My phones started blowing up first thing in the morning, followed by email. “You’ve been nominated for an Eisner Award!” I just assumed it was a typo. The nod was actually for Death Strike, a melodrama about the Grim Reaper caught up in a labor dispute.

Thanks first off to Marvin, for whom I slaved tirelessly when I was 17 years old. That’s me making copies of his Tomb of Dracula in 1978. That’s pretty much all I did in those days, make copies for Marv Wolfman. (more…)

I am not rallying against the current spate of presumed police brutality against black men. Much of what I am seeing is uninformed histrionics: here’s what we think we know, here’s what we saw on TV, here’s what we heard, here’s what we’ve been told. For me, there’s too much emotion loose on the streets of the nation and not nearly enough intellect.

Our outrage seems mostly an anti-intellectual embrace of rhetoric over analysis, and the wrongheaded and deeply troubling determination to fight our legal case on city streets where no such cases are ever won. Simply failing to obey lawful instructions from a sworn officer is legal justification for the very tragedies we are rallying against. I’d rather fight the actual problem than flail away at a symptom of it. (more…)

No, I don’t know where I’ve been in 2012. I mean it. I have almost no recall of last year other than being trapped, almost around the clock, in my home office working on design and advertising projects while the world passed by on CNN. Looking back over the year, I realized that, outside of working for other people, I’ve accomplished virtually nothing. This stuff is incredibly time consuming and leaves you creatively and intellectually exhausted, so the thought of coming up with some pithy blog post or, even more challenging, a comic book plot, becomes an extremely steep hill to climb. I was actually kind of shocked to finally get back over here to my own website and realize it’s been more than a year since I posted anything here, and at least as long since I’ve checked Jim’s Comic Book Life email over at the DigitalPriest account. The annual Holiday Dead Stop has afforded me a little time to pause and look around, so I’ll be making an effort to comb through what appears to be a 13-month backlog of email while updating this WordPress installation (which means this blog may come down for a while as I update and reinstall).

Presuming anybody’s actually paying attention anymore, I hope and pray you all had a great year. More important, I hope and pray for great things in the year to come. I’ll do my best to be here more  often (which is easy, if I show up even twice in 2013). And my apologies to what I’m sure are a great many people who’ve sent messages to my dead-letter office. Back to you soon.

—Priest