Happy New Year & Welcome to 2015

2015 sounds to me like the future. Or beyond that.

This is the year Doc Brown travels to, with Marty and Jennifer in Back to the Future II, to discover flying skateboards — and where are those things, anyway?

We’re just four years away from Blade Runner and Akira, and in fourteen years a Terminator T-800 Model 101 will be sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor.

Chris Claremont and John Byrne‘s X-Men comic book ‘Days of Future Past‘ scenario took place two years ago — the year Snake Plissken escaped from L.A. Richard Linklater’s film adaptation of A Scanner Darkly is supposed to have taken place then too.

Hell, Moonbase Alpha was knocked out of orbit a decade and a half back (in September 1999), it’s been fourteen years since Dave travelled to Jupiter with HAL 9000, while the Jupiter 2 took off for Alpha Centauri seventeen years ago (on October 16, 1997). If you really want to rear vision the opposite way, talking apes arrived in 1973, biological warfare between China and Russia killed most of the world’s population in 1975, and George Pal destroyed the globe anyway 48 years back in The Time Machine (1960).

I think you get the point — future, now. Kind of.

Regardless of that hyperbole it’s been a madcap year, and I think I’m going to miss 2014.

art by niagara detroit

Personally, I was able to publish another novel (Depth Charging Ice Planet Goth), a graphic novel based on Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, and get a monthly comic book series going (Bullet Gal).

There was also an anthology (Black/White) and the ongoing series Tales to Admonish, plus getting to work with a bevy of talented visual artists like Matt Kyme, Adam Rose, Dan Watts and Asela De Silva.

I hooked up with some amazing like-minded people along the way — which resulted in not only some essential moral support and fun camaraderie, but a successful Kickstarter campaign to publish all 12 issues of Bullet Gal in around March/April 2015 (via Under Belly Comics) as a trade paperback that’s 340+ pages in length.

I started a fifth novel titled The Mercury Drinkers — though that’s been temporarily on ice while I wound up the Bullet Gal book — and we’re considering options for another issue of Tales to Admonish, a comic book adaptation of Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa?, and a possible sequential update of the Tristan and Iseult story.

Little Nobody/muzak wise, I have a second 12″ vinyl EP coming out through My Own Jupiter, and a CD album out via Japanese label Fountain Music. Next year we’ll also be celebrating 20 years since the establishment of IF? Records (more news soon, thanks to Sebastian Bayne).

In 2014 I got back to Melbourne for the first time in 3 years (this past August) — and thus got to meet my IF? Commix partner-in-crime Matt and his lovely clan, as well as hang out with mates and La Familia, do a comic book and novel launch, watch DVDs, and eat far too much fish & chips, steak, oysters, cheese and Hawaiian pizza.

To cap it all off last month my daughter Cocoa was selected to dance the Blue Bird Variation at her ballet school performance next June — in front of about 1,000 people.

At age nine.

Wow.

Reading-wise I’ve been able to find the time to go back to Raymond Chandler, and via him to really properly explore Dashiell Hammett beyond Spade and Nick Charles — in particular his character the Continental Op. I also pushed through some China Miéville (The City & the City, Railsea), Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union), and Jedediah Berry‘s The Manual of Detection.

The comic books that meant most to me in 2014 were ones not necessarily released this year (though some have been), including Matt Fraction when he works with David Aja on Hawkeye and with Christian Ward on ODY-C, along with writer Ed Brubaker — who killed it for me this year via Velvet with artist Steve Epting and The Fade Out with Sean Phillips. I also caught up on (and really dug) the The Winter Soldier run Brubaker did with Lark and Butch Guice, some of the Criminal tomes by Brubaker and Phillips, Nowhere Men thanks to Eric Stephenson and Nate Bellegarde, Pretty Deadly by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Ríos, Walter Geovani’s work with Gail Simone on Red Sonja, and my IF? Commix partner Matt Kyme’s ongoing That Bulletproof Kid.

Best comic book adaptation?

While Guardians of the Galaxy was fun, I’d go with Captain America: Winter Soldier. I’m a huge fan of the original comic series by Brubaker with Epting and Lark, and I think they adapted that exceptionally well. Even Cocoa loved it, and I thought she’d be too young.

Anyway, I wasn’t intending on doing any sort of best of list thingy; I mostly wanted to waffle on about finishing off the year — and wish you a brilliant time over NYE, and all the best for 2015.

That future now I mentioned.