I go for walks a lot. That's my exercise, it isn't much but whatever. When I'm walking I never know how to react when people walk by. I tend to make direct eye contact a lot which I know can be intimidating but I try not to. I feel like I might make people uncomfortable if I smile and say hello like giving a stranger that much attention is somehow imposing. And if I divert my eyes and ignore them I feel even more shady. I temper my reactions based on the people, of course. Old people I am much more friendly to, younger people I do the head nod and get on with my business but I really have no idea what is normal. The whole thing feels forced and annoying but I feel like I should do something if just to throw off the crazy potential mugger vibe I feel like I carry. It isn't social anxiety, I really don't have that at all. It is more like I am aware of creating anxiety in others and try to preemptively alleviate that. I should just growl at strangers. At least then they'd have a story to tell later.

CROSSED #6 by Garth Ennis and myself in stores today. looks like this:


or

This is the most depressing thing I have read in a while...

Rolling Stone's penetrating essay into the history of how Goldman Sachs has all but destroyed the US economy for the sake of a handful of ultra wealthy scumbags and, more importantly, how they are manipulating the current administration into creating the next unsustainable bubble.

If you don't really understand the ins and outs of the financial crisis, this lays out a lot of the facts in an easy to read format and I highly recommend it.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20090623%2FREVIEWS%2F906239997

Eberts review of Transformers 2 and one if his best. Hilarious reading.

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

Have to give the show to MS. Sony brought out some interesting stuff but nothing that wowed, really. God of War 3 looked like a highres PS2 game that will undoubtedly be a lot of fun but didn't really excite me. I'm curious about MAG, being a huge fan of Battlefield. I'd rather play that kind of game on PC but I'll try it. Heavy Rain looks great, Last Guardian looks amazing despite not having hardly any game play shown, Uncharted 2 looked rentable, that cart game Mod-Racers didn't move me at all....and that was it aside from their wii-mote knockoff (which did look like an improvement but eh). There were some Final Fantasy announcements but I can't stand that series aside from the pretty art direction. Where is new content for Killzone 2?

Microsoft had Left 4 Dead 2, Halo ODST, Halo Reach, Mass Effect 2, Ninja Blade, Alan Wake, new exclusive GTA4 content, Crackdown 2 (I hear the first one was good), Forza 3 (if you like driving sims), and Splinter Cell. That's a lot of a-list stuff. Surprised there was nothing listed from Rare or Epic yet.

Nintendo had...some more Mario stuff, a Deadspace shooter, a Res Evil shooter and a pulse meter. No wii in my future.

Can't wait to get my hands on Brutal Legend, Assassin's Creed2, Rockband Beatles, Arkham Asylum and Modern Warfare 2. I'll give a new Metal Gear a shot but the idea of playing a game focused on Raiden doesn't exactly get the blood pumping. I'm a bit tired of soap opera plots, vampires and magical silliness creeping into a tactical stealth shooter but I appreciate the sheer laughable silliness of it. Looks like there are enough great non-exclusives to keep busy but I am envious of 360 owners.

Sony needed to bring the thunder and they didn't. I really hoped they would have opened their wallet and bought something BIG (like, I don't know, an exclusive Valve or Id project). I hope there are still some cool PC game announcements coming to take away some of the burn from the lame PS3 showing.

Sony lost Metal Gear to Microsoft. Oops. All of Microsoft's exclusive announcements are pretty damn impressive to be honest. I'm still looking forward to Sony's E3 announcements but it isn't looking good for the future of the PS3. Our PS3 is a giant dust collector right now. We keep renting games but none of the PS3 exclusives have been worth owning and the downloadable content for the games I like aren't even available for PS3. Sony needs to up their game in a fucking hurry because after gouging their customer base and not delivering any games worth the investment, they are actively driving their base toward MS and Nintendo's goofy little machine. If the best announcements they can make are Killzone 2 quality, they might as well throw in the towel. The new God Of War should be fun but an old school button mashing slasher is not the gateway to the new. And if you don't have NEW, you don't have shit.

Dammit, I'm going to have to buy a 360.

A Wii game that doesn't make me feel like I'm choking on Disney's third string rejects or being conned into paying attention to sub-par game design with a controller gimmick. This looks devilishly creepy and quite interesting.

Livejournal is dead. My "read" flist group is down to about 20 posts a day, which is saying something since there are 300 of you and several of those are feeds. It's a wasteland that doesn't appear able to bring in any new voices. There are plenty of die-hards that are plugging away like nothing has changed, of course, but the casual users have gone silent and every day I notice more "friends" with lines through their journal names. Apparently creating content is too hard or pointless for most so they've abandoned blogs and scattered to networking sites. I'd have closed my journal down ages ago but I like having an easy way to read your journals.

Myspace is also pretty much dead. No new content, just people collecting people and countless desperate people promoting some product or other. Compared to LJ it is still grand central though. I get on average, 10 friend requests a day and I'd say 2 or 3 of those are usually real people. Nothing comes of it, I rarely communicate with anyone there. I don't much like Myspace and its weird format and proprietary email system and find myself looking forward to abandoning it like I did Friendster and countless other sites from back in the day. These days Myspace seems to be packed with people I would go out of my way to avoid in real life. It is like going to a pimp convention in a trailer park where everything is covered in glitter gifs and the primary goal seems to be to destroy the English language once and for all...and gettin' biche$$.

Facebook has, of course blown up. I imagine the backlash is growing and the site will fall from favor as Myspace did within a few years. I keep reading theories that are flying around about how Facebook developed by being purposely exclusionary. Essentially, by initially being for college kids only it became the equivalent of a gated community, keeping the poor and undereducated at open community places like Myspace. You also had to be YOU on the site preventing people from making pages claiming to be one of hundreds of Paris Hiltons or some other vapid useless celebrity. I quite like Facebook these days because it has done exactly what I want a social networking site to do. It's reconnected me with old friends and classmates.

Twitter is the big rage these days and I think it best represents our modern internet culture. Tiny info bursts from people full of banal, silly, pointless banter or links but no real content. It's like reading nothing but one liners from decidedly unfunny people. Or worse, to-do lists from people with nothing to do. Sure there are some amusing moments and some brilliant people that are truly worth following but most of it is noise. Forgettable, pointless noise, at that but has that nugget of entertainment that keeps us checking it.

What I find interesting is actually that our presence online has evolved from carving out a representative space online (personal web pages- amusing to note that I read today Yahoo is finally shutting down Geocities) to archiving our thoughts and interests (blogs) down to twittering our meaningless musings in a format no one will ever bother to keep with rare exception. Are we changing the internet culture to be one less focused on the "I was here" archival mentality to one of living purely in the moment? Is that change significant? Is the world really going to be worse off if all of those old blog entries, articles, essays and musings vanish into dusty old virtual filing cabinets to be replaced by nothing but the instant tweet, devoid of significance or purpose aside from momentary amusement? As they say, the internets are serious business!

Who out there can tell me a good way to purchase European comic albums? It kills me that I don't have much work from several of my all time favorites simply because they haven't been made available here. Obviously I'd prefer English editions but I'd be fine just owning the art. I need more Wendling and Marini and Bilal and Liberatore and Alary and Bess and Lauffray and countless others!

Issue 4 hits the stands this week but a warning. The last couple of issues have been getting split so some stores get them one week and others the next. Might want to call ahead. The distributor is a state of temporary chaos right now as they do something or other with their major warehouses I hear.

According to the NY TIMES, the recently colored and relreleased COURTYARD, my Lovecraftian horror story with Alan Moore and Antony Johnston is the #7 soft cover Graphic Novel this week. I suppose I could now call myself NY TIMES Bestselling Graphic Novelist Jacen Burrows! I kind of like the ring of that even if it isn't quite the accomplishment it sounds like.

Have you guys seen the preview stuff for Steve Pugh's new series HOTWIRE from Radical press? Fucking gorgeous work! Seriously, if this thing isn't a top seller based on art alone you are all fired as comic fans. The gist: Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead, written and illustrated by Steve Pugh from a story written by Warren Ellis. The four-issue miniseries takes place in a near-future when ghosts, or “blue lights”, roam the city streets. Most remain harmless...until a break-in at London's Maximum Security Necropolis triggers a surge of violent, brutal hauntings.



Previews:
http://comicbookresources.com/?page=preview&id=2007&disp=table
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/020904-HOtwire-Pugh.html

CROSSED #3 hit the stands yesterday in which our heroes find cake and have a joyful party. Go pick up your copy before they outlaw it. It looks like this:



But inside it is warm and cuddly like THIS:



PS. there is nothing on Earth more awesome than a River Otter.

I hate the words Trouser and Blouse but love the word Pants.

I think the giant box of Xmas cookies I got from my mom is going to turn me diabetic. Just call me Sugarblood from now on.

The Spirit failed so bad. Eisner is going to kick Frank's ass in hell.

( My Xmas card to the world )

Crossed #2 is on shelves now. In this issue a nasty rumor threatens to end Lauren and Audrina's friendship and Heidi realizes Spencer's been withholding information from her so she decides to go back to Brent and Sam and ask for her job back! I recently had a dream in which I had to box a Kangaroo. Any questions, comments, psychological advice?

I answered questions for our friends over at Fangoria Online about Crossed. I talk about about my motivation behind the book and what the content really means to me.

Your awesome link of the day:

70's Rock Musicians In Their Parent's Living Rooms

Every few months I start studying a new set of artists. Some comic artists, some non-comic artists, but I choose them based on areas I am trying to improve in my own work. When I was doing 303 I spent a lot of time looking at Moebius' Blueberry stuff, the Mitch Byrd sketchbooks, Steve Dillon and everything by Frank Quitely which I think really helped me figure out some new composition ideas, surface style and storytelling stuff. For wormwood I spent a lot of time looking at the proportions of Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, the fun cartoonish style of Art Adams and Mike Wieringo, and the work of Goran Sudzuka and Goral Parlov, particularly Outlaw Nation and Barracuda. All the while I have also been studying a lot of classic illustrators and painters. The internet has done so much for giving us new avenues of study. I've been getting a real kick out of the classic advertising illustrator archives and concept artist sites. There is so much great work out there.

Right now, for Crossed I think my biggest study subjects are John Buscema and Joe Kubert. My main focus right now is really trying to improve my anatomy and proportions and these guys are masters of the kind of form I am trying to adapt. They do that rugged, tough, outdoorsy brawler stuff so well. I'm sure by next month I'll be focused on composition or storytelling again but right now the main flaw I see in my work is my figure stuff. I find the hardest part of working in a realistic style making my figures still seem naturalistic and expressive. I'm also contending with having to get pages done faster than I like. I am not as satisfied with the final results as I'd like to be (who ever is?) but I figure if I can make some rudimentary improvements in some areas, even working at a faster pace won't cause to much of a dip in quality. I just wish i could work at a 3 page a week pace. That seems to be when I get my best results because I can tinker with stuff till it looks "right" or I hit a point where I simply can't solve the problem any better at my current skill level. Damn publishing schedules!