Meanwhile, I have some news anyway....
Obviously, we're launching a new website or two. The one is SiteoftheLivingDead.com, which may or may not be operational by the time you click on the link; the URL is still working its way to the server at the speed of InterNIC.
It should be up by 2003.
Meanwhile, we're also still working on the site's content. And that takes even longer, since we never actually get anything done around here.
For the moment, we're looking at SotLD as a sort of zombie database: a site devoted to everything from Night of the Living Dead to Resident Evil and beyond. Sort of what you would think AllFlesh.com would be, though it really isn't. SotLD will also be a place to search for Greenback's Hidden Subsite, where he'll be stashing a bunch of weird Photoshopped stuff, which won't necessarily have much to do with zombies.
And, if you're wondering, yes: the zombie currently on the index.html of gremlin.net is a screenshot of the TarMan from Return of the Living Dead, which I napstered from WinMX the other day. I can justify that because they're finally releasing RotLD on DVD on 27th August, and I already preordered it from amazon.com; also, I can justify it because the damned film has been out of print for about ten years and you can't even rent it anymore. We already tried that back in January.
Of course, you can still find RotLD2: The Sad Parody of RotLD and RotLD3: The Even Sadder Ripoff of Day of the Dead at any place other than WalMart. Evidence that, if deities exist, the calvinists are right.
Then there's the other site. And a lot of people have been waiting to see this one for a long time.
Lemee fill you in on the backstory here.
In 1988, I started writing novels. Before that, I was stuck on short stories--mostly because I couldn't quite figure out how to make a single story span four hundred pages. Obviously, I've since figured that out, and pretty well forgotten how to keep a single story under four hundred pages. But that's another matter.
So: in 1988, I managed to write GW88 [I codeword the titles of these things until I'm ready to release them--a bit of foresight, I suppose, since it tends to leave me the fighting chance of getting TheBookTitle.com when I'm ready for it] which has almost nothing to do with anything here; a couple of years later, I wrote LK1, and things moved on from there.
These days, LK1 has evolved into the S97S, which includes LK1, LK2, LK3, LK4, LK5, LK6, LK7, LK8, LKLast, LK0, and Subheroes. In that order. Although the actual order in terms of conceptualisation was LK7, LK8, LK4, LK5, LK6, LK1, LK2, LK3, LKLast, LK0, and Subheroes. Mostly because the idea for what became LK7 was actually something I came up with in 1986 and never did anything with until 1996, and LK4 was something I thought up in 1990, but forgot about when I lost my pen, resulting in LK1. So there's some really useless trivia to impress all your friends with.
Now: believe it or not, that's not all I did for ten years. I also drove around a lot, and wrote a few other books. And one of those books has been known, to date, as SB95.
Before 1988, I was writing short stories. And, since my only reference for short stories in 1987 was King's Night Shift and those horrid things they try to infect you with in college, I naturally assumed that short stories were all either scary or tragically boring. So I wrote horror.
One of those stories was A Bump in the Night.
ABitN was the first appearance, in comicbooks terms, of the bogeyman. He later appeared in a few other such short stories [Welcome to the Neighbourhood, written a couple of months ago, has a cameo; it's mostly practise for what I'm slowly announcing here] and, in 1995, he got the entirely of SB95 to himself.
Codewords aside, the title of SB95 was Phobivore.
The idea was that the bogeyman was--first and foremost--real. So, being real, he had to have a few things he never had before. Like a metabolism. So I created this phobivore and gave it a purpose: it feeds--literally--on fear. It scares people to death.
Phobivore was not a nice book. To the extent that I'm the only one who's ever read the whole thing. A few people have begun to read it, but never really got very far. I may have made this guy a little too...upsetting.
But he now has a website. And the question is why.
Because--again in comicbook terms--he's about to make his first appearance. Again.
A year after I finished SB95, we started talking about doing comics. Mostly because people can't read anymore, and half the reason that SB95 scared everyone was that it contained six hundred pages of words. So we created Wasted Ink Comics [which quickly evolved into--you guessed it--Wasted, Inc.] for the purpose of releasing stories in a way that even the ninety-eight percent of Duhmericans with reading levels beneath twelfth grade could handle. So now I can write childrens' books, too. Yay.
For a number of reasons, the comics never actually happened. Until now.
So: whether anyone ever sees SB95 or not [I'm still working out whether I want people knowing that I'm capable of thinking some of these things up], we're in the process of writing, pencilling, inking, colouring, and otherwise producing Phobivore. A comic.
Not like Gen13 and WildCovertActionToys are comics. I'm talking about the forgotten tactic of releasing comics to bother people. Creepy and Eerie and Tales from the Crypt. The stuff leading to Creepshow. The stuff which, in the modern world of Resident Evil and Silent Hill and other SurvivalHorror videogames, should really be happening again. But no one really seems to be doing it.
So, we're doing it.
I've got a guy who can do the pencils and inks as well as Frank Miller and Jim Lee; Greenback can obviously handle the colours; and writing these things out is something I like doing, and people seem to like it when I do it.
Incidentally--and write this off as thinking out loud until I'm sure about it--there was a time, in the beginning, before SlipKnot and the resurgence of StoneSour, when Corey was interested in writing a few of these things. That's one of the things we're going to go over when I fly to DuhMoines next week. So: there's a chance that Corey could be writing some of these for us, which would be interesting.
I'll know more about that by the time I get back to Denver, sometime in August.
More later....
--Gremlin