big love out to Brett “WINTERMEN (it’s ONE word, brett!!!)” Lewis & Cliff Chiang. enjoy yer weekend!

love,

the law-giver
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kPkgBq8eew

Here’s the link.

Brian Wood: LOCAL. The best thing I’ve done, and hopefully the first of many Ryan Kelly collabs. And the first NORTHLANDERS book, which not only got me out of my comfort zone but did the same for a lot of people who thought they knew what a comic book about Vikings was.

G. Willow Wilson: I’m proud to have written almost 500 pages in 2008. (AIR, VIXEN, and two drafts of The Butterfly Mosque)

David Lapham: YOUNG LIARS, definitely. Actually this was a huge year for me. Did a ton of work and finally feel like “I’m back” (even though I didn’t go anywhere) for the first time since STRAY BULLETS went on hiatus. YOUNG LIARS was something I had been working on for almost a year and a half before the first issue hit the stand. I felt it evolve from what I thought was going to be a Tomb Raider-esque chick action book to something that was completely twisted, dark, funny, tragic, real, fantasy, and just plain gonzo. It turned into everything I’d like to see in my comics all at once!

Jock: Comics wise I’ve not had much in print, apart from my SCALPED covers. Always proud to be part of that book. Outside of that I did a load of concept art for Pete Berg’s movie DUNE for Paramount, and I’m really proud of a lot of that. Very different to comics work, but very rewarding.

Cliff Chiang: GREEN ARROW & BLACK CANARY #4 came out in early January, and though it was a bear to get through (imagine drawing an issue about a hospital while a loved one is IN the hospital), I’m proud of how it turned out.

Will Dennis: I love all my children equally.

Brian Azzarello: 100 BULLETS lasting 100 issues with the same creative team. The impact JOKER had in not just the direct but the book market too ain’t so bad, neither.

Jason Aaron: The “Dead Mothers” arc of SCALPED. I think it’s the best thing I’ve done on the title, and I’m looking forward to the challenge of topping it in 2009. Also, the PUNISHER MAX CHRISTMAS SPECIAL and GHOST RIDER #26 (featuring the debut of the all-new Orb) were probably my favorite single issues to write.

WHAT WORK ARE YOU THE MOST EXCITED ABOUT FOR 2009?

Brian Wood: A few upcoming NORTHLANDERS one-shots should be excellent, if only for the artists we have lined up coughRissocough. Seeing how the new DEMO books come out, and writing issue #50 of DMZ. 50! Reaching fifty issues of a series is sort of like when I hit 30 years of age. I never thought I’d make it that long.

G. Willow Wilson: I hope not to have to work quite as hard in 2009. But I’m excited to keep writing AIR and branch out into new genres, to be disclosed forthwith.

David Lapham: Sales willing, hopefully a second year of YOUNG LIARS. I have another–still super secret–project coming up from Wildstorm. A big high concept idea I came up with (and I don’t get many of those). I enlisted a young artist to partner with, who I can’t wait for everyone to see his work because he’s going to be a great one. Every page looks better than the one before. As soon as I can I’ll post about it. Stay tuned…

Jock: Drawing SNAPSHOT, a mini series with Andy Diggle, but I’m also looking forward to working with some writer by the name of Jason. Jason Aarskrak or something? Aarnon?

Cliff Chiang: I’ll be finishing the Neil Young epic GREENDALE soon and it should be coming out later in the year. Hopefully, we’ve taken a cool concept album and made some good comics out of it. Also, excited to work with Azz again in 2009.

Will Dennis: I know I said I love all my children equally but that’s a bit of a fib. Cause this year I have two things that stand apart. First up in Feb(ish) is the final issue of 100 BULLETS. Hard to believe. A monumental achievement by any measure. And quite literally I would not have the career I’ve had without the generosity and blind faith shown to me by Brian, Eduardo, Trish, Dave and Clem all those years ago. I was a totally unknown assistant editor who inherited that amazing book. Azz had little to go on other than one night we spent drinking in some divey bars in nyc. It just goes to show that everything yer parents told u about drinking was dead wrong. One good night of boozing can change yer whole life forever. Now nearly 9 years later we have made it to the end. I think we told some pretty goddamn good stories (spent a lot of sleepless nights in that time too!) and I couldn’t be more proud of the work that everyone has done. It’s sad to see it go and I’m humbled by my association with this book

The other big event is the launch of the Vertigo crime line in September. A lot has already been said about this and more will be revealed at NYCC but the first two books are deadly. One is an occult thriller written by international best selling author Ian Rankin called DARK ENTRIES and the other is a nasty noir called FILTHY RICH from the man, Brian Azzarello. They’re about 200 pages each in glorious black & white digest size hardcovers! Hopefully folks will check ‘em out.

Beyond that I have a new monthly that we’re going announce at NYCC as we’ll as the usual goodness from Scalped, DMZ and Northlanders!

Brian Azzarello: I really don’t get excited unless I’m in a stadium. I’m looking forward to the debut of Vertigo Crime, and really proud to be part of it. Also some prose work will be published in the fall…

Jason Aaron: “The Gnawing” in SCALPED, Tony Moore drawing the mother of all trucker horror stories in GHOST RIDER, and the debut of my new WOLVERINE series, plus an as-yet-unannounced super-cool Marvel project.

WHAT’S YOUR NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION?

Brian Wood: I don’t make them. Each year, each week, each day I just try to make forward momentum, and improve in everything if only a little bit.

G. Willow Wilson: My New Year’s Resolution is to play more. I’ve gotten too serious.

David Lapham: Kick heroin. After that everything else is easy street.

Jock: I never have them. I’m flawed, but I know it.

Cliff Chiang: 2008 kinda threw me for a loop, but 2009 is all about taking charge. We’ll see where that takes me.

Will Dennis: To never read blogs

Brian Azzarello: My New Years Resolution is to not be so invisible, and post regularly.

Jason Aaron: To make Brian Azzarello post regularly.

jarvis dance at 1:43…wait for it.

here’s three from me:

lily allen

gilmore girls

this one is actually 3 guilty pleasures in 1:
MOULIN ROUGE, my man-crush on Ewan McGregor & homemade music videos on YOUTUBE

i only mention it cus today i happened to hear RAPPER’S DELIGHT by the SUGAR HILL GANG and it reminded me of my first job (a paper route delivering the ITHACA JOURNAL) and my first exposure to rap music and something new and fantastic called a “WALKMAN”.

see one Sunday night in the dead of winter (had to be late 1979/early 1980) i was out collecting for my route. that meant going door-to-door to get the deadbeats who got the paper all week to pay up for the week. it was a lonely job and — as anyone who’s ever lived through a winter in central new york can tell you — it was a cold-ass job as well.

so i would often beg my younger brother to come with me…most of my ‘clients’ were hippie college kids, so occasionally a girl would come to the door in a towel. that was usually enough of a lure to get him to come and one night his best friend came too.

he was a cool kid who’s parents had some dough and he always had the latest toys. but on this night, he had something more magical. he called it a SONY WALKMAN. now we had a SONY “Trinatron” color TV set (purchased hastily by my father at Woolworth’s during the Watergate hearings when our old B&W set literally blew up) at home so i knew the brand name, but this was a device that played tapes and you carried them around to listen to music. i mean WTF?!…

i recall it was blue (could that be correct?) and bigger than his hand. i don’t think it even had what we would consider headphones but more like an ear plug that would come with a transistor radio…i could be wrong about that tho. anyway, this thing blew our fucking minds. it’s hard to conceive of it today, but it then it was like something that had been beamed down from another planet.

but what was even more mind-blowing was the tape inside. it was something called RAPPER’S DELIGHT…god knows where the hell he got it, but it was like nothing our brains had ever heard before. i mean were living in the disco age so we knew dance music, roller skating music, make-out music but this was a completely different life form. and they cursed!

ok, maybe not cursing but they did reference “s—m” (which in hindsight is a little creepy) and that was enough for us. i think we prolly broke the rewind button listening to the song. more than 25 years later, i still know every goddamn word.

but we didn’t know much else…we didn’t know anything about the band, the music, the hip hop scene and had no way to find out — no wikipedia to check, no music magazines to buy, no MTV to watch. we were just three nerdy white kids on a freezing cold sunday nite in upstate new york getting hit in the face by a new age.

god bless mike, hank and master gee.
god bless sony walkmans.
god bless us all everyone.

watch for the JOCK appearance about 7 seconds into it. he’s the one the left.

your left.

free copy of AIR #1 to anyone who watches the whole thing.