Plans for 2014

Well, it's the end of 2013 and when I look at the output this year, it doesn't seem like a real productive year, but actually it was.  I had my anthology, NIGHT PIECES, come out, but that was a collection of reprint material albeit one of the stories, "A Mother's Beauty",  first appeared in Chillers vol. 2 which was a 2013 release as well. I was happy to see the response to it and Decapitated Dan, the noted horror enthusiast and reviewer, tabbed it as the Best Archival/Collection of 2013. I had planned on releasing another collection, Street Shadows, but figured I'd space them out a bit more. I also did two books which featured a multitude of artists contributing and those are always much more work than it might seem.  ZELDA'S ZOMBIE ZOO was a kid's book about Zelda who is...

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Night Pieces gets Best of 2013

  NIGHT PIECES, the anthology that collected some of my earlier short stories, was announced as Best Collected / Archival Book for 2013 by Decapitated Dan's annual list.  Decapitated Dan, aka Dan Royer, is a horror enthusiast and runs a variety of websites, blogs, podcasts, and the Ghastly Awards in order to build and maintain the awareness of horror comics. Night Pieces features a variety of stories, most prominently from various Caliber editions (High Caliber, Caliber Presents, Negative Burn) but also from more recent editions such as Chillers. Here's what Dan had to say about the collection:"I love Gary Reed. He has to be one of my favorite writers around, so when he put out Night Pieces I was excited. This book collects some...

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Busy Year After All

It was a year that started off slowly as far as getting my written works out there but it's coming together pretty fast towards the end of the year. March saw CHILLERS volume 2 come out and that had one of my short stories in there, a tale called "A Mother's Beauty".In September, NIGHT PIECES, a collection of some of my short stories came out from Transfuzion. October saw ZELDA'S ZOMBIE ZOO from Binary Publishing and BOOK OF THE TAROT from Transfuzion.  Both were projects done featuring primarily local artists.  Zelda was a children's book with a zookeeper giving a tour of her zombie zoo and was a fun full color book.  Tarot was similar to books I did in the past with Caliber as it was an overview of the tarot cards and each of the major arcana was drawn by a different artists. ...

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Deadworld from IDW in December.

The new Deadworld mini-series, Restoration, will be coming from IDW in December which means it will be in the October Diamond Previews for ordering.  IDW will also be releasing variant covers for it. The art is from Sami Makkonen who did the last series, War of the Dead, and Slaughterhouse prior to that. This story picks up from War of the Dead but I did try again to make it reader friendly.  Like War of the Dead, I don't know how well I succeeded.  Obviously, you want new people to be able to step into the storyline but when you have a history of some 100 issues, it's not easy to bring everyone up to speed without sacrificing a lot of the current storyline.  And with Deadworld, there has been some dramatic changes...but...

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Updated Updates

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 You know, I keep saying that I’ll get more frequent on these blogs and I can do that by doing shorter pieces.  But usually once I do actually get started, I tend to ramble.  There’s actually a lot going on behind the scenes even though I haven’t been too present in the comics market this year thus far.  My last release was late last year and that was the War of the Dead graphic novel from IDW.  There’s lots of stuff being worked on but most of my time has been spent on the “bigger” picture.  If that sounds ambiguous, that’s because it is…to me as well.  ...

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Projects Forthcoming

It's been a busy couple of weeks as I moved ahead on a number of projects. I find that as I get ready for vacations, I like to get to a certain point where I can map out a current series that I'm working on. For me, the first issue (or equivalent) is the hardest as I have to decide where to start the story and how to bring all the characters into play and how all that weaves together. Once I'm done with that, I find the rest so much easier.  The Deadworld mini-series coming from IDW in the fall is just about finished on my end. I just have a few scenes to retool and the artist, Sami Makkonen, has finished the first three issues and all the covers. So, that's nearly a wrap.   I'm doing a mystery in the 1900s with artist Wayne Reid that ties into an insane asylum. I'm...

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On those writing projects....

I actually am making headway on some projects that I've wanted to work on and it looks like 2013 should be a busy year as far as the writing goes.  I do have some OLD business (in terms of projects) to finish which I plan to this year. First up, I will be finishing the last bit (mostly modifications) for the Deadworld mini-series coming out.  The artist, Sami Makkonen, has already drawn the first three issues but he was brought in on a hush-hush project that he just couldn't turn down.  So, Deadworld: Resurrection will start up in November of this year.  It will ship monthly. I plan to finally finish off Subversives, a trade paperback in mostly comic format, although there are a variety of illustrations and photos used and this covers stories of traitors, spies, and other...

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Keeping Busy

Been planning to update sooner than this and wanted to go in depth on a couple of topics.  It's kinda funny, I don't think many people read the blog but I'm always surprised how many emails I get regarding something I said in the blog and often times, it leads to some curious circumstances.  One of these days, will have to explore that. The main reason I haven't blogged recently is the same reason I'm virtually non-existent on facebook...just way too busy.  Maybe because its I'm getting older but I just can't seem to juggle things as well as I used to and I have found myself for the last couple of months in a deep pit of  behindness that I just can't seem to climb out of...although this last week made a lot of progress. It makes me realize I have to start adjusting some...

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Industry Year End Thoughts

Last time,  I took a look at what 2012 held for me personally and I got immersed in a couple of conversations about the industry as a whole so I figured I’d take a look and give my impressions of the entire comics market.  Of course, this is just my opinion and comes from my little corner of the comics world and yes, mostly anecdotal. On one hand, I’ve been involved in many aspects of the industry- as a creator, as a publisher, a freelancer, did work for hire, conventions, retailing, VP of a toy company, dealing with licensed properties, etc.  On the other hand, even though I am “part” of the comics industry, there are huge portions of it that I know next to nothing about, i.e. - what goes on in the current releases of Marvel and DC.   I guess that’s the first point...

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