Hope things are better for you this year than last year even if things last year were pretty good.
The Groo project I was working on is our new limited (but not very) series, Groo: Friends and Foes, which will run twelve issues, the first of which goes on sale January 21. Each month, Groo encounters someone from his past who is either a friend, a foe or (more likely) a foe who acts like a friend. Each issue can be read separately but there's a minor connective storyline throughout the twelve episodes. The first two covers look like this, only larger…
For those of you interested in comic book lead times, the issue I was working on will be #6, plus I wrote promotional copy for #7. That's not easy to do when you have no idea what's going to be in #7.
Each issue also includes one of the world-famous Groo letter columns, which someone once called the best letter column in an industry where no one does letter columns anymore. This is not true. There are other letter columns…just not very many of them.
For years now, I've been pointing this out and insisting that we have one and most other comics don't because we care about our readers and others don't care about theirs. They just want your money and don't give a damn what you have to say. In fact, they probably hate you and mock you in private and don't want to even waste five seconds reading your messages.
I meant this as a joke when I started saying it but absolutely no one involved with any other comic has stepped forward to disagree so I've decided there must be something to it. This does not apply to any other comic books I write, by the way.
The Groo: Friends and Foes series is produced by Sergio Aragonés, me, Stan Sakai and a colorist who is usually but not always Tom Luth. Due to excessive crowd scenes and the necessity of sleep for human beings, we must occasionally give Mr. Luth more time to color it than a monthly schedule permits. Sergio, Stan and I have been doing what we do on it since 1982 and Tom signed on shortly after. (Stan does the lettering. What I do is a little more difficult to explain and — I'm almost pleased to note — understood by darn near no one.)
In other news: About a dozen readers of the site wrote in with the solutions to the mystery (see previous post) about why the first string critics who attended and reviewed the Marx Brothers' Broadway debut on May 19, 1924 weren't down the street seeing and critiquing the opening of Blossom Time. Answer: Yes, Blossom Time opened the same night but that was a reopening of a production from several years earlier. They could send the second string critics (or none) to see that.
That's one of the things I love about owning n' operating this blog. The readership is smart and solves riddles…even if none of you have figured out the lady with too much eye makeup in the beginning of the Odd Couple movie.
On with our year —!