Catching Up
Because sometimes things sneak up on you.
- It passed without me noticing¹, but a week ago was the one year anniversary of Machine of Death Day, when readers of anthologized, speculative fiction banded together and accidentally pissed off Glenn Beck. MoD2 edges ever closer to completion, and an official celebration of a year of Deathy Goodness will take place on November 17th in Hollllywood².
- Breaking earlier than I expected³, news from Ryan Sohmer about a project he’s been working on. Sohmer’s pretty well known for his strip where the POV character is the living embodiment of what 14 year old dudes think they’ll become if they douse themselves in enough AXE products. Also his other strip where the breakout character is a sociopathic, gleeful bringer of death and destruction and general antisocial tendencies. Basically, his main oeuvre doesn’t scream “family friendly”.
But if you read his forum posts, and awful lot of them are about how awesome it feels to be a dad to his toddler son. So although it looks like a bit of a disconnect on the surface, it maybe isn’t a surprise that he’s been working on a kids-and-grownups-too picture book called The Bear, which is about small moments in the lives of first-time fathers and their sons.
It’s touching. It’s sincere. It’s adorable. I know — even with that last paragraph to prepare you, these words don’t immediately associate themselves with your preconceptions re: “Ryan Sohmer”. I’m lucky — I had a bit longer to digest the thoughts, as I got hints as to its existence (although, tantalizingly, no details) last month at NYCC in conversation with Sohmer’s creative partners on The Bear, Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson.
I said it was adorable, didn’t I? Nobody does adorable (without being cloying) like Becky, and given the gorgeous look of the pages available for preview, I understand (and retroactively don’t mind so much) the relative dearth of TKT and Tigerbuttah updates of late. The Bear will be released next year; start planning which father-and-son pair you’re going to give it to now.
- It’s been eight years, just about exactly, since Child’s Play was born. In 2003 we all felt awesome that an improvised, thrown-together effort raised US$250,000 in only a little more than six weeks to benefit a children’s hospital in Seattle. In 2011, the ninth iteration of Child’s Play launched (thanks to it’s year-round activity and some major sponsorships) on Day One with US$450,000 in donations already counted and a network of more than 70 hospitals worldwide.
Every year has seen an increase in receipts over the year prior, with only the Great Meltdown of 2008 even able to slow down the year-on-year growth. At the end of 2010, less than US$1500 separated the total donation from the US$9 million dollar mark, and it’s a rock-solid certainty that the US$10 million mark will be obliterated this year.
New website. New goals. New events. New person hired pretty much solely to run the damn thing year round. Same purpose. Go, give.
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¹ Bad hack webcomics pseudojournalist! No tasty biscuits for you!
² Like Bullwinkle J Moose always said, you have to pronounce it “Like it’s got three or four Ls.”
³ But then again, he has a habit of surprising me.
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