Category Archives: Mixtape

The Real Thing

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And there it is … on shelves as we speak.

I snapped this photo at Midtown Comics on Friday April 13th.  As I was lining up the shot someone picked a copy from the stack, looked at the cover, flipped through some pages, and added it to their armload of purchases for the week.

The cynic in me says “lucky me, happening upon the stack of Mixtape comics the very moment the one person who bought a copy at that store happened by.”  Of course, I got to that store after a couple delays, so the odds are good someone else bought a copy sometime between April 11 and 13.  Then again, on the 11th, I witnessed Forbidden Planet sell out of their last copy of Mixtape.  They’ve assured me more are on the way, so if you’re looking for a copy, and are NYC based, they’ll fix you up.

Did I mention this was all unexpected?

Diamond, the main comic book distributor told the publisher (who subsequently told me) the date of publication was April 18th.  I actually found out through a post on Twitter, where a fan wrote he was thrilled Mixtape #1 finally arrived.  Brendan, the book’s editor and co-publisher, found this out while ducking into the shop down the street from his offices, and was informed by the owner he had new book out this week and that said book was selling.

Hopefully this raises the bar on solicits for #2.  Second issues typically get a lower number, as the general consensus is that issue #1 is the collector’s item.  I also received the final pages for #3 last week, so we have that on the boards too.

[Regarding subsequent issues, I plan on announcing where we're at with those soon.  We'll be doing something cool in tandem with them, and as issues 4,5, and 6 are probably my favorite of the first arc, I'm as anxious as you to get them out the door]

To be frank, it’s a strange feeling, walking into your local comic book store like you have countless times before, and seeing YOUR BOOK on the shelf along with the other new releases.  A book you’ve been thinking and dreaming about for the last three and a half years; a book that, with its publication, finally gives me the right to call myself a comic book creator.  At least I think it does — feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

So if you’ve been following my Mixtape antics, I’d appreciate you supporting the book and spreading the word about it.  Mixtape has always been a comic book for people who don’t normally buy comic books.  As I’ve said before, the characters in Mixtape don’t have super-powers.  They don’t fight zombies or date vampires or have crazy adventures.  The aim was to tell real stories about real people — people you or I could have known (or indeed may have known) in High School, no matter what your age is now, or what era you were a teen in.  So far I’ve received some nice comments about the book on its FB page.  One reader wrote “I felt like I was back in high school and I see my old friends in each character.” 
Another said “It more than lived up to the expectations. Memories have been kickstarted after reading issue one and I am currently playing 7″s on my floor from the 90′s.” 
That was really the goal with Mixtape.  To tell stories that prompt them to do stuff like that — drag out the old 7″s, dust off the boom box and those old cassettes, switch from the morning news on the commute to music. To unlock those memories we all bury, and discover we’ve spent the past twenty years or so running away from our teen years, only to wonder why we ran so fast and so far.

On a sidenote, I am talking with a couple local stores about doing a signing, and hope to do the same next month when I’m up in the Toronto area for work.  If anybody has any suggestions please message me here.

No Excuses

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Timing is everything.

Like most creative types, I owe my career to it.  A stint volunteering at a film festival turned into the opportunity to pen a TV miniseries, and launched me into the world of being a professional writer.  Had I not volunteered at that festival and ingratiated myself with the producer running it, who knows where I’d be?

Success is predicated on the ability to recognize an opportunity when it presents itself, and acting accordingly.  Being in the right place at the right time is key; being able to recognize when you are in one of those moments is crucial.  If you’re not paying attention to the signals, that ship sails, leaving you standing on the shore and realizing that you just missed the golden opportunity that would have put you on it, rather than looking at it from a distance.

So what does that have to do with Kurt Cobain?

Everything.

Kurt is immortal.  He’s deified and lionized and memorialized every time you hear “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”  He’s a genuine rock icon on the same level as Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin (all of whom, like Kurt, died at 27).  heck, NECA even released not one but two collectable toys of Kurt:

His journals have been published, a movie is forever in the works, books have been written, conspiracy theories about his death abound.  He’s forever trapped in amber, howling like a demon in a fog shrouded high school gymnasium as a pep rally goes out of control.  He’s forever twenty-seven.

So another year comes and goes minus Kurt Cobain.  Everyone knows who he was.  But he’s not the reason I’m writing this.  This is due to the gentleman pictured below.

If you don’t know who that is just by looking at him, chances are you’re one of the ones who forgot that Layne Staley, lead singer of Alice in Chains died ten years ago, on April 5, 2002.  He died of an overdose.  His body lay for two weeks in his luxury Seattle condo before they found him.  He was 35 — the same age Kurt would have been had he lived.

Both deaths were tragic.  Yes, even Kurt, despite suicide being widely regarded as a dick move.  Unless you’ve dealt with crippling depression, or drug addiction, or chronic health problems like Kurt did, you’re in a glass house throwing rocks.  But as years pass on, I find Layne’s passing to be the more tragic.  It’s also hard to remember now just how big Alice in Chains was.  Multiple platinum albums.  Sell-out tours.  A legendary Unplugged performance.  Legions of devoted fans.  And the songs, man the songs still have the power to send chills up one’s spine; The Rooster, Angry Chair, Man in the Box, Them Bones – fantastic.  I saw Nirvana once, in 1993, in Toronto.  But I saw Alice in Chains twice, once in 92 and again in 93 when they co-headlined that year’s Lollapalooza festival and for my money, their work cuts deeper than Nirvana, who had the luxury of releasing three great albums before imploding in such a dramatic fashion.  They never got old or stale.  Neither did Alice, but as each April passes with piles of stories about Kurt, I wonder why Layne isn’t afforded the same.

Why is Kurt commemorated with galleries and books and toys, but not Layne?

Obviously, timing – or as much timing as death  requires.  Kurt died, if not at the height of popularity, then at the height of fame, when he’d shifted from being the indie rock star who broke into the mainstream and heralded a shift in music, to becoming a tabloid train-wreck aided and abetted by his very public marriage to Courtney Love.  His rise into public consciousness was meteoric – roughly 5 years lapsed from Nirvana’s debut Bleach, to the shotgun suicide that ended Nirvana, and alternative nation.  Kurt had timing on his side of going out when Grunge and Alt-Rock were at their peak.  His death triggered their decline.  It was hard to listen to Bleach or Nevermind with the knowledge that the guy singing about angst and loneliness blew his brains out.  Face it, when “the voice of your generation” kills himself, it doesn’t say much about that generation’s prospects does it?

When Layne died in 2002, Grunge had been dead for nearly 8 years.  Generation X had grown up, graduated college, gotten jobs and started families.  I’m sure some people reacted with more surprise that he was still around – heck, I probably reacted the same way.  There were no vigils at the Space Needle in Seattle like there were with Kurt.  Rolling Stone and Spin didn’t publish commemorative issues.  There are no toys of Layne.  The band took time to mourn, and lick their wounds, and eventually reform with a new singer … and as it turns out they’re pretty damn good.  But Layne’s absence is one they’ll never overcome, just like as great a band as Foo Fighters have became, they’ll never be a game-changer like Nirvana.

Kurt is remembered/deified because his death signalled the end of Grunge, and the end of Alternative Rock as a mainstream force.  It was like that moment in high school when a classmate dies sudden and unexpected. It’s that big moment that forces everyone around it to grow up.  I know for my personal experience that Kurt’s death and Nirvana’s break-up marked the beginning of the end of music in my life.  Not that it ended entirely, but its importance in my life began to wane.  School became more important, as did getting my career off the ground.  I gradually stopped going to shows, and while I still bought music, it wasn’t to the degree it had been since 1989.  It took fourteen years, and the beginnings of Mixtape, for me to rekindle that passion for music.  Growing up means letting go of childish things and accepting responsibility.  Not everything ends with a shotgun blast or a lonely overdose.  Life is rarely that dramatic.

Someone, and I can’t remember who, said something to the effect that “Foo Fighters are to Nirvana what New Order was to Joy Division”, and that’s as apt a comparison as any.  Nirvana became legends the moment Kurt pulled the trigger.  Alice was wounded the moment Layne OD’d, and while that’s unfair, it’s what it is.

So as the music world marks another sad anniversary, I encourage everyone to give more than a passing thought to Layne.  He deserves it, because sometimes the worse thing than being trapped in the spotlight is going on after that spotlight has passed you by.

Sell, Baby, Sell

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You may have noticed the new Mixtape banner at the top of this page.  It was made by David Buceta, a Spanish artist.  David and I are collaborating on a short 2-page comic for a Fanzine he’s editor of.  It will appear everywhere when done, starting with this page and spreading like wildfire from there.  It was lots fun to write and was totally based on a thing that happened.  If it’s well received, we may do more.  If it’s not, we may do more anyway because we aim to please ourselves first.

Anyway, here’s the full version  of the banner.  It had to be cropped slightly to fit the above space).  And if you’re asking, yes I will happily trade banners with other creative types out there, provided there’s some common ground between us.  While there is great use for porn in this world, I’m not interested in promoting “Backdoor Sluts IX” or “Schindler’s Fist” here.  Likewise the multitude of spammers who keep posting messages that get themselves deleted before anyone reads them, you won’t get any love here.  But, say if you’re an indie comic book creator looking for exposure, or an indie band with a new release, or an indie artist … shoot me an email and we’ll talk.

Enjoy!

Lovefool

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First bit of business; new publication dates for MIXTAPE (print and iTunes versions) are forthcoming.  We just need to work out a few details, to avoid announcing a new date and having that be untrue.  But you can look to the end of March-beginning of April for release in one, if not both formats. Again, the announcement will drop here.

If you’re frustrated by the delay, well, join the club, and be thankful you’re not me, who’s frustration burns like the brightest star in the heavenly firmament (i.e. the Sun –  seriously, try and stare at it and you’ll share my pain).  Delays happen, and they’re not through any malicious intent on the part of anybody, but they do monkey with the works; to wit, some reviews are being held until we get the release sorted out.

On the positive side, the delay has allowed us the additional time to get the word out about the book, and the good news in that is that we’ll be getting much more media exposure, on the web, and radio, and even TV sometime in May.  media have actually been contacting me about the book, which is a great sign that word is starting to get out about Mixtape.

So for every negative, there’s a positive, and the latest came in the form of a review that did slip out onto the web from Playback.Stl.  Click the link to read it.  It was a positive one, and quite in-depth, but one part really lept out at me:

“Abraham’s teens are equipped with large dashes of stupid and, well, frankly, they’re not very fun … which means that they’re telling stories so eerily similar to actual teenagers that it’s frightening.”

If you look at movies or TV or, yes, comic books focusing on teens, you’re always forced to choose between one extreme or the other.  The first is wish-fulfilment; characters who always know what to say and how to say it, how to act and so on  The teens/twenty-somethings of the Scott Pilgrim universe fit that category — they have the same foibles as real people, albeit with kung-fu and video-game powers.  It’s a fantasy, but an appealing one (and the fact the Scott Pilgrim saga unfolds against the backdrop of my old hometown gives it a particular resonance for me).  If you look at “teen” based TV or movies — the cool teens (i.e. the ones we like, not the snobby jerks) have cool parents and hip friends and are, like, so above the High School shenanegans it’s funny (see Easy A and Ferris Bueller).  Who wouldn’t want to be that cool, that together, that much a winner?  It’s a fantasy, but an appealing one, and lord knows we could all use a little more in our lives.

The other type are the “slice of life” ones — the “After School Special” approach where “real teens ” (written by 40-something men and women) deal with such burning issues as suicide, alcoholism, drunk driving, drugs, bullying, peer pressure, divorce, and a host of other traumas.  These stories are frequently traumatic bordering on horrific, but all end on the same note; with survivors, having learned the lesson of the day, live to struggle onward.  John Hughes specialized in stories like this (and more than one reviewer has compared the Mixtape sensibility to that of The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles, filtered through an alt-rock haze).  There’ve been some queries about movie and TV rights for Mixtape, though I can’t see Mixtape working in either format the way it does in comics.  Good luck spinning a weekly series about teens just hanging out and shooting the shit about nothing in particular; in TV you need conflict and story arcs and crises to deal with, and while we deal with those in real life, Mixtape (the comic) feels more separated from those Big Moments.  They happen, but they happen off-screen, not exposed for everyone to watch.

Mixtape aspires to be neither Ferris Bueller or The Breakfast Club.

It aspires to be “slice of life” but life as it’s usually lived.  The day-to-day grind of getting through intact.  There is drama and conflict, because it would be deadly dull without that conflict, but Mixtape is, and has always been, more about what happens after the party is over, after the diplomas have been awarded.  That’s not to say there won’t be things like suicide or alcoholism or drugs addressed as the series progresses, but I hope I’ll be able to address it through the prism of surviving those moments, of not being consumed by them.

The Mixtape saga begins with the words “I discovered it on the morning of the funeral” and will end with that funeral, as the four surviving main characters reunite to mourn the one of their number who was lost.  The journey to that moment will comprise the series run and, hopefully, arrive at a conclusion where we can all learn something about this journey we call life, and the soundtrack we carry with us through it.

It’s been the big challenge in writing Mixtape, and one I’m sure I’ll grapple with — to not have it sound like one of those books or movies or TV shows that sounds like it’s being written from a 40 year-old’s perspective down to an 18 year-old’s, to come across as preachy or (the worst possible crime; ironic).  I hope it feels authentic.

The reviewer ends with another telling phrase:

“Reading Abraham’s musings on music and teenage romance, [I] wouldn’t be 16 again for all the tea in China and a guaranteed Molly Ringwald ending.”

That’s mission accomplished, in my book.