G.I.JEFF is Actually Starting to Happen!!

After months of apparent inactivity (believe me, I was ANYTHING but inactive), I finally have some progress to report for G.I.JEFF: A REALLY AVERAGE HERO! I have rewritten the script for the initial G.I.JEFF story, "Dead Men Don't Eat Quiche". Additionally, as you will see below, I have pencilled a cover picture and the first page of the story, which as rewritten, will run six pages.

(I guess I need to add here a disclaimer: My G.I.JEFF comic has absolutely nothing to do with the parody cartoon - of which I only learned this afternoon - that ran on the cancelled NBC tv show, COMMUNITY. Jeff Roberts and I came up with G.I.JEFF back in the mid-1980s, when we were co-workers at Mr. Moe's Subs. G.I.Jeff was a nickname I gave Jeff back then. Then we decided to make him a comic character. I've got the three almost-30-year-old pencilled/inked/lettered black & white pages here at home.)

The first photo is of the cover pencils, the second is page one of the story.

These pictures were taken on my cellphone, since I don't have a scanner large enough to handle the 14"x17" Bristol board I'm working on. Once I have these inked (that's right, I'll be inking right over the pencils -- and then ERASING the pencil marks!), I'll have to take them somewhere to get them scanned so that I can color them and add word balloons on the computer. Unless I can find a really good deal on a large scanner.

So we're still a ways away from actually publishing the comic online, but we're a lot closer than we were just a few days ago. My plan is to (in more or less this order):
1) Ink the cover, get it scanned, color and letter it on my PC and publish it on the G.I.JEFF site;
2) Finish pencilling "Dead Men Don't Eat Quiche";
3) Write the script for the follow-up story, "Real Men Don't Wear Plaid";
4) Ink all six pages of "Dead Men Don't Eat Quiche"; and
5) Color and letter 1 page each week, publishing it online weekly for six weeks.
I'm guessing that it'll probably be at least three weeks before the cover goes up on the site. Then, it'll probably take a couple more weeks to finish pencils on the story. Another week for the "Real Men ..." script. A couple more weeks to ink the six pages. So, we're looking at about eight weeks before the story starts its run. That puts it at late-July/early-August. We'll see.

Let's just pray that I can stay healthy enough to actually stick to this timeline. Last year, once I finished "Froggie Went A-Courtin'" over at the ROADFROGS site, things kind of ground to a halt, first because of my own health problems and then my mother's cancer, which took her away from us last October.

Lord willing and the creek don't rise, I'll be back on this site in a week or two with more news.

BTW, in case you're not already reading these webcomics, check out Eddie Pittman's RED'S PLANET and Brian Shearer's WILLIAM THE LAST. I also recently found Jeff Smith's latest project, TUKI. All great stories. All beautiful artwork. All lots of fun.

As I hope G.I.JEFF will be.

Thoughts about the Boston Marathon Blasts

Today, I spent a couple of hours in the late afternoon putting the finishing touches on tomorrow's ROADFROGS strip. I had no idea what was happening in Boston until my wife came home from work and told me about the bombings. We, of course, turned on the TV and watched the coverage on various networks.

I think most of us certainly reflected on 9-11, but I had another line of thought going through my head, too. Back in the late eighties, when Jeff Roberts and I were trying to develop G.I. Jeff: A Really Average Hero, I came up with a character I wanted to use as a baddie: Achmed Malahende Achmed was his name. The whole concept of this character was very politically incorrect, and is probably more so these days. That very political incorrectness was a large part of the character's appeal for me and Jeff. We never got around to building a storyline for Achmed, but the basic premise was that he was a devout (but not necessarily zealous) Arab Muslim, who - while no jihadist - wreaked terror in his wake ... totally without intent. He would be the "accidental terrorist". Jeff and I were really into playing with popular book, song and movie titles, thereby coming up with some (mostly lame) story ideas. There was a popular book out (I think it was by Anne Perry, but I could be wrong about that and I don't feel like doing my research right now) entitled "The Accidental Tourist". Jeff and I got a few chuckles out of the concept, but as our work on the G.I.Jeff comic fizzled out, Achmed kind of fell by the wayside too.

I didn't really think about Achmed again until, in the wake of 9-11, there was quite a bit of confusion and contention regarding Muslims in the US, as well as in other Western nations. Had I tried to resurrect the Achmed character in, say, 2003, I would have probably been lauded in some corners of society and lambasted in others.

Right now, as I write this, we don't know who is responsible for the reprehensible terrorist act that was perpetrated today in Boston. If it turns out to be an Islamic group, I imagine that many here in the US will call for a clamp-down on the freedoms of Arabs and other Muslims here in the states. There will be others who will say that we cannot limit the freedoms of the few without, by default, limiting the freedoms of all. And there will many who will offer some kind of compromise which will probably just be a waste of time.

I don't know the answers to the dilemnas we face in the wake of this attack. And, as shallow as it may sound, I just wish we could all get along. But, just as in fiction, conflict is what moves the story - in this case the story of America. In my lifetime, I've seen awesome and awful events, many with resounding and enduring effects on our nation and its people. Today would seem to mark the beginning of a new chapter in the "age of domestic terror" in which some would say we find ourselves. Maybe so, but I prefer to think that this event might just be a footnote in the larger story of the forging of this nation. A story of which I hope I don't live to see the end.

And I plan to be around for a long time.

Maybe, if I live long enough, there will come a time when I can write and draw a silly little G.I.Jeff story about Achmed Malahende Achmed, the accidental terrorist. Without recrimination.

In the mean time, my prayers are with the injured, the murdered, their families and the investigators who are trying to sort all this out. And I pray that this event might be something that draws us, as Americans, together rather than driving yet another wedge between us.