(I apologize for the crudity of the images in this article. I couldn’t bend the pages enough to get good scans without violating Borders’ return policy, and therefore denying myself a better comic.)

I like Doug TenNapel. First and foremost, he created Earthworm Jim, which I always enjoyed, even though I never got past the second level. Apparently he also made Skullmonkeys, a game that, as far as I know, existed only in my friend Mike’s house, which has the greatest video game music of all time. His comic Iron West is as about cowboys fighting robots as anything could be. Tommysaurus Rex made me cry. Well, not really, I can’t cry, but I recognized where a weaker man WOULD cry if he were reading it.

Anyway, I like the guy, and when I saw Ghostopolis, I had to get it. The plot: Garth Hale, dying kid (he has an uncurable disease of some kind)  accidentally get sent to the afterlife by washed-up old down-on-his-luck ghost hunter Frank Gallows, who has to travel into Ghostopolis (as it’s called) to rescue him. Kind of like Coraline mixed with Hellboy. Cool, right?

And it starts off good. The kid’s a bit emo, but he’s slowly dying, so I’ll give it to him. Frank Gallows looks an awful lot like Hugh Jackman (which he noticed). He’s has a ghost mechanic girlfriend with a suped-up ghost car. There’s a Benedict Arnold running gag. I’m down with it.

But then we get to this section: the kid is in the suburbs outside Ghostopolis. with his grandpa, who is also a kid (go with it). The kid asks about the origin of Ghostland, and the grandpa tells this tale:

Alright, a black WWII pilot, that’s pretty– heeeeey, wait a minute…

That kind of looks like…

You don’t think…

Is this one of those Veggie Tales sorts of things? Like, your suspension of disbelief is already on full (because vegetables are singing and dancing and THAT IS RIDICULOUS!), and then they throw in some Christianity while your guard is down? If I’m willing to believe that tomato’s a pirate, then is belief in an all-loving creator such a stretch? Maybe if you just pretend you believed in God long enough to get through the story, you’ll feel better, and you’ll forget to turn that belief off afterwards?

Doug! Come on! I trusted you! Hours of Skullmonkeys, and this is how you repay me?! Surprise Bible (do I capitalize Bible?) comics?!

It gets worse. Later in the story, Garth and Grandpa enter a dark, secret cave the bad guys don’t know about, where Tuskegee Jesus is curing the sick and guiding them from the purgatory of Ghostopolis to a…better sort of afterlife.

The very worst part is, if I ever read a new Doug TenNapel comic, I’ll constantly be looking for the Jesus imagery. Are those dinosaurs the apostles? Is that robot  sending a letter to the Carpathians? Holy crap, is Earthworm Jim a Christ figure? Actually, come to think of it…his worm portion is man (being of the earth), and his supersuit portion is God (being super). Both man and God, but still all God. Sounds Jesus to me.

Anyway, being duped into reading Christian fiction upsets me. How about you?

So, me and Wendy (who is my girlfriend, strangers reading this in the future) are walking our dog, Remy. To help build some unnecessary sympathy, he looks like this:

It’s like 10:45pm, dark out. Middle of the city. Presumably, we’re talking about this “Twilight except with Mole Men” idea I’ve been working out all day.* Same route as every other night, no big deal. We pass a tree,  and out of the corner of my eye, I see a raccoon peeking its adorable head at us.

“Hey,” I say, “that’s a raccoon.”

When bad things happens very quickly, my mind doesn’t really have time to react. When I was 18, a truck hit my car, exploding all the windows into little death shards (half of which ended up in my underpants), and bending the whole car into a sort of horseshoe shape. I should have been upset, and got out of the car and socked that guy in the nose. But it happened too fast. So instead, I pulled over, halfway into a bus shelter (cause the car was a U) and asked someone waiting for the bus (in the bench I was parked on) if they saw that. Yes. They saw that.

So, anyway, what happened was this:

Remy tried to chase it off. Wendy tugged on the leash. Remy flipped over onto the sidewalk, and yelped. Maybe because he was embarrassed, but more likely because he was lying on the sidewalk belly up with a tiny feral monster running towards him.

So, Remy got up and staggered away, looking back at the snarling thing as it followed him, as Wendy screamed and dragged him towards her. In a single moment, I found myself standing right between the dog and the raccoon trying to bite him.

There’s a lot of things you can do, standing between a dog and a raccoon. I won’t list them here, but I’ll give you a moment  to go over them in your head.

…

What I, unlike you, went with is the old “lean over the attacker, making myself look big, and saying ‘HEY. HEY. HEY.’ in a commanding voice” trick. You may recall that this is how you’re supposed to handle bear attacks. I think it was in Family Guy. Wendy, to her credit, took a more proactive and reasonable “pull the dog away from the damn thing” approach.

It might have worked, I’m not sure. Four seconds later, the raccoon ran back and scurried up the tree, followed by five of its babies, which had been watching from beneath a parked car. We ran a few houses down, and checked Remy’s butt, which was free of bite marks. Hallelujah.

Twenty minutes later, towards the end of the walk, I saw The Goonies projected on someone’s entire wall through their apartment window. Which is cool.

And that’s how that story ends.

* Don’t steal that, by the way. That’s my kids college fund.

To those of you who are using Google Chrome: ignore this.

To those of you not using Google Chrome: this is what the site is supposed to look like.

Carry on.

…and presumably, strangers looking through the backlog years from now…

A lot of you know me as John McGuigan. Probably because that’s my name. If my secret machinations have been successful, some of you know me as John “Hawkeye” McGuigan. Nice. But that’s not relevant. My name on here, and other things I write from here on in, is Jack McGuigan.

John McGuigan is some dude you went to high school with. John McGuigan takes pictures of his trip to Oregon. John McGuigan is a trumpet player with a rat tail. John McGuigan runs Krispy Kreme Austrailia. John McGuigan is a bunch of boring guys with a last name you can’t pronounce.

Jack McGuigan is a cool writer guy. His last name says “ethnic” but his first name says “party!”. If you meet him at a bar, he’ll tell you a story about something pretty crazy that happened to him at a rock concert. With funny voices and hand motions and everything. He’s also probably pretty good at writing comic books. Which brings us to the actual reason why we’re here.

In the minimal research I’ve done on my quest to become a paid writer of comic books, I’ve found that every single comic writer I’ve heard of has a blog of some kind.  Peter David, Jeff Parker, Paul Cornell, Fred Van Lente (just to name a few at random)…everybody’s got one of these stupid things. Just a place to promote your wares besides Twitter, I guess. Seems like the cromulent thing to do.

So, the comics I work on will be over there on the left where it says “Comics”. Feel free to read and tell me what you think of anything. It is your constructive criticism that helps me to grow, and it is your unconstructive criticism that helps me to cry.

As for this part…I don’t know, what do people do with blogs? Complain? Gossip? I hear Jeremy Piven’s actually balder then he looks. Also, he and Lady Gaga are getting MARRIED. Oh snap!