The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log reports on a Cartoonist’s 10 Commandments, as drafted for young cartoonists by the Groupement des Auteurs de Bande Dessinée du Syndicat National des Auteurs et des Compositeurs (that is, the French Artists’ Syndicate’s Comics Creators Group).

According to the site’s translation of French journalist Didier Pasamonik’s paraphrasing of the original document, the manifesto includes such common-sense recommendations as—

1. You will not surrender your talent for the rest of your life.

&#151and—

4. You will recover your rights if your work is not in exploitation.

—all of which can be applied to any creative endeavor, and not just comics.

Any readers of French out there can download the original document here.

Seen at the supermarket …

Courtesy of Times Online comes a list of “10 Books Not To Read Before You Die,” excerpted from Richard Wilson’s upcoming book, Can’t Be Arsed: 101 Things Not to Do Before You Die.

Wedged between Pride and Prejudice at #1 and Ulysses at #10 is Lord of the Rings. According to Wilson:

The best I can say about this book is that it was a very useful tool at school for helping to choose your friends. Carrying a copy of Tolkien’s monstrous tome was the equivalent of a leper’s bell: ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ I knew I would have nothing in common with anyone who had read it. Their taste in music, clothes, television, everything was predetermined by their devotion to Gandalf. Without a shadow of a doubt, in a few years, these people would be going to Peter Gabriel gigs and reading Dune.

I’ve noticed a number of bloggers linking recently to the amusing McSweeney’s article “Selections from H. P. Lovecraft’s Brief Tenure as a Whitman’s Sampler Copywriter,” but I prefer the magazine’s piece that spoofs my favorite Raymond Carver short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

Check out “What We Talk About When We Talk About Mad-Cow Disease,” by Steve Lohse:

Dan, Cheryl, and Clare were all vegetarians once but not anymore. We were having a barbecue. Dan and I were standing by the grill while Cheryl and my wife, Clare, were up on the patio, talking.

“The only thing that makes me sad about veal is when it’s overcooked,” I said. I was trying hard to be funny.

Spotted in the supermarket—Iron Man chocolate!

Thanks to E. E. Knight, I was alerted to this interview with David Foster Wallace which originally appeared in Salon back in 1996.

I was particularly taken by this passage, which grows even more poignant in light of the author’s recent suicide:

What do you think is uniquely magical about fiction?

Oh, Lordy, that could take a whole day! Well, the first line of attack for that question is that there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I don’t know what you’re thinking or what it’s like inside you and you don’t know what it’s like inside me. In fiction I think we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way. But that’s just the first level, because the idea of mental or emotional intimacy with a character is a delusion or a contrivance that’s set up through art by the writer. There’s another level that a piece of fiction is a conversation. There’s a relationship set up between the reader and the writer that’s very strange and very complicated and hard to talk about. A really great piece of fiction for me may or may not take me away and make me forget that I’m sitting in a chair. There’s real commercial stuff can do that, and a riveting plot can do that, but it doesn’t make me feel less lonely.

There’s a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don’t with other art.

I’m saddened that the art Wallace loved wasn’t enough to keep him from feeling so alone as to have saved him.

But I guess it’s naive of me to even think that it could.

Yesterday was the 56th birthday of Gerry Conway, the writer who killed and then brought back Peter Parker’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man—which makes this the right time to share another hidden bit of comics history.

When Gwen Stacy returned in the final panel of the May 1975 issue of Amazing Spider-Man, this is what readers saw in the published issue.

But what those who weren’t lucky enough to be working in the Marvel Bullpen at the time never saw was the alternate version originally handed in by artist Ross Andru. (more…)

I have been dithering for months about whether or not I had both the time and the money to make it to this year’s World Fantasy Convention in Calgary, and after much wavering, I finally decided that I will not attend. I just canceled my hotel reservation.

So those of you who thought you might see me there … well … won’t.

The Living Dead—a reprint anthology consisting of more than 230,000 words of zombie fiction, including my Stoker finalist “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man”—has just been published.

To promote the book, John Joseph Adams has launched a Web site coinciding with the release. Go there to find complete text of the introduction and four of the anthology’s 34 stories, plus excerpts of several of the other stories.

You can read the opening of my story there, which represents its first U.S. publication, as it originally appeared last year in Pete Crowther’s UK-based magazine Postscripts.

But I’d also like to point you toward one of my all-time favorite stories by another, Adam-Troy Castro’s “Dead Like Me,” which is available online in its entirety.

I first read that story in Castro’s collection A Desperate Decaying Darkness, and I’ve probably read it at least a dozen times since. It’s a powerful and moving tale, and if you’ve never read it, you should go and do so now.

After which you should buy the entire book, of course!

When Irene and I went through our old photo albums earlier this week as part of our anniversary celebration, I found a few photographs taken in the Marvel Comics Bullpen during the mid-’70s. So get ready for another flashback …

First up is me at my desk, in a picture probably taken in 1976. My sleeves are rolled up and I’m ready to work. I could probably figure out the exact month and year by tracking down the dates of the issues on the wall of covers behind me, but I’ll leave that exercise for some other time.

Next up is a group shot. That’s me standing with Bonnie Smith, while Chris Claremont kneels between us and takes a photo of our photographer. We’re bracketed by my future wife Irene Vartanoff on the left and Roger Slifer on the right. (more…)