Nowhere Band News

Jim Davis is allowing a Garfield Without Garfield book to be published, and has a sense of humor about the existence of the strip (I suppose it helps that the book will also provide him with assloads of money).  Good for him, I guess.

…and we continue with last week’s internal Awesome Boys debate over how to get ready for their show at the Terminal.

I don’t know what the deal is with the rule Jon cites, but it seems to be pretty ironclad… covering still-active bands that you like is just Not Done, for no good reason that I can think of. Especially weird since I remember reading about Jimi Hendrix covering “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” like a day or two after it was released, and the Beatles being really flattered, etc, etc. Essentially, I think it’s hard to say that something’s uncool if Jimi Hendrix did it (especially death by vomit!).

Future comics note: I’ve gotten a little bored with the formatting and general look of Nowhere Band. Played with it a little bit for this one, and it might drift some more as time goes on. Depends on how some experiments go, and how much drag they put on the comic-making process.

I survived the monster bike ride I was talking about, although lack of daylight forced us to cut it off at about 75 miles. We made up for the shortfall, though, by spending the weekend splitting a metric shitload of wood.

I don’t do a very good job of keeping my weekends restful.

Here she be. Not much needed in the way of liner notes, except to say that every band does this, I think, and that I was kind of gratified to get the chance to play off a little bit of past continuity (I did resist the urge to add a Stan Lee-style “*as seen in Nowhere Band #17!”

We’ll say 8/1 for the next one, because Crazy Recreation Summer continues to eat up time. I’ve got a 120-mile bike ride cropping up in the next comic cycle, and god only knows how many comic-making days that’s going to derail…

Holy crap, it’s true. The Derailleur Bond EP is done, and available for download over at the Derailleur site. Listen, learn, and love, my friends.

In case you haven’t heard me babble about this before, this EP is our attempt to write theme songs for Bond movies– some are replacements for the original theme (I mean, do you even remember what the official theme to Octopussy was?) and others are themes for Bond movies that haven’t been made, but should.

And if you like this one, there’s more on the way. Our man Jay is hard at work mixing our second full-length album, tentatively called The Dirtiest Dudes in Rock ‘N’ Roll. 

And oh yeah, that comic that gets done around here…. on schedule, and looking good for a posting on Sunday night or Monday morning.

So, this week Jon learns a harsh lesson that’s surprisingly common, I’m told. I’ve never actually played Guitar Hero or Rock Band (I’d like to, it just never works out), but I’ve had enough guitar-playing friends complain about getting waxed by children that it seems to be a universal right of passage.

Couple of other items:  my old band Red Hay, which provided a bunch of source material for Nowhere Band, got a nice writeup on Tried to Rock, a wonderfully kick-ass site about bands that don’t go anywhere (you can see why the site appeals to me). Go over and check the whole site out, it’s good, good stuff.

And, hopping away from comics and music, Rebecca and I have once again sat down and tried to decide whether another beloved movie stands the test of time. The latest contender? Say Anything. 

So, I’ll say this about bus commuting: you get a hell of a lot of reading done. With a pile this big, I thought I’d revive an old tradition and print out the list of what I’ve read so far, with brief comments. The thought of going through and doing proper italicization gives me hives, so we’ll just skip that.

1.    Complete Peanuts, volume 1 (Charles Schulz)- More interesting than fun, really. There’s good stuff, but the elements that made Peanuts so special aren’t anywhere near to gelling in this early stuff. It’s pretty amazing to see how rigid Schulz’s early style was, and how much more expressive he got when he loosened up and simplified.

2.    Cartoon History of the Universe, vol. 1 (Larry Gonick)- If anyone’s ever done a better job with nonfiction cartooning, I haven’t heard of it. Gonick serves up great, great stuff—this volume gets you as far as Alexander the Great, and it’s a really informative blast all the way.
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w00t! A strip of mine got picked for the City Pages (Minneapolis’s alt-weekly) Comics Issue, focusing on the upcoming Republican National Convention. I did some writing for them back in my freelance days, but this is the first time I’ve convinced them– or anybody– to actually pay me for a comic. I’m pretty jazzed– hey, validation!

Also, the next Nowhere strip should be up in the next day or two, and a couple of other bloggy posts are forthcoming. Horn o’ plenty, dude.