Racist Grandpa

I don't know what it is about the copy shop environment that attracts crazy marginal challenged individuals. Lots of folks with grocery bags full of hand-written notes and other ephemera seem to congregate around the copiers. It was worse when I worked at Kinko's (that Kinko's sign seemed to be a flame to many psychotic moths), but even the small shop I now work at has it's fair share of crazy folk. These folks seem to always gravitate toward one employee over al the others. My friend Devon seems to be a beacon for these types and has more stories than you can shake a stick at about his interactions with them. Work at any one location long enough and you'll no doubt gain your own fan.

I now have my own. I call him Racist Grandpa.

Racist Grandpa (RG for short) is of indeterminate age; somewhere between 80 and a hundred at a guess. He's either Polish or German and has a sort of shrunken appearance. Summer and Winter he wears a puffy down-filled ski jacket. He's been coming into the shop where I work since I started there, but in those days he fixated on Deb, a coworker of mine who is in her mid-fifties and displays more patience than I can muster. After Deb left, RG seemed pretty upset. He would ask us all the time if we had any news from her.

After a while, I noticed that I was helping him more and more when he came in. I chalked it up to the fact that my coworkers are bastards and ducked out of sight whenever RG came into the store and I didn't think much about it. But then RG started asking me to come to the front to help him even when someone else was already up there. I realized too late to do anything about it that he'd imprinted on me. Hell.

RG is religious and I spend a lot of time helping him create intricate collages. He brings in photos he asked to have reduced and then then does this really amazing cut-and-paste jobs to produce pictures where, for instance, two children sitting on a couch are flanked by angels and hold the Baby Jesus across their laps. He builds these over time, adding elements to the photos as the weeks pass. He will have the pictures laminated every so often and they eventually get to the point where I tell him that the collage is too think to laminate properly. He then starts a new image.

And how did he get his name? Every time I help him, Racist Grandpa regales me with... well, to be honest, I don't always know what he says because I'm pretty good at tuning him out. One time, not to long after our weird relationship started, I was standing there as he ranted. I stared off into the middle distance and would occasionally nod and make a sound of agreement. And then, for some reason, I started to pay attention. He was talking about Mexicans. I am Mexican and this piqued my interest. He went on and on about how Mexicans were no good: he worked with a whole bunch up in Alaska and to a man, they were all lazy and they cheated on their wives. He finally paused and looked at me and I thought that maybe he'd clued in to the fact that I'm more swarthy than your average Aryan type. But what he did was to lean a little closer and say, "The Italians, too." Since then, he's told me about how gays are ruining the country, Jews run the world, Protestants are all going to Hell, etc. At this point, I'm just hanging on to see how bad it gets.

I don't have a great talent for bestowing nicknames, but after telling that story everyone in the shop started calling him by the name Racist Grandpa.

And now he brings me little gifts! Fruit for the most part. And he can't come in without calling to the counter and whispering something to me with a conspiratorial air. Usually a story relating how the whole damed country is going to Hell in a hand basket. His only redeeming quality is that he has a deep, unwavering hatred of President Bush.

No one is all bad.

Signing this Saturday

If you are in the Salem/Keizer area this Saturday, please swing by Tony's Kingdom of Comics where I'll be signing copies of Gear School and, really, anything else you thrust in front of me.

Saturday, November 10
1 - 3 P.M.
Tony's Kingdom of Comics
5420 River Dr. N
Keizer, OR
(503)-463-1142

There will also be a signing next weekend in Portland. I'll post more about that later.

Gear School web activity

Ganked from the Gear School blog:

Two things have shown up on the Internets, vis a vis Gear School.

The first is an interview with me by Andrew Chung for his fabulous site, Jaded Expressions. Go there now and read, please. Thank you.

The second, is a brief write-up about Gear School at Comic Book Resources. They also have a ten-page preview. Ten pages you've already seen if you've looked at the gallery section of the Gear School blog, but you should all go there anyway to drive up their link-counting thing.

Thanks in advance for that, and good reading.

100 Logos

This is about the evolution of the 100 Girls logo. I don't know that this will be of interest to anyone but me, but I wanted to document this somewhere and the this blog (depository of ephemera that it is) seems like the best place.

Back when Todd and I were publishing the comic on the Dark Horse Comics website, we needed a logo for the feature -- something that neither of us had thought about much. I asked Todd to draw me a silhouette of Sylvia and I'd work up a logo. It looked something like this:



I say it looked something like this because I actually used ITC Oficina Serif, a typeface that Dark Horse had licensed, but that I have not. But you get the idea. Sylvia replaced the letter "I" in Girls. I liked how clean it was -- it looked good on top of the black and white pages. Todd was less happy with it. I think to him it felt too sterile or corporate. I can see that.

When we got picked up by Arcana Comics for publication, Todd had a go at the logo.



The only similarity between this logo and the first one is that they both have silhouettes of Sylvia. Todd's logo is much more dynamic and more "comic-booky" then the first one. It looks much more like something you'd see on the top of a comic. If I had any qualms about it at all, it was that I felt like it sacrificed a little readability, especially in the "R", the "L" and the "S". I think I told that to Todd at the time, but after showing it to a bunch of people none of them said the had a problem with it, so I dropped it. This was the logo we used for the whole seven-issue run of the first story line as well as the Free Comic Book Day stories, etc.

Enter Simon and Schuster. After picking up the book the asked us to tweak the logo. They also had issues with the readability. Todd asked me to have a go at revising the logo. In revising and re-revising the logo (I was getting constant and good feedback from the senior designer at Simon and Schuster), I noticed something: Todd must have just drawn that logo freehand. Which to me is amazing. However, there were quite a few inconsistencies with line widths, etc. After trying to redraw certain thing several times in photoshop, I gave up and decided that I needed to redraw the whole thing in Illustrator -- converting it from a raster image to a vector. I used elaborate grids to make sure that everything was consistent. I actually love this process. I changed the letter form on the "R" slightly and, after asking Todd's permission, changed the letter forms on the "L" and the "S" fairly drastically. While still keeping the forms consistent with the design of the other letters. Todd also drew yet another silhouette of Sylvia for this new design.

Simon and Schuster finally OKed this version, so now we have a new logo:



This is the new logo that you'll see on the Simon and Schuster collection. We'll also use it on any new 100 Girls stories. I'm not sure what would prompt us to redesign it again. Maybe when they make it into a movie or TV show?

Incremental progress

Were one to go to the Simon and Schuster website and, further, if one were to search for 100 Girls, one would see that they have now posted the cover to the 100 Girls collection they will be publishing next Summer.

But, because one came here first, one needn't go through all of that. Rather, here is the new cover, in all it's glory:




Art, of course, by the talented Mr. Todd Demong. I believe he also did the colors, but I will confirm this.

I'm okay, at least

So tonight I ran into another car. That is, I was driving and hit another car with my car. I didn't just punch a car or anything.

I was driving down Lancaster, a very commercial and ugly street here in Salem, and an SUV turned left out of the turn lane and right in front of me. As I slammed on my brakes, I remember thinking, "there's not enough room for him to do that." And I was right. Though I braked and swerved as much as I felt safe doing on that busy street, I still clipped their rear quarter panel right behind the wheel.

They continued on into the parking lot and I didn't want to block traffic so I pulled in behind them. This sucks but I know how to deal with it. What I don't know how to deal with is the fact that the SUV I hit then tore ass out of the parking lot and down a side street. I watched for a few seconds and then followed them. I also called 911 to report this very strange behavior. After I got the 911 operator (by the way, 911 operators in Oregon apparently answer the phone by saying, "Hello?" and then waiting a very long time for you to ask if you have, indeed, reached 911), I told her what happened and she had to ask me to clarify what I'd just said.

"You just stuck another vehicle?"

"Yes."

"And they drove away from the scene?"

"That's right, baby!" I didn't really call her baby, but I thought it. I also went on to tell her I was pursuing the jackass. She told me to stop. According to her, there's nothing wrong with being hit and leaving the scene of the accident. This seemed wrong to me, but I wasn't going to press the issue. She then asked me the make and model of the car and for the license plate number. I know none of these things. I am not the person you want to have as a witness at your trial, I'll tell you that.

I then just drove home. I was coming down from the adrenaline and I started feeling shaky and stiff. I'm feeling even more shaky and more stiff right now. I'm sure my muscles tensed up right before the collision. I know my sphincter clenched to the size of a purely theoretical particle.

After I got home, I called the police non-emergency number and went through the whole deal again. According to this operator, it is indeed wrong to leave the scene of an accident, even if you are the one that was hit. She also asked for the make, model, and license plate. I did no better for her than I had for the 911 operator. "it was an SUV; tan, maybe gray, possibly light blue?" And it's hard to get a license plate when a car is speeding away from you so fast you can make out the red shift. I gave her all my info and the info on our Saturn and she gave me a claim number to give to our insurance.

The good news is that I could drive the car after the accident. The bad news is the hood and the bumper and the right front quarter panel are toast. And who knows if there's been any damage to the frame or engine.

I just can't stop thinking about why they'd tear outta there. No insurance? Stolen vehicle? A kid driving mom and dad's car without permission?

All I know is the whole affair has left me sore and tired and not wanting to drive anywhere.

I was on my way to buy a Halloween costume, by the way.

I give you the Kreutz Gallardo sprout

Look what I did. With, uh, some help from Melissa.

No, it's true. Melissa and I have decided to spawn. The attached photo is a scan of our first ultrasound. Say hello to the Sprout. We do not yet know the gender (not until about week 20) and so have no name for our progeny. Melissa just enter the second trimester and is happy that she is no longer constantly nauseated. I am less happy as she is offering me less of the food she can't finish.

As some of you may know, I was a guy who had never even considered marriage until I met Melissa and the thought of having a kid was less than a remote possibility. I feel as surprised by this as anyone. The fact that I am looking forward to raising a wee one. I hope I can do a good job. I know I'll have lot's of help and advice.

I reckon that this space will now be where I work out, in public view, some of the things I'm going through as we prepare for the Sprout. In addition to all of the other things I usually write about.

Speaking of which: I now feel like I have a definite deadline as far as getting some writing done is concerned. We're looking at an April 28th due date. I can't imagine that much will get done when the Sprout first arrives. Fitting the writing into the new life style should prove interesting. Anyone out there doing the same kinds of things?

Wish us luck.