-zur). It is based on the same game system as Sand in the Bone but is entirely different in tone. Where Sand strikes a more serious tone, GOZR is balls-out sci-fantasy in the vein of early 80s romps like Heavy Metal and Wizards. It is an entirely visual game too. Meaning... I'm hand-lettering the whole fucking thing. And it's taking forever but I'm loving it. Something about doing hand lettering is relaxing and fulfilling to me. I don't purport to be great at it. I'm not a master letterer. But I have fun with it and I'm practicing the craft, hopefully getting better at it.

The game itself is an experiment. There's been no playtesting yet and I'm composing a lot of the rules, such as they are, on the canvas as I go. But it's a simple game without a lot of moving parts so I feel confident it will work. After all, there's not much new to the idea of rolling a d20 vs. a target number, is there? We kinda already know how that mechanic works.

The game is presented visually and is table-heavy. In fact, it's pretty much all tables. When it's all said and done you will be able to use this slim volume at the table even with little or no prep and run a fun romp of a game for a bunch of goofy bastards playing goofy bastards.

There is a The Pool element to the game. I made a few posts talking about Sand in the Bone's sand mechanic and GOZR, being more-or-less the same system, also has this mechanic. Here it's called GOOZ but it does pretty much the same thing. Spending your GOOZ lets you influence the game-story by adding facts or controlling outcomes, with a bit of a risk/gamble mechanic involved. I think this will be fun at the table.

I plan to run some GOZR for the Monday night group the next opportunity I get. This will definitely be before I finish it, so I can make tweaks if playtesting suggests it.

So that's what I've been doing, for those who are curious. More later.

Oh, I should caveat here. I have a long and proud history of getting heavily into an idea and then abandoning it. I make no claims that GOZR will actually be finished. However, I do tend to muscle through and finish things after some critical mass has been established. I have pumped many many hours into this thing so far. I have several finished pages that took a long time to complete. Plus this is a sci-fantasy romp... and I tend to greatly enjoy doing those. What I have a problem with is the more serious, dry projects. I am not good with that. So odds are this will actually see the light of day.

(Man, I'm so god damn honest when I'm blogging.)

Richard Corben... definitely an influence on GOZR.

Echoes (Older'n Dirt Art XXVI)

Page one of Echoes, a Pan-Gea comic written by my friend Jayne and scribbled by me on Paris Paper for Pens.

Zarp Cover (Old Art of Doom XX)

Zarp! This character came out of the early 2000s and appeared in numerous little comics between then and the mid-2000s. I still sketch and doodle this guy from time to time and I still have lots of scripts and story drafts featuring him. He's great. I wanna do more Zarp comics... but I'm also very lazy and I know from years of firsthand experience that drawing comics is fuckin' hard work. Anyway... I have this idea for a wordless Zarp comic. Well, there might be dialog but it would be in weird alien scripts as Zarp encounters strange races of creatures in his wandering across a Pan-Gea world. Zarp himself would simply be unspeaking. So this would be 100% focused on visual storytelling. Because that would make it easier to do, right?

I really love this drawing. I did it on Paris paper for pens using my standard array of PITT pens and brushes coupled with Prismacolor markers (that was my arsenal at the time). Oh, and the background was drawn with a Micron 005.

Wonder Woman Action (Old Art XVI)

Another old favorite. Did this one soon after a bit of a rebirth of my creative soul. I went through a somewhat darkish time in 2000, a long slump. I came out of it creating art like this. Rather like discovering you can draw even though you'd been drawing for years.

Brig and Wolf (Old Art X)

This one comes from the age of Pan-Gea, my mythic fantasy comic from the mid-2000s. I have so many memories of this time period, some good and some bad. This was my first professionally published comic book all of my own, published by a company and not by myself. So I was very proud of it. But I was also going through a ton of life changes - such as having our first kid. I crashed and burned, creatively, around 2004-2006.

This piece of art was from a moment when I felt like I was at my apex. Like I could do nothing any better, ever. Of course that's a silly way to think, but that's how our brains work, isn't it? We tell ourselves dumb things, bad things, lies, and junk to get by or to keep from reaching new levels of responsibility.

Let the Dead Stay Buried III