What do you say?

So Mark Siegel's new Sailor Twain graphic novel?

It turns out it's not at all what I had imagined it would be, based on the title.

Another depiction of Mothman, this one in prose

The Monster's Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes (St. Martin's Griffin; 2011) is a prose anthology edited by Christopher Golden containing 19 short stories from different writers.

One of these is "Rattler and Mothman," written by Sharyn McCrumb, an author probably best known for The Ballad of Frankie Silver and She Walks These Hills. As the title indicates, Mothman is in it.

The story is told in the first person, presumably from the point of view of the title character, and old, loner type who lives far away from civilization, resents city folks and apparently has some sort of extraordinary ability to communicate with the dead and/or paranormal entities.

One night, while Rattler is sitting in his front yard, looking up at the stars, he sees a large shape circling him, and he signals for it to land. It turns out to be the Mothman, although Crumb is somewhat coy in actually using that name, holding off for a few pages.

The being is described as being seven fee tall, with leathery wings. Here's how McCrumb envisions her Mothman:

He was roughly human shaped, standing upright on long legs that ended in bird claws. Those red eyes flashed and glowed, seeming to take in everything around him. They were set far apart, on the outer edges of a round face with a sharp beak of a nose and a lipless mouth that made me think of a cave entrance: Just a way into darkness. I was wondering if he had teeth, and not particularly eager to find out.

The whole cast of his countenance would cause you to think "insect," by way of classification, except that his expression and bearing said that there was somebody at home. He was a lot smarter than a housefly. You could tell.

His body was covered with a fine fluff (Gray or blue—I couldn't tell in the dim light)—that might have been fur or the sort of down feathers you see on baby birds.

McCrumb's Mothman talks, and quite intelligently, "in a guttural voice with an accent I couldn't place."

The nature of the creature begins to emerge during the course of their conversation. Both the narrator and Mothman use the word "garuda" when describing Mothman, a garuda being a mythological, divine giant bird or bird-man creature in Eastern religions Hinduism and Buddhism. John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies and the creatures #1 press agent, used the term to refer to Mothman repeatedly, often referring to the creature's 13-month flap in West Virginia as "the year of the garuda."

In this story, garudas like the Mothman are powerful beings that live outside of time and protect the land upon which they dwell, by destroying the "nagas" that threaten it ("Nagas" being snakes, again in Eastern mythology).

Rattler pieces together that this particular garuda has been around the area that is presently West Virginia for millions of years, and is at least partially responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs (dinosaurs being the "naga"). It would periodically go to sleep for millions of years and awake to find its land different and populated by different creatures, some of which it would kill as well.

The garuda have a sort of mind-reading technique and, if it feels or "hears" enough human beings all expressing the same fervent wishes or prayers, it acts upon them, as it did on behalf of the Native Americans a few times. The Silver Bridge disaster was one such answer to one such prayer, which may not sit well with my fellow Ohioans.

"Okay, tell me about the bridge," I said. That's almost all anybody remembers about Mothman: That in December 1967 he was seen in the vicinity of the Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant, and that a short time later, the bridge collapsed, killing forty-six unfortunate people whose cars ahd been crossing over at the time.

"It was a small gesture," said Mothman.

Well, I guess it was, compared to wiping out dinosaurs and sending the Ice Age mammals into extinction, but I was still wondering why he'd pick on a bridge.

He heard my question in his head. "Because...that bridge led to a land of nagas."

Oh. Right. Sure, it did. Ohio.

Hey, who are you calling a naga, Mothman?

Unfortunately, the book isn't illustrated, so the only pictures of the various monsters are the ones the writers form in the heads of the readers.

Well, those and the ones on the cover. I'm not sure if they match, one for one, the monsters that star in the stories in the book, but there is a monster on that cover with pretty big, moth-like antennae, so I suppose it's possible that is meant to be Mothman (although it's lack of wings or red eyes makes me think that's probably not the case).

I didn't read the other eighteen stories, as they did not appear to be about Mothman, but the names of some of the contributors should be familiar to some comics readers, including David Liss (Black Panther: The Man Without Fear, Mystery Men), Kevin J. Anderson (JSA: Strange Tales, Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi) and Jonathan Maberry (Black Panther, Doomwar, Captain America: Hail Hydra).

And now here's a crappy sketch I did of the Mothman, as described in the passage above by Rattler:

Some of you may be wondering what's going on with my face...

(Or; "The state of my facial hair is getting stronger...as long as we are joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, and our future is hopeful, and the state of my facial hair will always be strong")

New Watchmen comics I'd be totally okay with:

1.) Tiny Watchmen by Art Baltazar and Franco


2.) Watchmenstruation by Johnny Ryan (If you're going to take a crap on a classic comic, why not turn to the expert?)


3.) Watchmice by Art Spiegelman


4.) The Watchmen Strike Again by Frank Miller (You might think I'm kidding, but I'm totally serious. They have to use this exact title, though)


5.) Watchmen Gallery (I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, but I think DC's best strategy for exploiting Watchmen further than they already have would be to publish one of those Gallery books they used to do in the '90s—I remember buying ones featuring Batman, Death and the Justice League, although I know there were others out there too—in which they would basically have a bunch of great artists contribute pin-ups. It would give them a new comic book, or even comic book series—Mike Allred had a Madman miniseries like this, and DC's JLA-to-Z was essentially a pin-up collection with short bios of various characters offered as a primer to Marvel readers during the JLA/Avengers crossover—that wouldn't actually be a new story. I think that would allow prominent creators to "cover" Gibbons and Moore's work without feeling like jerks, and even those appalled by the idea of a Watchmen 2 something they could comfortably purchase or, at the very least, not feel the need to organize against. Hell, I'd drop $3 on 20-pages of pin-ups of Paul Pope drawing Silk Spectre and Geoff Darrow that squid-thing and Joe Kubert Ozymandias and his genetically-engineered cat thing or whatever. Slap an Alex Ross or Jim Lee or Brian Bolland cover on that sucker and ship away. On a similar note, I guess they could do like some popular manga series like Death Note and Full Metal Alchemist have done and publish some sort of guidebook, with, like, character bios or profiles and suchlike, although I think that would still seem pretty crass compared to a straight-up gallery, which could at least be interpreted as a tribute in addition to a cash grab).


6.) Watchmen Vs. Justice League (I was only 3/4ths kidding when I said that if DC were gonna do it, they should just do it and make it as crass and silly as possible—Watchmen vs. V For Vendetta, etc. Following Watchmen on its own terms is just silly. But what if they get someone like Grant Morrison—probably the only creator of Moore's stature who both works for DC and conceivably wouldn't mind needling the hell out of Moore by doing this—or Geoff Johns—who is synonymous with DC Comics in 2011-going-on-'12 and is an ideal awesome comics/stupid comics writer—and pair them with an unimpeachably talented drawer of superhero comics like, say, George Perez, and do a semi-silly, Gardner Fox style heroes of two worlds crossover in today's super-serious melodramatic style. Where, I don't know, having failed to save their world from nuclear war, Ozymandius sends a handful of his fellow heroes to the DC Universe to try saving it, only to find that its got like 200 guys who are all as powerful as Doctor Manhattan. They could fight, and then team-up. I'd buy that before I'd buy Comedian: Year One or Rorshach Begins)

The Human Torch just set the paper on fire, obviously.

Here's a fun holiday activity you can do with your friends while the comics blogosphere (or at least the U.S.-based portion of it), slacks off over the next few days.

Can you match the hand turkey to the Marvel hero who created it? You can find the answers...aw, you probably don't need the answers. It's not that hard.

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Happy Thanksgiving, and thanks for reading!

Here are some rather poor sketches of some rather pretty girls.

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I just recently completed the process of moving out of my ancestral home for, like, the fourth time since I've went away to college, and into a new apartment. Part of that process involved cleaning and de-Calebifying the most heavily Caleb-ed parts of my ancestral home, including the room I referred to as my "office," which was basically just a pile of comics and art supplies and sketches and notes emanating from my drawing table that filled the entire room ankle-high or so. These images were among the detritus I've been organizing this weekend instead of blogging. So I'm just gonna post them here and count that as a Friday night/Saturday night post.

At some point before the start of the previous season of 90210 (not Beverly Hills 90210, but the current, ongoing 90210 on the CW), I decided it would be more constructive to draw while watching it for an hour a week than to not draw while watching it for an hour a week, and I thought I would do little cartoon synopses of each new episode to post on EDILW the following nights (If I weren't blogging about comics already, I very well might have ended up blogging about 90210; you could be reading Every Day Is Like Tuesday Night on The CW instead of EDILW).

In preparation, I spent an afternoon at the CW's home page, looking at the promotional photos of the cast up at the time, and drawing Rob Estes and Matt Lanter and Ryan Eggold and Shenae Grimes over and over and over again to try to get their faces right in something that landed halfway between my "style" (dots for eyes, shadows for noses, etc) and what they really look like (drawing real people in my style is pretty impossible though, since everyone looks the same with only hair and clothes and accessories to differentiate 'em).

I couldn't get any of 'em right though, and gave up on the idea by the time the season had actually started (As I recall, it had just moved to Tuesday nights at 8, putting it in direct opposition with Dancing With The Stars, and I chose to watch the latter as it occurred and the catch up with 90210 on DVD later, as Dancing was live).

Anyway, these are the only three sketches that I kept (and by "kept" I mean left in one of the piles on the floor in my office, instead of put in the recycling bin that night). They're of Jessica Lowndes/Adrianna Tate-Duncan, AnnaLynne MacCord/Naomi Clark and Jessica Stroup/Erin Silver. The Silver is the only way I don't completely hate.

And if you think those are bad, you should see what my Rob Estes looked like...sort of like if Willem DaFoe was bitten by Ray Wise, and every full moon aftewards, DaFoe turned into a Were-Ray Wise, and an police sketch artist tried to draw what DaFoe would look like during mid-transformation. That's what my Rob Estes looked like.

Blog@ Contributor No More!

Hi there loyal Every Day Is Like Wednesday reader. Have you noticed the content on this supposedly daily comics blog has been decidedly less daily than usual the last week or two? Have you also noticed that you haven't seen my byline on any posts at Blog@Newsarama.com (which I assume it's safe to assume that you're in the habit of visiting Monday through Friday for bonus, EDILW-like, Caleb-written content) in a while?

You have? My, but you're observant. Have you wondered why that might be? You have? Observant and inquisitive; you'll go far in life!

Well I've been feeling a bit ground down by the, um, grind of producing at least twelve posts about comics each and every week, seven of which I do for the sheer pleasure of hearing myself talk about comics, the other five of which I was doing for actual money (albeit a relatively small amount of money).

I honestly loved doing both, but changes in my professional life over the past year or so have eaten up a lot of my writing-about-comics-for-no-to-little-pay time. When I started this blog in 2006, I was 100% unemployed; when I started contributing to Blog@ in...whenever that was (2008? 2009? I honestly can't remember; it was a December, I know that much), I was working 20 hours a week at a job that allowed me to write while on the clock (which was pretty much the best job I've ever had, and was mighty disappointed to lose it). That hasn't been the case over the last seven months or so, and I just got a new-new day job, an event which seemed like a good time to make a change in my, uh, night job as well.

Because I am dumb and bad with money, I decided to quit doing the writing-online-about-comics gig for which I got paid, but to continue doing the one for which I do not. That is, I'm no longer going to be contributing to Blog@, but will continue writing here as per usual—and hopefully with renewed enthusiasm resulting in sharper, better content.

I could have probably continued doing both for a while longer, but it was increasingly apparent to me that I was phoning work for both venues in a little too often, and what I was giving Blog@ lately wasn't my best. While a little extra money to blow on comics each month is always welcome, I was beginning to feel a little bad about not giving them my best, and having my name attached to work I knew wasn't my best.

Additionally, if I had to choose between the two, and I sort of felt I did, I wanted to continue doing the one that was all mine, that I had the most control over (unless blogger or Google gets hacked or decides to eat my blog or something, I guess, since I'm still on a blogger blogspot blog because, again, I am dumb).

And that's pretty much all there is to it. I don't have any bad feelings about any of the folks I worked for or with there, and am incredibly grateful for the opportunity that Matt Brady, Troy Brownfield, Lucas Siegel and Mike Doran have given me over the years, which amounted to essentially doing whatever I wanted, so long as I did it once a day Monday through Friday, and then giving me some money for doing what I'd do for free anyway. The bosses at Blog@ couldn't really have been more hands-off, and I generally only heard form t hem when I had a question. I wish them all the best of success at Newsarama and/or whatever they all decide to do next (Brady, as you know, moved on a while ago).

I'll continue to read Blog@ just as I did before I started contributing, and I hope you will to (To be honest, I think it's gotten even better in the past few weeks once Graeme McMillan started contributing again and, a little before that, when Jill Pantozzi started contributing and Alan Kistler started talking about superhero costumes.

I'm sure—like, 100% positive—that I'll be contributing to another comics-focused site on the Internet in the very near future, although it will be on a more limited basis, which will allow me to focus on quality instead of quantity. Daily blogging is a lot of freaking work, even the extremely easy, low-thought sorts of posts I was doing (link-blogging, examinations of the weekly releases, straight reviews), that took me an awful lot of time, if not always a lot of creative thinking. And, ultimately, time spent reading every comics blog I could find for link fodder was time I wasn't spending doing my best work here, or reviewing comics at better-paying gigs, or, perhaps most importantly, making my own comics. (And if you've read that first one I made, then you probably know they need all the work they can get).

So that's that. I'll be sure to update you on any future developments regarding me-writing-about-comics-on-the-Interent. In the mean time, I've been recharging my batteries a bit, reading things that aren't comic books, and spending time with my friends:

Owlbear