Chadwick Boseman, whom I loved in “42” and paid to see six times in “Get On Up,” has been cast as The Black Panther. I actually didn’t know there *was* going to be a BP film, so ask me no Q’s because i don’t actually know anything and am not afraid to admit it. And, no, no one has reached out to me to consult on the script.
Ok, Just Heard It
By October 28th, 2014, underEssentially Ranting
By October 25th, 2014, underPraiseNet Essentials are a collection of essays and rants wherein I tilt futilely at the windmill of religion, attempting to separate religion (man’s search for God) from spirituality (man’s relationship with a higher power). Most people familiar with my comics work tend to avoid my Christian ministry, likely suspecting (as many people instinctively do) a Jerry Falwellian dogma that does not exist in my writing. I’m not trying to sell Jesus to anybody and I don’t tell people how to live. I tell people how *I* live, which is where my responsibility ends.
Just the mention of my Christianity puts people off as they immediately associate me with the nutty ultra-low-information conservatives killing doctors to prevent abortions, suppressing the vote for political gain, opposing even modest gun legislation while relentlessly attempting to write hatred and bigotry into law. These people have made the face of Christ become the face of intolerance, racism, homophobia and hatred. it is most often a scowling face routinely masked by a phony, plastic Joel Osteen smile for the TV cameras.
Write this down someplace: Those People Are Not Christians. They do not know God, they do not love God. If you hate, you are not a Christian. If you lie, you are not a Christian. Please don’t confuse me with those idiots. For that matter, please don’t confuse the Christian experience with whatever the hell that is.
Zion
By October 22nd, 2014, underI’ve posted the first of several novels I’ve written over the years and then ignored, allowing them to languish on my hard drive while I am distracted by a bumble bee. This is writing I did mainly for me, without a whole lot of consideration for market factors or wondering who the audience for the work might be. I presume the audience for the work is anybody reading this website, and, at a buck ninety-nine, how much of a risk could it possibly be?
I’ve found the only way to break writer’s block is to write, which seems self-defeating because, when you have writer’s block, writing is the very last thing you want to do. Since I couldn’t make any progress at all with the screenplay, I decided to write something else. I just started writing and kept writing, no matter how awful it was, until the ink began to flow from the pen once again. It took maybe a couple weeks of writing absolute gibberish before I finally managed to break through: I was a writer again, I was enjoying myself again. My writing exercise became the novel Zion.
The exercise yielded a love-hate story wrapped in a procedural crime drama. Much like the cancelled-before-it-ever-shipped Concrete Jungle: Legend of The Black Lion, Zion is a cynical urban fable about bad guys and worse guys. A world painted entirely in shades of gray, Zion is populated with quirky, complex, and deeply flawed characters in an overarching theme which deconstructs the meaning of love and the relevance of faith.
I’ve published it under the name “James Priest” to avoid further confusion with the British novelist Christopher Priest, whom I am quite certain has been driven insane from typing, “No, I don’t write Black Panther” thousands of times.
Q2
By October 22nd, 2014, underThe first issue of Q2: The Return of Quantum and Woody shipped last week, which means I probably should blog something about it, but as usual, I’m up to my ears. I’ll try and get back in here over the weekend with a few words. Meanwhile, here’s a recycled clip from my “Watch This Space” post:
I will say I’m more than surprised by the gracious (and puzzling) applause over news that MD Bright and I are doing five issues of comics. For the first few weeks of back-and-forth with Valiant, I was fairly convinced that this was all a practical joke of some kind. I certainly appreciate everyone who actually asked for this project and who have supported this series in the past.
Sorry, there is no goat. We could have put “A” goat in there, but by this point in their lives, I’m pretty sure Vincent Van Goat has gone to Farm Heaven. Forcing a goat into the story pushes us past what we feel is an action-adventure super-hero buddy book (and, all right, super-hero deconstructionism) and into farce, which was never our vision for QW. I think QW is only funny when it evolves along plausible storylines rather than Doc and I sitting around going, “Ok, how do we make this funny?” Sorry to disappoint Vincent fans, but he appears regularly in the monthly.
The project is scheduled for a 2014 release. You can find me hiding under my desk, hoping I haven’t grossly disappointed people who’ve invested so much good faith in these characters and the work. Thanks so much to Doc for working out a way forward, to Dinesh Shamdasani, Warren Simons and Walter Black for their extraordinary patience and persistence in making this project possible.
JFK
By December 4th, 2013, underWhether you love it or loathe it, Stone’s 1991 classic, JFK, is a masterpiece, a tour de force of filmmaking. Critics have labeled it a propaganda film, and I agree, but that hardly makes it any less brilliant. JFK is, hands down, my favorite film. I actually tend to think of it as a horror film, one more devastatingly nightmare-inducing than even the best Freddie Kruger or Jason film. It was the scariest movie I’d ever seen because I walked into the theatre as one person and left as another. I walked in thinking and believing one way and walked out terribly shaken and disturbed.
It was, I believe, a film a little before its time. I’m unsure in this cynical age if JFK would have been nearly as controversial in 2013 as it was in 1991. Stone is accused of undermining American trust in our national institutions, which is laughable considering an American president took us into a desert war under knowingly false pretenses. Haters tend to miss the forest for the trees, accusing Stone of manipulating if not outright brainwashing Americans, when brainwashing Americans is what Google, Facebook, and virtually all news media and advertising do twenty-four hours per day. The government lies to us all the time, don’t blame Oliver Stone for that. All of his critics miss the point of the true power of his brilliant masterpiece: it changed a nation. It forced an act of Congress. It got the planet talking about the assassination again. Name me five other American films in the history of cinema that did that.