B O N D P H O N E.
Words and pictures by Chris Lamb.

Lots to talk about, like the insane run around Manhattan that left me with a handful of jobs to pick from and has me sitting on a sound stage opposite a fourteen foot tall Absolut Vodka bottle at present. I'll go into it more when I can get the events in order and on paper in a way I'm happy with.

Fuck it, let's do this now: Thursday was saying yes to everything, hitting a groove in the city and not skipping once. The lessons of the last two months met with a dozen loose ends to produce day jobs I actually want to cover rent and food and a gig baby sitting a laptop on a commercial shoot for the rest of this week. It was scooping Strummer Effect directly into the vein; a broad daylight bankrobbery cementing everything I had hoped for in moving. This is real life, this is what I do; this is just a radio song.

Bringing us up to last night, and a real-time email talk about the recent update to Ninth Art and the place of online commentary on comic books and culture. The question was raised, what would I talk about if given the column space? Say something bi-monthly, or even weekly?

Okay, then: I'd want to do something on what works in comics that doesn't - or at least not to the same extent - in other mediums. Take a maximum of five titles from the week's new books and tear them apart in search of the elements that keep me reading and could be used as bait to get new readers in. Joe Casey summed up the sort of thing I'm looking for in this week's Basement Tapes: Comics have more tricks up its sleeve than movies, meaning even when the summer blockbusters catch up there's a way to distance ourselves again. Film is bound bycertain laws - physics, for one, and in the case of special effects trickery, audience-demanded realism - that sequential art just strolls past. I would do something that looks for proof of the Harvey Pekar line about comics being just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures. so why not prove it?

My case was clearer last night, when there were drinks and smoking involved, but I digress. The reply comes back, across the ether and the ocean: not bad, why not pitch it? Attached to a list of comics webzines actively seeking contributors.

Bastard. Now I'm walking around with this homeless idea and half of the first installment in note form, and I have to either do something with it or forget the thing entirely. I'm mailing you snakes instead of CDs, next time. Big poisonous snakes.

Something to come back to later, after I upgrade to a proper keyboard and the job things have a chance to settle into patterns.

posted by chris  # 7:24 PM