Beep Beep!

Rick Lacy's arrived, folks!

A few words about my illustrious partner:

1) He wears leather, a lot of it. But only on his extremities.
2) He knows Form 7. That's the deadliest lightsaber dueling stance.
3) Any time he gets bored in conversation (and often just for the hell of it), he rolls up in his Conversational Clown Car, pulls everybody in, and floors it, dragging the talk into a virtual Toon Land.
4) He once tried to date a Disney Princess at Disney World
5) He loves to try to date bartenders and actresses
6) He's still single
7) He calls himself "Schmoopie" and also "Baby" (I wouldn't mention this, but he does it in public).
8) After seeing any action movie, Rick will walk out of the theater and imitate its main character (again, does it in public). I have witnessed Rick as the following characters:

• The Hulk
• Jack Sparrow
• Wolverine
• Nathan Algren (the last samurai)
• Rick Lacy as an Angel (that night the clown car took us to a land where there was one male Charlie's Angel)
• V (as in for Vendetta)
• Captain Malcolm Reynolds

Welcome him!

And now that I've embarrassed him, the praise: every script I've ever written has gotten between 80 and 100 percent better after he's drawn it.

It's humbling and kinda amazing.

cheeky!

I can't fix the below image hosting problem until i get my sweet ass back to work. So until then, lets rant a bit.

Whenever I'm drawing the cast of Labor Days outside the confines of the comic pages, for some unusual reason i conjur up the idea that they're play acting and now they're off set. So most of my drawings is them hanging about, or sitting in a car, or in this case taking a load off at a pub. Something the three of them prolly wont tend to do at all in the comic. Maybe Bags and Victoria might, but Stryker would prolly burst through the door and yell "everyone, quick, get in the car!"

and Bags would say "why the bloody hell for..?"

"Does lightning ask thunder why its so loud!? NO! Lightning flashes about... and gets in the damn car!" Stryker would retort.

and Bags says " Wow. You've got a bloody chee...OW MY HAIR!" cause stryker just grabbed him by the locks.

Maybe thats what would happen.

Rick Lacy reporting in! SWOOSH!

Thought it high time to get a post up in (as Phil puts it) this funkatronic mix. Been fussing over creating a specific LD layout for the blog and shirking my duties as co-mod, and we cant have that. We need a cooperative post matrix. A nexus of creative tendrils linking our space-minds!

So I'm gonna drop in a sketch of our anti-hero. The no-where-man, Benton Bagswell.

Creating ol' Benters here was an arduous process, that i shant bore you all with this day. Since there's lots more to come. One of my specific influences when creating Bags was Shinichiro Watanabe's Spike Spiegle character from Cowboy Bebop. Anyone familiar with said show will know that Spike is an ex-mob hitman and accomplished martial artist.

BAGS IS NOT.

But as far as his demeanor, the way Spike carries himself and interacts with others, as well as his penchant for smoking were all labels i loved about the archetype.

Well i'm getting longwinded here. My jobs ta make good with the drawings!

So stay tuned! the Labor Day masterworks are gonna get rolling and soon you wont be able to stop it!

Or the signal for the matter.

Surprise!

It's Hercules and his junk!

That last post had no images and a lot of words. I know how some folks hate to read.

So here's a bearded, be-clubbed, motivated hero for you, with his penis out.

No fuss, no muss.

It's Hercules 2007: Unshaven, Bored, Lackadaisical

That’s another pitch for Labor Days. It's the 12 labors of Hercules re-imagined. Set in the present day and featuring a thoroughly confused and unmotivated hero at its center. It's maybe the pitch with the strongest hook, as they say.

There's an essay out there somewhere by a film critic (or maybe you'd call him a theorist) named Thomas Elsaesser (okay, weird, he has a website, complete with, rather odd, picture).

Ahem, anyway... he wrote an essay years ago called "Notes on the Unmotivated Hero" or something like that. It was about the nature of protagonists in '70s American cinema. Specifically, movies like The Conversation, Night Moves, Two-Lane Blacktop, and The Long Goodbye.

They're slacker heroes before slacking became the province of comedies (teen or otherwise). Their motivations are full of a kind of world-weary pathos. And they tend to be inserted in genres where you expect a highly motivated hero (mostly, but not always, they're in detective films).

Our main character, Benton "Bags" Bagswell, is based on the idea of that kind of hero. What if an unmotivated hero found himself in the middle of an adventure of almost Grecian proportions? What if the fate of history hung in the balance?

Once Rick gets up on here, and we can see Bags, I'll tell you more about him.

(on a side note, someday I'd like to push an unmotivated hero into other genres. Fantasy in particular would be fun. In a sense, Barry Windsor-Smith did a bit of this with a section of his Storyteller's comic. Which seems to be, holy crap, now available to buy. Guess I'll be getting that.)

(a second side note, The Dude is an excellent example of a latter day unmotivated hero. And the tone of that film is much closer to Labor Days)

(further, for anyone who really cares about theories of '70s film, I do have some issues with calling those characters "unmotivated." As did Elsaesser, if I remember correctly. But what's important is the idea of an unmotivated hero. Productive brain food, I find).

It's like Repo Man meets James Bond

I'm obsessed with that ridiculous pitching device. "It's like Jurassic Park meets Halloween with a touch of The Piano." "It's like Beetlejuice meets Snatch, with the third act from Ghosts of Mars."

This might come from my last few jobs being film related. It might come because I honestly find it to be a productive brain exercise (yes, I always pause when I hear one to give the combination an honest consideration). Or it might be because they make for easy jokes (see first paragraph of this post).

I also enjoy retro-constructing the pitches for movies already released.

For example: "It's True Lies but they're both leading double lives," or "It's Three Amigos, but in space," or the classics "It's Romeo and Juliet but with werewolves and vampires", or "It's Die Hard on a boat" (or "Die Hard on a plane" or "Die Hard on Alcatraz teamed with an elderly James Bond" or "Die Hard on a plane full of convicts")

So, when writing, I can't help but try to come up with that one perfect, and often utterly ridiculous, pitch.

The best I've come up with for Labor Days is "It's like Repo Man meets James Bond."

That's Otto Maddox (the repo man) meets James Bond (the super spy).

That tells you, if you decode it properly, that it's about a slacker, a mysterious object, a superspy, and international adventure (and possibly punk music and sex appeal).

Smash those things together, bake on high for 40 minutes, season to taste and it won't give you Labor Days, exactly. But it'd give you something similar in taste if not texture.

In other news, if anyone reading this hasn't seen Repo Man, you're hereby uninvited from talking to me about movies (that includes you, Rick).

It's like Indiana Jones… but with "cunt"

Welcome one and all to the Labor Days work blog.

So what is Labor Days? It is, or rather will be, a comic book published in 2008 by Oni Press.

Herein you'll find the behind the scenes ramblings, ravings and reassurances of the Labor Days creative team. That team of lads being principally comprised of myself, Philip Gelatt and my loose tongued and loose cannoned partner, Rick Lacy. I do the writing and shaking of my head in disappointment. Rick does the drawing, drives the clown car and dons the capes.

This space will be a collection of notes, thoughts, drawings and miscellanea. All the basic elements one expects of a work blog and then some.

But what is Labor Days, really? To begin to answer that, I defer to the title of this post.

(That's how we roll here at Labor Days Towers. Minorly offensive, sure, but mostly just bemusing.)

Stay tuned!