As with my actual life, Concrete Jungle is full of evil people who do wonderfully noble things and good people who benignly incorporate some level of hypocrisy and corruption. With people who love without sacrifice. It is ruthlessly, giddily cynical with a dash of hope tossed in, hope being the most invented part of the piece. It’s got crime and sex and politics and ancient mysticism and modern religion, with heaping doses of black humor and wrenching terror. And, threaded through the complex layers, it’s got what I know to be true. Just a little piece of it. Maybe that’s enough.
Archive for the ‘About Me’ Category
Alone In The Jungle
Saturday, November 19th, 2011Rip Van Priest
Friday, October 14th, 2011They re-booted the DC Universe? ALL of it?! I am hearing gonzo numbers… Will they last? Are the books any good? Every time you set aside continuity you create a class of reader who will not invest, viscerally, in the reboot. Jumping-on points create jumping-off points, and fans feel cheated for having invested decades in the old continuity only to now have it set aside. Aren’t they devaluing their own assets by saying nothing matters? They are also creating a class of reader who will simply skip what they Are doing now and wait for the next reboot.
This is a problem similar to that of collected editions and trades– people sit out the monthlies and wait for the trades. But, by not supporting the monthlies, they deprive the publisher of numbers sufficient to warrant a trade.
Amazing…
Mum’s The Word
Monday, October 10th, 2011Like most writers, there’s thirty years of “I Should Really Get Around To This” piled around my house. Things that didn’t get done. Things that still might get done. Things I’ m actually doing. The problem with this page is that it’s a lot easier to discuss completed projects than works in progress or pitches of things I’d like to do. Every writer has a drawer full of unfinished stuff and ideas. Posting those ideas puts the ideas at risk. And sometimes it takes years for this stuff to move from my desk into a book or a film, so the Projects page can get old pretty fast, with the same dozen half-eaten sandwiches listed up there. So I’ve really been twisting trying to decide what, if anything, to publicly display.
You Are Here
Sunday, September 18th, 2011I have no idea what I’ m doing, so bear with me. All I can tell you is my old website is, well, old. Very old. With lots and lots of bad code. I’ve wanted to re-code it for years, now, but haven’t had then time. I have finally admitted that I will never get around to it. There’s just not enough hours in a day, and, frankly, I haven’t been in this business in a very long time so I’m not sure what the point of fixing the site might be. Therefore, I have done the reasonable and responsible thing: shoved everything under the bed and moved on. The old site is still here, but it’ s a lot like that Christmas tree you stupidly shoved into a box last year, lights and all, and now have to unravel and reconnect everything. That I’m fairly certain I will get around to, but it’ll be done in fits and starts.
Beyond that, I am rattling off some self-serving observations about whatever, mainly for the sake of hearing myself talk. Most of my blogging is done over on the PraiseNet these days, so if you’re at all interested in what I have to say, there’s a lot more of that sort of thing there. I may or may not have some new projects to talk about, but most of that won’ t look anything at all like comics.
I do miss chatting with you bloggers and apologize for the vanishing act. Moving forward I will do my best to be less of an absentee landlord, but time is not my friend. I had to steal a great deal of it just to get this far. Hope everybody’s well. —Priest
The New Black Mambo
Sunday, September 18th, 2011At some point I was no longer a writer. I had, somehow, become a black writer. This perplexed me, considering the halcyon 80’s, where Marvel was a hotbed of scathing, litigiously un-PC sexism and racism (reference: Rescue Me’s potty-mouthed fire house), I was never seen as a “black” writer. I competed with everybody else, with guys who had much more experience than I, and did the grunt work and odd jobs just like anybody else.
Nobody at DC hired me to reboot Green Lantern in Emerald Dawn because I was a black guy, and Fabian Nicieza seemed to not notice or care about my skin color when he approached me to dream up a Power Man/ Iron Fist-esque buddy book for his startup imprint Acclaim.
Pre-Milestone, the subject just didn’ t come up. Somewhere along the way, Marvel became much more PC and I became inexplicably much blacker.