Mmm mmm post.

*Today was a day of picking things up and putting them elsewhere. I aided my brother and uncle in cleaning out a yard, and I helped my father purchase a load of bricks (along with sacks of sand and crushed rock) from one place and move them to another. I’ve lived in a building where all the yard and brick work have been handled for me for the last three years, so needless to say the slightest rearing of manual work’s head had me moaning ‘oh!! what labor!’ before the second brick was laid. How the hell does Ignatz manage to throw those goddamned things all day?! That mouse has got one sweet strawberry goddamn of a forearm.

*UPDATE (5/19/06 1:58 AM): Hm, I almost forgot to mention yesterday's comics-related dream.

I found myself standing at a decent-sized outdoor festival. The kind of place where I'd normally expect to see rides and games, but it was actually just a lot of people milling around. In front of me was a large tent. I approached, entered, and discovered that Tim Vigil (of Faust) was having a signing.

I have no idea what Tim Vigil looks like, but the 'Tim Vigil' character in my dream was a lean man in the upper reaches of middle age with a scratchy grey beard. He had a fairly large line for his table, but it moved quickly. There were a few other tables set up in the tent, though I didn't know any of the artists there by name.

I was almost up to Vigil's table when I realized that I didn't have any comics for him to sign, and he didn't seem to have any with him at his table. I grew very anxious, and began scanning the room for nearby comics. Just as it came to be my turn in line, I looked to a nearby (and unoccupied) table and spotted a stack of WWII comics - the Japanese-influenced ones that Antarctic Press used to put out - and snagged a copy. But as I approached Vigil's table, I found that he'd not worked on that comic at all, and I grew very nervous.

But Tim Vigil put me at ease. He asked me my name, and mentioned that he'd known people with my family's name in the past. It turned out that Vigil had many relatives in the Pennsylvania area, and we began talking pleasantly about that and related topics. Nobody in the line behind me seemed to mind that we were taking so much time.

And that was it. Some nice variation on the usual 'caught in an awkward situation' dream. No clue what it all means.

*Anyway, it's to hectic right now to get out a full post. I did buy the new Krazy Kat book, and it's looking good and colorful. Some sources who managed to catch the new X-Men movie say it's right smack in the center of the superhero movie quality spectrum, which might wind up pushing it up to 'good' in the public eye just because expectations have gotten so low. It's nothing that people on the internet will be demanding a Best Picture Oscar for like they did with Spider-Man 2, but it's been insisted to me that it's actually better than the first mutant movie. I've never seen the second. Plenty of fuel for hardcore fan arguing over accuracy, though. Apparently, you can sese the rushed nature of the project through the cutting schema. That's what I've been told.

Beyond that, just working on various projects. I've got some more special features on older, once-prominent series on the plate for the soonish future (like, a month or two). The Puma Blues is a lock, since I've been going over the whole series, and god it's an odd bird. I've also been reading the whole of Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men in concurrence with Joe Casey's run on Uncanny X-Men, which I've just finished my set of, Marvel having never bothered to put the last 10 issues of it in collected form. How can they rob the world of Eddie Campbell drawing Uncanny X-Men?! Huh.