Hey,

May 10, 2009

I sometimes have to resort to threatening letters to editors.

It’s tough when you are basically a talentless cartoonist, waving your hand in the air waiting for somebody to turn around and take a look at you. I suppose it’s only getting tougher for guys like me. Everybody keeps on telling me that print is dying. I have a hard time believing that. It sounds so stupid. The strong will survive. I love books! I love magazines, I love newspapers. I want to hug them all. Tell them to come home with me, enjoy a nice relaxing evening in the trash dump I call my apartment. Have a cup of joe with me. Let’s film each other to mark our time together.

But anyway, the people all want to talk about how the internet will be everything in cartoons soon. How, floppy comic pamphlets are going to be old news, that indeed alternative/independent comic books are a thing of the past. I can’t listen to it. It’s insane to me. Why do I have to walk among you all?

This evening, I was in a sullen mood, wanting to take a walk through my city’s alleyways to think and get away and convince myself that I am a super man. Not Superman the famous comic book hero, but super man. Somebody special. Somebody better than your friends. I have to walk through Denver’s alleyways to do this. Don’t ask. I’ll tell you: alleyways are an untouched, dark and mostly silent getaway in a place that is so crazy with people young and old on their way to see Wolverine. In some of my favorite alleys, you get to see for yourself how things were built a long time ago and adjusted over time as ownerships changed, as a window was smashed, as the concrete needed to be patched up, as a fire escape was removed and some windows and doorways were bricked up. Everything has a real look to it, because its more hidden from people walking by and therefore doesn’t need to be as slick as the front of the building. It’s the part you don’t see unless you want to, or need to.

I can really see the beauty of the affects of age in ways that other people can’t. When I see an old building that has been patched up a number of times, with a rusted fire escape, I think of all of the corpses in the ground who had fine memories of that place. All of these people who had the greatest times of their lives in the rooms of that old apartment. The bricklayers, who worked putting all those bricks in place, not realizing that one hundred and thirty years later,their labor would be appreciated by a young man who just happened to be passing by. Who was stopped in his tracks to become lost in the details. One hundred and thirty years later one man out of thousands of people who pass by , was able to really see the work that they did and care. One man out of thousands who sees a lonely old building sitting in a parking lot by itself and feels sad about it. I am such a Super Man.