Summer is here... yippee...

It has been anything but an easy week, as my revised overnight schedule kicks in, and with that, my days of beautuful dreaming and sleeping goes with it. It is summer once more, and that means many more days at home with my darling seven year old daughter. Hannah is a lovely child, and (so far) has been a wonderfully behaved child, but trying to stay up most of the day with her is an utter drain on the sleep schedule.

Coupled with the fact that the more I watch her, the more I see Amy Poehler’s grade school character from Saturday Night Live. All I need is my daughter yelling “Rick! Rick” and not “Daddy! Daddy!” and the image would be perfect.

With the lack of sleep over the past few days, the urge to much of anything has went down the tubes. I find myself spending way too much time playing The Sims 2 and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and not nearly enough time on things like writing and creating.

My writing has been going so-so at best because of it, although I’m still hammering out new chapters of Epsilon at work. The revised Champion City is a bit delayed however, as I am working to catch up on both Epsilon and Freedom Patton while also working on my first comic project for Evolution Comics called Out For vengeance (© and ™ 2007 Nicholas Ahlhelm. All rights reserved. Just to make it clear.) Once I finish the first issue, I plan on starting my search for an artist to bring the book to life. My plans are to launch it in early 2008 which should give the project plenty of lead time.

Hopefully, I will get back to the reviews I want to start posting on this site in the near future, and I do promise to keep updating this page at the very least once a week or so.

For now, g’day all.

The Passing of an Artis

Tom Artis isn’t exactly the most well know comic book artist out there. In fact, I'm not really aware of much he's done in the past 15 years at all. I know I have several books drawn by him from the early 90’s, most notably a terrible written but beautifully drawn Green Arrow annual with Denny O’Neil and an excellent run on the short lived DC Impact title The Web.

Tom Artis died last week. I haven’t heard how and why but I have heard this from the folks at Silver Bullet:

Tom Artis, a former penciller for both Marvel and DC Comics, passed away recently. His family is in dire financial straits due to his death, and are unable to take care of themselves nor pay for his funeral expenses. A fund has been set up for donations. All donations can be sent to the following address:

The Tom TC Artis and Family Memorial Fund
Marine Bank
Attn: Gale Krueger
1401 North Dirksen Parkway
Springfield, IL 62702

I lived in Springfield for 5 years. I never met Tom Artis, much to my regret. But Mr. Artis happened to over hear a conversation my wife had with one of her girlfriends while out at a restaurant. They were apparently talking about how I wanted to be a comic writer. Tom was nice enough to introduce himself and give her a signed photocopy of a book he was working on for me. It was a cool day for me, coming home from a hard night at Mickey D’s to find a piece of art signed by an actual creator waiting for me.

It inspired me to actually start getting my butt in gear with this whole writing thing. The result: Champion City. And eventually, Metahuman Press itself.

So thanks, Tom. I owe you a lot.

And please everyone, give whatever you can to Tom’s family. It sounds like they can use all the help they can get.

I'm Back!

Well, this blog sat dormant for about 5 months longer than I planned, and I have to say I really don’t have that great of an excuse. I have been spending quite a bit of time working on my other writing projects. To be specific, I’ve started working on a few comic projects that readers should be able to (hopefully) see up at my new website Evolution Comics. Expect to see a bit popping up on that site to preview my comic projects soon. And I will try my best to update here as well.

I’ve become obsessed with developing a non-super project of late. Between watching 300 and reading Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze, I have been building a Conan-style fantasy character set in fantastic version of 1000 BC or so. No idea how much I will do with it, but it’s consuming a good size bit of non-blogging time as well.

Hopefully, I will be back in the next few days with some thoughts on recent viewing, listening, reading and the such.

Later.

The Story of My October Part 1

October started pretty decently. I had plans to participate in 24 Hour Comics Day and get an early start on Novel Writing Month. It started at well, pretty quiet. I got thru my 24 hour comic with little to no problems.

Then my wife made a routine eye appointment.

Where she found out she has cataracts. Now anyone who knows anything about cataracts will know that 29 years old simply do not get them. The optometrist asked her if she was a diabetic, as diabetics are the only cases he's ever seen with cataracts under 50. So she went and picked up a testing kit.

And found out her blood sugar was 4 and a half times where it should be. She immediately got a prescription for a new diabetes drug and away we went, as she worked on getting her blood sugar under control before she could get her cataract surgery.

I found myself focused even more on my daughter as my wife kept various appointments all around town. We saw our Flexible spending account disappear in a flash. But she got her count down to where it should be and had her first cataract sugery this last Tuesday.

So all is relatively good.

Hopefully it will stay that way.

I'm Still Alive!

Just a quick post to let anyone who might be reading this that I’m still alive and kicking. Computer problems still continue to derail my efforts to maintain this blog as frequently as I want, but hopefully, in the near future I will find a way to work towards resolving that issue.

Much to report over the last few weeks, and I'll try my best to get to that in the next few days.