I’ve meant to check back in these last few weeks, but I kept hoping I’d have better news to report. On the up side, I am moving forward with new pages. On the down, life keeps getting in the way. Amazing. I wonder how I used to do it? I’ve always been pretty good about posting, and telling people when I was taking a hiatus and when I was coming back. But this unplanned absence has thrown a spanner in the works. All I can tell you is that it is going to be awhile longer BUT that Lovecraft is Missing will return, as promised.

Bummer. First week without a page up and I feel kind of empty.

I finished Dead Space 3 yesterday, and though it isn’t anywhere near as scary as the first one, it is in many ways more Lovecraftian. Imagine a climax that includes living, tentacled moons surrounding the earth.

I started The DarkTower series again (for the third time. I understand that the story doesn’t really get hopping until book two, but The Gunslinger, even though it is short and has now been revised by King, is still a slog. I have so much non-fiction to digest pertaining to my job that I feel guilty reading something I find mediocre. If The Drawing of the Three doesn’t pull me in pretty quickly, I may finally give up on the epic.

I also tried to watch Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead. Despite his reputation as a visionary, I’ve yet to see one of his movies that engages me on any level other than purely visual. Cheezy as it was, I prefer Romero’s original.

Have a good weekend.

I know when I find myself saying, “That’ll have to do,”it’s time to take a break. I’ve been saying that for a couple of weeks, but I am literally posting this just before it goes live. That’s cutting it too close and “that’ll do” robs me of the re4ason I am doing this in the first place. I’m not a perfectionist, but I do have a vision of this story. I don’t always achieve it, but it’s not for want of trying. But when it comes down to something that can be solved by just slowing down a bit, then I have to take the opportunity. Regardless of the quality of the book, I have never looked at it as something to hack out.

I don’t exactly know how long this break will be. I’m guessing four or five weeks, long enough to catch my breath and build up some backlog. I’ll keep everyone updated. We probably have thirty or so more pages in this “issue”, and then we start the long finale. And, as I’ve said many times before, I’m as anxious to see how this all ends up as anybody.

So did you hear they affirmed the discovery of the Higgs Boson? I imagine everyone is relieved. After all, you wouldn’t want to drop $10 billion for nothing.

And one other thing: my good friend Bart Bush shared this pic on Facebook. I’ve never heard of this production. It obviously didn’t get made, but does anyone know anything else about it?

“The time has come,” the walrus said, “to talk of many things…..like next week being the last new post for awhile.”

Sorry, that time has come, and just as readership has been going up. But I just got this page up by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin. I have several more pages roughed out, but next week provides a natural breaking point, so it makes sense to stop there until I can get ahead again. I don’t know how long the break will be yet. I’ll give a heads up when I’m close. Just know that I am working on it.

Have a good weekend.

Ah, another week has come and gone. They roll by like waves anymore. I can only faintly remember a time when five o’clock seemed like it would never come.

I got the book, The Art of Dead Space, which beautifully reproduces art from across all three of the video games. And the text gives plenty of credit to HPL as a source of inspiration. Personally, I think he would have loved this stuff (though I’m not as convinced he would enjoy playing video games. But, like watching Alien, I think the Old Gentleman would have felt very satisfied with himself watching Isaac Clarke battle an alien moon.)

If I haven’t mentioned it before (and if I have, let me mention it again) my friend Joe Pearson has produced and directed a feature length animated film called War of the Worlds:Goliath. It hasn’t been released theatrically yet, but it is cleaning up the awards at film festivals. Take a look at the trailer. I’d sure love to see this, and more animated films aimed at older audiences.

Have a good weekend.

Need some input here. I’m thinking about getting some t-shirts made for Necronomicon (and which I can maybe sell via this site later) but I’m not sure what to put on them. I personally don’t like pictures on shirts, but I don’t like asparagus either, so I’m not the be all and end all of opinion. My thought is to simply put the logo, red Lovecraft, white is Missing, on a black shirt. I can center it, or I can make it small and put it in the pocket area. Is that too simple? Should I add Necronomicon 2013 to the mix? Any other ideas?

There’s another new screensaver by Natasha Alterici up this week, free for voting for Lovecraft is Missing at Top Web Comics. Remember, you can vote once a day.

I keep slugging along, but I’m getting closer and closer to running out of material. I have the next two pages up and ready to go, and I’m working on the next several, but as I’ve said, there will come a time when I am going to have to break. I think that’s better than putting up pages sporadically. And I’ve already felt that I’ve rushed certain pages, so I don’t want that pressure forcing me to rush even more. I’ll give you plenty of notice, and I’ll set a return date before I stop, as always. Dang life! Always getting in the way of the really important stuff.

I’m currently hung up on the final Boss fight in Dead Space 2. Overall, it’s not as good a game as the first one, and it’s likely I can’t finish it anyway. From the cheats I’ve read (after trying to win it on my own for a couple of hours) you have to have specific weapons, which I don’t have and which I can’t go back and get. And I don’t like the game well enough to go back to an earlier save and work my way forward again. Had the same problem with the final battle in Gears of War. Shame to enjoy a game right up to the last minute and then get stumped, but life is too damn short to keep repeating the same scene over and over again.

It’s always fun to share new friends and their talents. Though Natasha  Alterici and I have never met, I was immediately attracted to the art she posts on the Oklahoma Comic Creators page, so much so that I commissioned her to do three original screensavers for Lovecraft is Missing. The first is up this week, and is available simply by voting for LIM at Top Web Comics. I insisted she work in her own style, so you should find this different view of Win, Nan and Father Jackey free (and, of course, creepy.)

Natasha is working a new comic, Lucid, which looks pretty cool to me. I asked her to send me some more samples of her art, which is posted here along with a short blog by the talented Ms. A. Get in on the ground floor of a new talent, so you can brag about discovering her way back when.  Take it, Natasha:

Art, specifically drawing is for me visual thinking. As I see it, the practice of sketching is much like the practice of thinking, not in that the artist is actively trying to describe their thoughts in lines and shapes and values and textures, but that the physical process of pressing pencil to paper is an act of thought, one which can be observed, in which exploration of concepts is actively occurring. For example, when drawing dinosaurs, as I am prone to do, every mark from the first to last is a question, a statement, an argument all exploring the nature of the creature that once was; its character, its grandeur, its implications to a society of thoughtful apes that live millions of years after them. Sketching is visual thinking, and it is and always has been my favorite thing to do.

Having said all this, I’d like to take a minute to talk about my upcoming project “Lucid” which will be launching it’s kickstarter campaign on February 8th.

When author Tim Berry approached me with the script, I was very excited about it. The story is an intense mind-bending story that centers around five strangers. Trapped in this trippy dream world, they’ll have to learn to work together or else be eradicated by the mind of one man, who has the power to create or destroy with just a thought. I have the privilege of bringing this story to life with my own unique style. Moody color scheme, expressive line work, and preserved pencils make for an avante-garde comic experience which I’m very excited to share with the world.

The Kickstarter for “Lucid” launches February 8th and will last through March 13th;
The “Lucid” facebook page https://www.facebook.com/LucidComicBook
My artist page

Oops. Somehow left this week’s post in the draft folder. Not that there’s a whole lot you’d be missing if I didn’t post at all.

After spending the last eight months re-writing the 3D curriculum, I now find myself head of a newly independent 3D Department at school.

On another front, Andrew Bacon, a Facebook associate, has been working on his own independent game with an HPL flavor. Looks pretty good, though he is only getting started. Take a peek here.

I’m two-thirds of the way through Dead Space 2. It’s just now starting to seem like a Dead Space game. Up until now it was more like a tame version of Bioshock. The new necromorphs lack the chill factor of the originals, mainly, I think, because they are so far removed from any resemblance to humans. The first game was terrifying because the monsters were people transformed into horrors. These new ones, while well-designed, are just monsters or aliens that could fit into any other game.

Have a good weekend.

First, some sad news, no less sad for being over a week old: Lynn Willis, co-creator of The Call of Cthulhu RPG and co-founder of Chaosium. passed away, subject to the same frailties that ultimately beset us all. I never played the game but over the years I’ve picked up the odd book or card from it for the artwork.

Taking a great leap from the sobering to the utterly frivolous, LIM has 981 likes on Facebook, so close to 1,000 that I find myself thinking, What actual purpose does having 1,000 likes really serve? Still, it’s a milestone for an independent webcomic.

As for Top Web Comics, well, we’ve slipped a bit. I haven’t been beating that drum every week because, after awhile, it starts to feel like the intent of this comic is to get a higher ranking rather than be an entertaining comic. Of course, I want as many people to read it as possible, and the numbers are down a bit from where they were a few years ago, but I think I may share the Old Gentleman’s aversion to hawking my wares so flagrantly. Fortunately, I don’t have his aversion to work in general, so I’m not rummaging about old closets looking for rusty cans of chili for dinner.

Dead Space 2 has been a bit of a disappointment, though it’s still a good game. It just lacks all the creepiness of the first one. Now it’s just shoot the monsters. And oddly, I find the art and the layout, such a standout in the first one, is now almost a a rip off of Bioshock, minus the wit. I played through the first half over the weekend, and didn’t put all that many hours into it. Perhaps the second half will pick up again.

And, FYI, I am going to be at Necronomicon this year. I won’t have a table, but I hope to be on a panel or two, as well as milling about the show. Come up and say hi. (It’s not untill August, so I’ll remind you again.)

Have a good weekend

I finally finished playing Resident Evil 4 and have to say, I wonder what the fuss was about. I heard it was such a great game, but the story was all over the place and the “horrors” were pretty mundane. There are three bonus missions at the end, and I’m skipping them. But I started Dead Space 2, and, oh mama! is THAT a different story. It steps into high gear in the very first scene and although it’s not yet as compelling as the first one, the sense of madness and horror has been ramped up quite a bit. I don’t get to play long or very often, so it takes me months to finish out a game, but this one looks like it will be worth it. And one day I have to get around to the Walking Dead game, which is getting raves (but then, so did RE 4.)

I was moving along with LIM, then suddenly felt the need to pull up a sequence I had planned for later on in the story. I thought about it for awhile and decided to follow my instinct, but it meant that a page or two that were near completion had to beset aside. Then,  when I did the new sequence, I found that it didn’t work as well as I thought it needed to, so I redid it, expanding three pages to five. But all is well and there won’t be an interruption for awhile yet. Maybe I can even finish out the current issue before I take a beak. That’s my goal, so I don’t disrupt the momentum of the story.

Since there’s more to life than horror (really, there is, honest) and there isn’t much in the way of horror at the theatres or on TV at the moment, I’ve been watching Sherlock Holmes movies and Downton Abbey. I love the latter show, but cannot get out of my mind the idea of how cool it would be if they did a special along the lines of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, with folk holed up in the castle, trying to defend all the entry points and survive. Also, a special episode where Bernard Cumberbatch as Sherlock and Matt Smith as Dr. Who show up at Downton to solve a world-endangering murder mystery…that also includes zombies. I can dream, can’t I?

Have a good weekend.