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Dreamcrusher No More

Especially long-time readers of this page may recall that David Malki ! has, on occasion, been referred to on this page (not entirely seriously) as “The Dreamcrusher”, due to his role in rejecting a piece I submitted to the original Machine of Death open call lo these many years past. Crushed I was, all my dreams leaking dream juice because nobody would ever read anything I wrote ever. Sadface.

Well, the day has come to officially recant that particular nickname (though I’ve not used it in a good long while), and that’s because yesterday I did something creative and personally amusing that I never would have without Malki !’s example. Specifically, to aid my wife’s semi-required departmental holiday decorations (theme: Nations of the World; her assigned country: France), I constructed a diorama I like to call The French Revolution Comes To The North Pole, having been inspired by the cardboard-constructed Machine of Death that Malki ! took to conventions in 2011.

For inspiring me achieve an entirely different dream¹ in cardboard and tape and festive wrapping, I thank David Malki !, and apologize for ever characterizing him as somebody who would crush dreams of any sort. Feel free to hum either La Marseillaise or Wind Beneath My Wings if you like.

  • Hey, guess who was a bozo and forgot to take photos on Saturday when visiting with Danielle Corsetto, Bill Ellis & Dani O’Brien, and Jamie Noguchi? That means you get to imagine the perfect Kane face when the lid to the mini-cheesecake I brought him got stuck. I’d often wondered how Noguchi manages to draw such incredibly expressive faces, and now I know — he’s constantly making them himself and his brain is translating the feeling of muscle here, skin there, a teensy bit of boiling rage for flavor, and telling his drawing hand what to do. It’s a rare skill, and it serves him well.

    In any event, many thanks to Wild Pig Comics for hosting the creators, and thanks to Corsetto, Noguchi, and Ellis/O’Brien for creating comics that entertain me for free; you should pick up all their books, as they’re quite good.

  • Also obtained over the weekend: the post brought me copies of Tiny Kitten Teeth (it has an enormous trim size, and the textured cover stock makes it feel like a storybook from the 1940s) and The Abominable Charles Christopher volume 2 (with its beautiful red flocked cover, a “sketch” of an Asiatic Black Bear² up front, and two of my favorite Charles Christopher strips of all time inside). I am running out of shelf space with all these wonderful comics I’ve gotten, and I suspect that more will be arriving in the next ten days or so. Problems, man.
  • With a bit more than three and a half days to go, Ryan North’s TBONTB:ACFABRNAAWST is approaching US$375,000 and if it were to stop accumulating money right now it would be the most-funded publishing project in Kickstarter history by some US$87,000. As it is, I think the Toronto Man-Mountain has a better than even chance of clearing US$400K in the 88 hours left to him (and I’m not the only one), which would make for a truly amazing end product. Well done everybody that’s pledged, and everybody else kindly get to it, as I want to see what that last unlockable goal is.

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¹ Namely, the dream of sticking it to corporate overlords that make it difficult to say no when told you have to go spend money to decorate your desk because Teamwork!.

² Because what Karl Kerschl calls a “sketch” any rational person would call a “finely detailed animal portrait”.

Your diorama is adorable, but would have been more subversive (and more likely to get you and your wife in trouble) with Santa and some elves.

I’ve room on my shelves, just offering space is all, the books can still belong to you, I’ll just be your off site storage container.

­Rod Salm
Death At Your Door, a weekly webcomic about Death trying to live a life.

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