Ow! I am purged till I am a wraith!
Wow! I am sick till I cannot see!
What is the sense of Religion and Faith?
Look how the Gods have afflicted me!
It's not that bad at all, really. I'm just in the final stages of the cold, the place where you have the headache and you're all clogged up and stuffy and the sides of your nostrils are red and raw, and you start pronouncing words like Mamba "Babba" (fortunately, I have had no cause to say "Mamba" to anyone today); also I am getting very tired of chicken soup.
I would be feeling much more sorry for myself than I am if it weren't for Fred the Unlucky Black Cat, whose paw has healed nicely... just in time for him to spend tonight back at the vet's, having a tumourous lump removed from his chest. Poor thing. Let's hope it's not malignant, although with Fred's luck, I'm afraid it almost certainly will be. So I'm feeling sorry for Fred, and worried about him. He really is a very nice cat, and is very easily made happy, as long as you have the bottletop from some bottled water around for him to play with.
Got some writing done, but also spent all idle moments today (ie, whenever I was on the phone) signing the Certificates of Authenticity for the Diamond 1602 Dr Strange statue.
I'm not quite certain what I'm actually authenticating with my signature -- possibly that the statue is a statue, or that the certificate is indeed a certificate. I'm pretty sure that my signature isn't authenticating my signature, anyway.
Let's see: a strange homonymic moment today reading an account of the Angouleme festival on the Sequential site -- an excellent Canadian Comics blog I discovered via Journalista! I suspect someone taking notes over a telephone in the following sentence: Seth also talked about Schulz's impact on his work, and Osamu Tezuka was sighted as a pier by all. ("That thing! Sticking out into the sea! The thing that people are walking up and down on -- what is it? "Why... I think it must be famed cartoonist Osamu Tezuka.") [The words intended were cited and peer.]
Indyworld has an terrific article on Angouleme as well.
It'd be easy to fill an entire journal entry with things lifted from Journalista! Like an excellent interview with Seth and Eric Reynolds about Fantagraphics' upcoming complete Peanuts series (50 books to be published over 12.5 years).
Or the fact that Wally Wood's famous "22 Panels that always work" is up on line -- something pretty much every comics artist I've ever known has a fifteenth-generation photocopy of, pinned to a wall somewhere in the studio. And also Ivan Brunetti's own "22 Panels that always work*(*Sometimes)", which, interestingly, no artists I've ever known have ever had up on the walls of their studios. (Except possibly Ivan Brunetti, of course.) But which have a certain Oblique Strategies charm to them, and I seem to have used 13 out of 22 of them in 1602.
The quote at the top of this entry is from a favourite Kipling poem called "Natural Theology", by the way.
Next entry, I'll answer questions and things I expect. Now I think I'll stop writing and go and have a very hot bath, and there will probably be eucalyptus involved somewhere. And so to bed.