So during the first season of Babylon 5, my agents at the time bought me a gift: a new desk, as my old one had been pretty effectively beaten into the ground. So I wrote nearly all of B5 at that desk (and the office desk), same for Crusade, Jeremiah, then later Changeling, World War Z, Thor, plus a couple hundred comics...I finally switched over to a new desk, very art deco and sleek, and was wondering what to do with that desk. I could either put it into storage, or it occurred to me, I could sign it, give provenance on the desk itself as to what was written there, and auction it off for the next writer to come down the pike. Not looking to do this for charity, I already tithe about ten percent of my total income to charity as it is, just for fun, and obviously whoever buys it would have to arrange for pickup and shipping. What do you think? Should I go for it?
Why not. Cool collectors item for a B5 fan, or an aspiring writer.
This sounds like the kind of item that should be in the Smithsonian.
Oooohhh! He's such a tease!
Just finished reading the lettered/drawn Superman: Earth One vol 3, easily the best of the bunch. 2015 pub date can't get here fast enough
Guess we can figure a two-year publishing schedule. Sigh...
Nice interview, mostly about Twilight Zone (not just the comic) and writing.
http://www.comicvine.com/articles/in...e/1100-148914/
But my eyes bugged out when I read:
[quote=JMS]I
JMS shared a couple of photos from his pictorial archives for Throwback Thursday. First up, a family picture where JMS comments:
I don't generally do Throwback Thursdays, but stumbled upon this in the archives. "So, Joe, why is it you were always getting beat up as a kid?"
"Because in addition to the weird last name and being constantly the new kid, I looked like Boris Fucking Karloff in Frankenstein, *that's* why."
Looking at this, it's clear that I had only two career paths before me: becoming a writer, or a member of organized crime. (So I combined them and became a producer.)
(Starting from left of frame and going around: my psychotic paternal grandmother who married her blood-uncle, which makes me my own first cousin, her second husband/my step grandfather who died under dubious circumstances, a friend of my grandmother, my mother [a former "lady of the evening" who literally attempted to murder me at age four], and my two sisters. It was like the freaking Addams Family.)
I don't know offhand how old I was in this shot, but I'm guessing around 14 plus or minus a year. I was 5'3 or so at the time. My whole family was short. Then when I hit sixteen I grew a foot in a year. (Had to cut it off because nobody sells shoes in threes.) Going from 5'3-6'3 in one year was quite a shock to everybody, lemme tell you...and encouraged a number of folks in my family, including my father, none of whom went above 5'7 or so, to wonder suggestively where the hell THAT DNA had come from.
Up next is a class photo where JMS comments:
One other shot while I'm at it....
Because we were ridiculously poor when I was growing up -- my father was a first class deadbeat -- we generally lived in the worst and poorest parts of town. The world being the way the world is, those tended to be the parts of town with the largest concentration of minorities.
So for most of my childhood, I was often the only white kid on the block or in the neighborhood or the school. I don't have many class photos from those years because we always split (running from creditors) before they came out, but the few I do have are all pretty much like this. I'm the only pale face on the thing, just to the right of the priest. There was one other kid in the class who may have been at least partly Caucasian, but that was it.
And here's the thing, here's the important lesson I learned from those years: as sometimes the only white kid in a school populated otherwise by African American or Puerto Ricans or Hispanics, and despite being the weird kid, I was *consistently* treated better than a black, Puerto Rican or Hispanic kid would have been treated at an otherwise all white school at that time (late 50s/early 60s).
That compassion, coming from people who had been used and abused and discriminated against, to someone who could have been an easy target, was something I kinda understood at the time but really grew to grasp and appreciate more over time. I've never forgotten that kindness, and hope I never will.
And just to button down the thought...the schools where I *did* get the shit kicked out of me the most often were the rare later ones where we were able to get into more suburban, mostly white schools, like Matawan Regional High School in Jersey, where I got beat up nearly every day.
I was in public school in Newark at the worst possible time for race relations, right before the riots, one of the few white kids there when blood was already running in the streets from battles between police and African Americans that would soon explode into one of the worst race riots in the state's history...and nobody laid a finger on me. Left there, moved to suburban Matawan, white kids everywhere...and they pounded the crap out of me for a year. Go figure.
There are a few other small comments so head on over and read the threads.
If you ever wondered what it was like to live inside JMS' head:
Excited that I had my first lucid dream ever last night. Then I thought: what if I was only *dreaming* I had a lucid dream? Fuck.
Wonder if he was working on Dream Police before bed?
From Twitter:
‏@straczynski 41m
The internet at my hotel in Iceland is so slow I've decided to dub it the interNOT.
It's probably a sign that he should be writing.
Originally posted by ems
‏@lonelygirlem 8h
I want my:
Anxieties
As all they do is mess up my life and everyone else's :'(
@lonelygirlem Bear in mind, though, that all those things are what will make you interesting and successful later.
Obviously JMS doesn't have enough to do:
Out the door: the revised Shadowman screenplay, the last issue of the Terminator 12 issue run, 1 more left on Ten Grand...actually seeing daylight. And we're about 7 weeks from the end of filming on Sense8 Season One. Nearing the home stretch....
Asked about the B5 movie:
Script in 2015, looking to produce in 2016.
When people commented on the workload:
And there's four that aren't even announced yet....
I suspect he never sleeps
Originally posted by babylonlurker View Post
Indeed. Somebody asked him if it bothered him when people said he was superhuman (paraphrasing) and he responded.
I think the more you pursue your passion to the fullest extent of your ability, running as fast as you can as long as you enjoy the chase, the more human it makes you, not less.
And in the spirit of Halloween coming soon, JMS posted a link to one of his City of Dreams audio dramas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77vMnERHWao
The framing story reminded me of the Bill Cosby routine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlmIeH7DT_w
JMS answered a question on Facebook about both Protector's Inc. being shortened and asking for news about the 'Vlad Dracula' project:
We realized that going to 12 would be stretching out the story unnecessarily, why pad it out and make fans pay for two issues when they don't have to? On the other point: yeah, it got killed by the NBC Dracula series, and when that ended, the moment had passed and they'd moved on.
Maybe somebody can explain the significance of this request to me?
Originally posted by a fan
If Marvel asked you to write the equivalent of Chris Claremont's 'X-Men: Forever' but for Spider-Man, would you?
Absolutely. The only requirement I'd make is that we don't solicit the book until all the scripts and 60% of the art is in.
As a hedge against missing pub dates, that's all...the TV thing is very crazy right now and banking scripts would protect readers.
So what happened with X-Men: Forever that could translate to Spidey?