Nowhere Band News

After getting laughed at by Rebecca, I can’t bring myself to use the Item! Item! Item! format anymore.  So now we get em-dashes.

-I’m back from Miami (pictures here, if you’re into that), and finished my Uptown Girl Presents story while on the road.  Nowhere #20 is going really quickly, and should be posted by the end of the week.  Probably by the middle of the week, even.

-The latest word from MPR is that the Nowhere Band piece will run at the end of this week or early next.  I’ll post more when I know more, and believe me, I’ll be linking to the online archive of it.

-It occurred to me today that I never wrote anything about Jim Walsh’s Replacements book, All Over but the Shouting.   I really need to, because that book kicked off about as many trains of thought as the Schulz bio did.  But I’m tired and it’s late, so let’s consider Walsh and the Replacements as members of the “coming attractions” list.

As usual, I’m way better about working on comics offline and thinking, “hey, I should post this to the newsblog” than I am about actually posting things to the newsblog.  Which means that I have a backlog of news, and will be releasing actual comics before too long.

Item!  The McSweeney’s audiobook recording is done, and turned out to be a ton of fun to do.  I felt like a big weirdo, standing on the Washington Avenue Bridge with a recording setup, reading out loud about COBRA.  But hey, you gots to suffer for art.

When the audio download’s ready, I’ll link to it.

Item! Just this morning, I finished inking the guest story I’m doing for Bob Lipski’s Uptown Girl Presents. It’s not a Nowhere strip, but it’s very similar, and the Awesome Boys do make a cameo.  I’ll be traveling for the rest of the week, and finishing the digital part of that comic while I’m on the go (and I’m not sure when the comic would appear here, if ever– certainly not until after Bob’s book has actually been on the stands for a while), and then production will resume on Nowhere.  Strip #20 should be out and about by, say, March 15 (beware!).

Item! I spent a really fun hour and a half yesterday talking to Minnesota Public Radio’s Chris Roberts about Nowhere Band (and, to some extent, Derailleur). It was a cool, cool session, and it sounds like the piece will air on this Friday’s Word of Mouth broadcast (naturally, I’ll be out of town for this).  Should also be available online, eventually, and I will of course post the appropriate links when they’re available.

OK, that’s it.

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?