Nowhere Band News

First off, some exciting news: the folks at McSweeney’s have asked me to do an audiobook version of Journal of a New COBRA Recruit; after all these years, I finally get to do some voice acting. I never even knew I wanted to do voice acting, but suddenly I’m stoked. So right on.

And it continues to be weird to me that the COBRA piece has such long legs. For something that popped into my head while I was at a stoplight on my bike 7 years ago, it really winds up opening a lot of doors.

Second, I just finished the David Michaelis biography of Charles Schulz. To which my final reaction is “huh.”

I can’t help but feel like this book was one hell of a missed opportunity, on a couple of levels. For one thing, Schulz’s family has been coming out of the woodwork to denounce the way their family life has been portrayed, and even just looking at page counts, it looks like they’ve got a case– if you compare the amount of the book devoted to Schulz’s (unhappy) first marriage to his (happy) second one (note that the narrative pretty much ends with Schulz’s second marriage, skipping ahead 30 years to his death!), or the amount of space devoted to his one extramarital affair versus the amount of space devoted to his kids, it starts to look like Michaelis had an editorial bent towards the negative in Schulz’s life. Which starts to cast doubts on the reliability of the whole enterprise.

I’m also sort of amused at the reaction, both on the part of Michaelis and by many readers, to the “shocking revelation” that Schulz dealt with insecurity and depression; even if it wasn’t always right there in the open in the comic strip (which it is), insecurity and depression are so common among creative people I know that I’ve just come to assume they’re part of the essential makeup (I have a hard time thinking of an artist I admire in any field who hasn’t dealt with some combination of depression, substance abuse, or suicide attempts: Vonnegut, Hemingway, Robbins, Cash, Tweedy, Westerberg, Thompson, you name it. Maybe Walt Kelly, although I don’t know too much about his personal life…).

I _did_ enjoy the book– the glimpse of life in the Twin Cities in the 20s-50s was cool (and it was a thrill, recognizing a bunch of addresses), and it is pretty interesting to go back and reread old Peanuts strips with an eye for what the real-world raw material for that strip might’ve been. But it should’ve been a masterpiece, and plainly wasn’t, and that’s too goddamned bad.

Next up: reading Jim Walsh’s oral history of the Replacements, which will pretty much inevitably have repercussions on Nowhere Band.

So, the Awesome Boys have finally played their first show, even if it’s just a wedding reception in Fergus Falls. I’m proud of them, and I can relate– both of the bands I’ve been in have done the rural wedding thing, and it’s always bun an interesting combination of fun and weird. I’ve also lived through the horrible equipment-pretzel that Josh suffers in the first panel, although never for three hours.

Despte being #19, this is actually the 20th Nowhere Band comic (9 stretched over two strips).  Arbitrary numbers are always good places to take a break, and in this case I actually have a god reason:  I’ve been asked to contribute a story for an anthology issue of Bob Lipski’s excellent Twin Cities comic institution Uptown Girl. It’s too cool an opportunity to pass up, so I’m going to spend a couple of weeks working on that, and then the Awesome Boys will return in March to deal with their new status as a working band.

The blog will stay more or less active during that time though; news may be brewing on other fronts.

Also:  I just found out that Best Buy now sells guitars.  Fairly nice ones.  What the hell?

So, if nothing else, I feel like the suggested soundtrack of this one indicates that I’ve finally just settled on a hard-R rating for what’s basically a pretty innocent comic. I mean, for a rock comic, Nowhere’s pretty debauchery-free, but I’m so used to writing characters who share my penchant for swearing up a motherfucking storm that it just oozes out and suddenly hey, there, there’s something about fucking wonderchickens in the title box.  Which is fine… I think it’s just funny that the word “fuck” just inevtably rises to the top of any project.

Anyway, the comic itself.  On the writing side, this is yet another one where I subject Mimi to something I had to put up with when I was a musical freelancer.  This time, though, I’m giving her the gift of a much cooler reaction to the situation than I had (I basically did what Josh suggests, which, yeah, is really lame, and it’s probably no coincidence that I never wound up writing for Pitchfork).  And while I really like the fact that the Pitchfork dude hits on her in the final email, that was totally unplanned- my original script just had her getting the slot, and at the very last minute as I was mocking up the email, I thought it’d be funnier if he was so taken that he started  putting on the barely-detectable moves.

Visually:  I inked this one differently from previous Nowheres; I usually use a Pentel brush pen, but this time tried a couple of crowquill pens.  I’m curious as to whether anyone even thinks it looks different (and if it does, if the difference is good or bad).  I’m still trying to decide.

So, #17’s up. This one has sort of a weird heritage; it’s based on something that happened to me (a couple of times, even, and I think I’ve historically played both the Jon and Aaron roles in this siuation), but I’d forgotten about that.  Then, when #15 ran, featuring an incidental panel shwing the Awesome Boys’ setlist for the reception, a friend pointed out that it was pretty funny that they were planning on playing a song named “Shit-Hammer” at a wedding reception.  That reminded me of all of the bowdlerization controversies I’ve been in, and I was off.

Other comment:  panel 3, the overhead shot, is one of my favorites of all times.  Since so much of Nowhere Band consists of conversations in the practice space, it’s a challenge keeping it visually dynamic…