Mobbed

I can't recall if I've "blogged" about this before, and since I've been too out of it to formulate any interesting posts the last, oh, ever, I figure now's as good a time as any.

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Late last summer Amelie and I had the pleasure of meeting comicbook artist extraordinaire Phil Jimenez. We were both pretty excited, me 'cause I'm a huge comics geek who's been following Jimenez's career for a number of years, and Amelie because she'd never met any comic book artists before, just real writers like James Ellroy and such. I'd met Wendy and Richard Pini at the Great Escape in Louisville, where Jimenez was signing, and Greg Land at an in-store appearance at Galaxy Comics when they were still in Richmond, Indiana. All nice folks, and the Pinis looked, at the time, disturbingly like my uncle and his wife.

We manage to make it to the second stint of signing to see the dashing young Mr. Jimenez. There's a line from his elevated table in the back to the front door, and we took our place at the end of it. The Great Escape bills itself, I think, as a pop culture shop; the toys and the half of the shop dedicated to used cds and vinyl bear this out. It was pretty quiet, too. Amelie and I laughed at the geeks discussing X-Men annuals, X-Force, Gambit, and such.

And poor Phil, nobody really talked to him, just kind of muttered "can you sign this?" and "can you draw that?" I also seemed to be the only one who mentioned The Invisibles to him, at least while we were there. As far as I knew, the issues I brought to sign -- Invisibles, vol. 1 #16-18: "Entropy in the UK" -- were his first work. He tells me, sort of apologetically, that no, he'd worked on Team Titans before that. He seemed rather relieved that I hadn't read it. So we finally get him talking, I asked him about working with Grant Morrison, and he tells me that Morrison's scripts are rather straight-forward and easy to work with; Amelie tells him she's only recently gotten into comics, and he asked how much luck she'd had with that, because he's interested in the language of comics and how people pick it up -- or don't pick it up, sometimes. Amelie, for the record, is fucking brilliant, and hasn't had any difficulty reading comics. He was glad to hear that.

This is all a long-winded way to say "Look at that fucking King Mob sketch I got!" No slight to the other artists on the Invisibles, who I all love like fuzzy puppies, but for me The Invisibles was never cooler or sexier than when Phil was drawing it. Plus he's about the nicest guy you could ever hope to meet.

Amelie and I hope to someday attend millions of comic conventions and have all our favorite artists waste their talents drawing monkeys 'n' shit.