Jason Rodriguez's Blog, page 16

Man, I am so excited to be reading this book. I bought it...

Man, I am so excited to be reading this book. I bought it several weeks ago but just started on it a couple of days ago. It’s thick, over 600 pages, and deserves full attention, so I think it’ll take some time to get through.

But this is the book I knew I’d always love. I even considered buying the original Cadence Books’ editions from the mid-90s despite the fact that they’d sell for $50+ per volume and had terrible, terrible covers. Seriously - look at that cover up top and look at this cover right here:

Which book are you reading?

So, as I was saying, I always wanted to read these books and I was just waiting, anxiously, for Vertical to get to them. I just finished up Tezuka’s massive Buddha collection and I saw this beautiful orange and green cover staring at me from the shelves at Big Planet Comics. I didn’t even know it was released. 

It’s wonderful. It’s amazing how dark it is, tho. Buddha was heartbreaking at times and even a bit violent but this is the first truly dark Tezuka book I’ve read. One day, when I have his entire collection (probably impossible), I’m going to read it all in the order it was published. Tezuka worked in comics for so long, and only worked on his own manga, so I have to imagine you can chart his artistic and personal growth from a young age up until his death, a rare treat for a comic artist.

Before I started picking up the Blackjack books, all I knew from Tezuka was Astro Boy. Astro Boy is great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s kind of Mickey Mouse, and I’m an adult. I respected the books for the way they completely invented the language of manga and I loved “The Greatest Robot In The World,” obviously, but it was pulpy fun. I used to say Tezuka was Japan’s Will Eisner and Walt Disney, Urasawa was Japan’s Frank Miller, and there never really was a Jack Kirby or a Stan Lee or anyone else.

Well, once you get deeper into his catalog, you start to realize Tezuka was Japan’s Eisner, Disney, Lee, Kirby, Henson, Schulz, Ditko, etc, etc, etc. He was everybody. 

I honestly think Tezuka was probably the most creative, prolific, and imaginative artist, writer, and creator of the 20th Century. 

So get this book. Get all his books.

The End of Stars may no longer be free but The Boy Who Could See...

The End of Stars may no longer be free but The Boy Who Could See Through Mountains and The Little Particle That Could (illustrated by Noel Tuazon) still are!

Head on over to Amazon and pick them up. 

The Boy Who Could See Through Mountains features three new sci-fi shorts for kids…

1 - “The Boy Who Could See Through Mountains” - Indalecio can see his family’s vile and evil enemies through the neighboring mountain range but can’t get close enough to see what makes them vile or evil.

2 - “Detective Know-It-All and the Glittered Up Glue Stick” - The third-grade detective, who literally knows the answer to every question, agrees to help Sally find out who’s removing her class president posters. At a fee of two candy bars a day he ain’t cheap, but he always solves the case.

3 - “Rocket Ruiz Builds a Warp Drive” - Rachel “Rocket” Ruiz has won the soapbox derby four years in a row. This year she faces her toughest competition, the well-financed Philip Jones, whose state-of-the-art soapbox racer is considered to be unbeatable. Not wanting to relinquish her title, Rocket Ruiz sets out to build a soapbox racer that’ll make the finish line come to her.

The Little Particle That Could is about a graviton who wants to meet a photon but just can’t see to catch him and looks like this:

It also sports a dope cover designed by our man Dylan Todd.

"Rocket wondered if she could build a warp drive that would shrink the space between the starting..."

“Rocket wondered if she could build a warp drive that would shrink the space between the starting line and the finish line. This way, she could finish the race in a matter of seconds. She started doing some research into warp drives. According to her research, no one has ever built a real, working warp drive. Not only has no one ever built a warp drive, but many physicists thought that a warp drive would be impossible to build. And, unfortunately, the physicists that thought a warp drive WOULD be possible to build seem to think that it would take an astronomical amount of energy to use. An amount of energy so astronomical that it could only be achieved by using something called “dark matter.” And dark matter sounded really, really expensive.”

-

Excerpt from “Rocket Ruiz Builds a Warp Drive” from my new collection, The Boy Who Could See Through Mountains and Other Stories available (for free!) through Wednesday at Amazon.com. Get it!

The Little Particle That Could is available for free through Tuesday and The End of Stars is available for free today. Get all of them!

You still want more? FINE! The Girl Who Could Live in Yesterday and The Monster Hunter are both 99-cents. 

You still want more? FINE! I love you. 

"Sally seems satisfied with my conditions so I get on the case. And by getting on the case I mean I..."

“

Sally seems satisfied with my conditions so I get on the case. And by getting on the case I mean I sneak into the back stairwell and read some comic books instead of going to gym. Reading comic books is hard, by the way, when you know everything. You can’t think things like, “How’s Spider-Man going to get out of this one?” because the second you ask it you know the answer. “Oh, ok,” you say to yourself, “He pulls a lever in Doc Ock’s lab that turns on the interdimensional transporter and Doc Ock gets zapped into the Negative Zone.” Once you know how a comic book ends, it’s hard to keep on reading it.

Being a Know-it-All isn’t as great as you’d think it is. But you learn how to deal with it.

”

-

Excerpt from “Detective Know-It-All and the Glittered-Up Glue Stick” from my new collection, The Boy Who Could See Through Mountains and Other Stories available (for free!) through Wednesday at Amazon.com. Get it!

The Little Particle That Could is available for free through Tuesday and The End of Stars is available for free today. Get all of them!

You still want more? FINE! The Girl Who Could Live in Yesterday and The Monster Hunter are both 99-cents. 

You still want more? FINE! I love you. 

colonialcomics:ladiesmakingcomics:ejbarnes:On 18 November...

colonialcomics:

ladiesmakingcomics:

ejbarnes:

On 18 November “Ladies Making Comics” blogger Alexa Dickman and I went to Merry Mount in Quincy, the site of the notorious Maypole erected by Thomas Morton and his band of rebelled indentured servants in the 1620s.  We were accompanied by fellow Boston Comics Roundtable writer Patrick Flaherty (“Mealtime”, “The Plague”) and my partner, Brian Bixby.

Alexa and I are planning a comic story about Merry Mount for an anthology of comic stories about colonial America.  The merry Morton and the po-faced Governor Bradford of Plymouth, who had Morton arrested and deported back to England, wrote accounts of the plantation at Merry Mount and its friction with the neighboring Puritans and Pilgrims.

Merrymount Road (marked on online maps as Maypole Road) runs from Black’s Creek near where it flows into Massachusetts Bay, to the actual Merry Mount (formerly Mount Wollaston), which is in a small park at the corner of Samoset Avenue and Ridgeway Drive in the Merrymount residential neighborhood near the Quincy Shore.  Merry Mount and the park it sits in are not to be confused with Merrymount Park, which is about a half-mile away on the other side of Black’s Creek.  The trunk of a very tall red cedar tree that stood on Merry Mount not far from where the Maypole was erected is now in the Quincy Historical Society, the tree having blown down in a storm in the 1890s.
In the photo, L to R: Patrick Flaherty, Alexa Dickman, me.  Photo by Brian Bixby.

Yeah, this is a thing I’m doing. E.J. is a fantastic artist too, I’m excited to be working with her on my first comic story!

A report from the field from two Colonial Comics creators!

I know it may seem like today is all about The Boy Who Could See Through Mountains but I do have other books I’m working on. Here’s a quick report from writer Alexa Dickman and artist E.J. Barnes on their research for Colonial Comics, the first book in a three-volume series I’m editing for Fulcrum Publishing!

"For Indalecio’s father, a mountain was a mountain. A mountain was tall and thick and made of rocks...."

“For Indalecio’s father, a mountain was a mountain. A mountain was tall and thick and made of rocks. There was really no other way to explain it. Indalecio’s father never had to say, “Look, over there. Do you see that giant rock coming out of the ground? That’s a mountain.” A mountain is one of those things you know about from a very young age. You don’t know the exact moment when you learned what a mountain was, but it was probably the first time you saw one. Indalecio, however, didn’t know what a mountain was because he’s never seen one. He just sees a line off in the distance. On top of that line is the sky. Below that line is the ground.”

-

Excerpt from “The Boy Who Could See Through Mountains” from my new collection, The Boy Who Could See Through Mountains and Other Stories available (for free!) through Wednesday at Amazon.com. Get it!

The Little Particle That Could is available for free through Tuesday and The End of Stars is available for free today. Get all of them!

You still want more? FINE! The Girl Who Could Live in Yesterday and The Monster Hunter are both 99-cents. 

You still want more? FINE! I love you. 

My new collection, The Boy Who Could See Through Mountains and...

My new collection, The Boy Who Could See Through Mountains and Other Stories, is FREE on Amazon.com for the next three days. This collection has three new Twilight Zone-esque short stories for the 8-12 year old set:

The Boy Who Could See Through Mountains - A story about a boy who can see his family’s vile and evil enemies through the neighboring mountain range but can’t get close enough to see what makes them vile or evil.
Detective Know-it-All and the Glittered Up Glue Stick - The third-grade detective, who literally knows the answer to every question, agrees to help Sally find out who’s removing her class president posters. At a fee of two candy bars a day he ain’t cheap, but he always solves the case.
Rocket Ruiz Builds a Warp Drive - Rachel “Rocket” Ruiz has won the soapbox derby four years in a row. This year she faces her toughest competition, the well-financed Philip Jones, whose state-of-the-art soapbox racer is considered to be unbeatable. Not wanting to relinquish her title, Rocket Ruiz sets out to build a soapbox racer that’ll make the finish line come to her.

Download it today!

You want an added bonus? The Little Particle That Could (illustrated by Noel Tuazon) is free through Tuesday and The End of Stars is free today!

You want to be extra awesome? The Girl Who Could Live In Yesterday and The Monster Hunter are just 99-cents each!

That means you could get your hands on seven short stories for only $1.98…or just get five for free if that’s your thing!

Sorry…I just can’t get over this.

Sorry…I just can’t get over this. 

Yo! Remember when I posted that whole thing about District Comics being named one of the top-10 graphic novels of the year by the Washington Post?

Yo! Remember when I posted that whole thing about District Comics being named one of the top-10 graphic novels of the year by the Washington Post?:

Well here it, again, sort of, because now it’s on the Washington Post’s top BOOKS of the year list which includes graphic novels, fiction, and non-fiction.

Look, seriously, jump on it, get at you, here comes the boom.

Seriously. 

Reminder: I got a story in this book about the 1867 Washington Nationals with Charles Fetherolf.

Reminder: This book is published by Fulcrum Publishing, the company that is publishing my next THREE graphic novels.

Reminder: I love you.

Reminder: Jump on it.

Dark Horse's ONCE UPON A TIME MACHINE Recommended in LA Times/Hero Complex 2012 Gift Guide

Dark Horse's ONCE UPON A TIME MACHINE Recommended in LA Times/Hero Complex 2012 Gift Guide:

You should follow their recommendation and get it for everyone you know. It’s only $15 on Amazon so we’re in Secret Santa price ranges, you know?

You know what else would make a great Secret Santa book? ESPECIALLY for DC-area residents, history buffs, comic fans, or humans? Fulcrum Publishing’s District Comics: An Unconventional History of Washington DC, named one of the top ten graphic novels of 2012 by the Washington Post. 

Holiday shopping done! You’re welcome!

(Disclaimer: I have a story in both of these books, the former with Scott White, the latter with Charles Fetherolf)

(Disclaimer’s Disclaimer: I love these books regardless of my contribution)

(Disclaimer’s Disclaimer’s Disclaimer: I love you, too)