Michael Zulli swung by tonight for dinner, being in the area. I've not seen him for about nine years (although I hadn't noticed this, because we keep working together, and talk on the phone, and time passes and you never know) and it's been such a delight to see him; same old Michael, magnificent moustache and all, but now with extra swatches of grey at his temples and laugh lines at the corner of his eyes. He told me that he's recently been working on an oil painting of Daniel, as a companion piece to his Morpheus. You can see it as work in progress at:
http://www.michaelzulli.com/lastdaniel.htm
It's up for auction at eBay right now (here's the link), and the auction has six days to go.
("You auctioning anything else?" I asked. "Only a set of Sandman Watches," he said.)
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I meant to post a link to the Mumpsimus MirrorMask ONION HEADLINE contest winners entry, but I forgot... http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2005/10/mirrormask-contest-winners.html
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I've been listening to Lorraine and Malena's new CD, Mirror Mirror, which Lorraine brought home yesterday. It's Lorraine's best album so far, I think -- it's sort of like the Flash Girls, only darker and sweeter.
...and as I was typing that the phone rang, and my agent Merrilee told me that Marvel:1602 won the Quills Award for best Graphic Novel. (Winners are listed here -- http://www.quillsliteracy.org/categories.php. And yes, they still have the title of the book wrong. Twits.) Which made me relieved that I recorded the thank you speech yesterday, stressing the important bit, which was, as far as I remember, something or other about the variety of stuff out there on the Graphic Novel shelves, and stressing how deeply different and good the various nominees for the category were. Not sure that we deserved to win, given the competition, but the five contenders were so different anyway, only having in common that they were made of words and pictures, and if the awards serve to draw attention to graphic novels as a category, then that's a good thing...
The awards will be shown on NBC on October 22nd. No idea whether my bit will make it in, as I suspect that Graphic Novels will be one of those categories like the Oscar for Best Assistant Key Grip (Foreign) which never turn up on the actual telecast.