Hurrah for Wizard magazine. A few months ago they published that some film that I had had in my basement for some years was irretrievably lost. (The people who sent the film to me told them this, for their own reasons.) This month I was told that Wizard had published an update -- that there was film in my basement, but it was in unusable condition -- which was an amazing thing for them to know, since, as far as I can tell, the boxes haven't been opened since they were owned by Eclipse, pre-bankruptcy.
So I thought I'd go down to the basement and look.
Not only was it not at all damaged, old or unusable (because my basement is the other half of my library, and shares drainage tiles and moisture control and sensible things like that) but there was an awful lot more of it than I had thought there would be from the labels on the boxes, including some things I'd thought gone for good -- which will, I think, soon be seeing print from a delightully unexpected source.
Which is enormously fun, and I owe it all to the responsible journalism of Wizard magazine.
...
Also, while I was looking for the film, I found, inside an enormous envelope, an AMAZING piece of artwork by Michael Zulli that I don't ever remember seeing before: it's called The October Man, and it's a Sandman portrait that he did in 1994, in what looks like chalks and coloured pencils -- good enough to be a poster or a book cover: a brooding, moody Morpheus on a jut of ruined masonry against a thundery sunset. Autumn-yellow birch-leaves tremble from a branch, while golden oak-leaves are blown past in the chill wind that whips strips of crimson cloth at the top and bottom of the picture, like rags of a theatrical curtain.
And, as far as I know, I've never seen it before in my life.
I don't know when Michael gave it to me, and dammit, I remember that stuff. And furthermore, if it had been a gift and I'd known about it, it wouldn't have been in an envelope in the basement, it would be in a frame on the wall. How did it get here? How did it get down there? A mystery that needs to be investigated. I shall report back.