The Windy City Comicon

Some of the KC area crew (myself, Kevin Mellon, Dennis Hopeless, Alex Grecian, maybe Ande Parks, maybe Seth Peck, maybe Jeremy Haun?) will be driving across Missouri and Illinois this September to attend the 2009 Windy City Comicon: http://windycitycomicon.com/ .

And the guest list is full of good friends and collaborators: J. Torres (with whom I first “broke in” to comics), Brian Hurtt (with whom I did one of my first ever signings), Mike Norton (whom I’ve known for about a decade now), Chris Samnee (Bluejacket collaborator), Tony Moore (whose kitchen was a favorite hangout in his KC days), Shane White (who handled a HAWAIIAN DICK backup and with whom I’m developing a dark new superhero one-shot), Steve Bryant (who’s working on a DICK backup as I type), Robbi Rodriguez (whom I discovered swaddled in rags in a cardboard KFC bucket on the Tex-Mex border when he was just a baby), Tim Seeley, Cullen Bunn, Chris Burnham, Chris Mitten, Andy Kuhn, Matt Kindt,  Hilary Barta, the legendary Pat Loika…the list goes on.

J. Torres

Tony Moore

Cullen Bunn

Brian Hurtt

Thanks to Chris Neseman and the Around Comics crew for working hard to get us to the show. As of now, it looks like we’ll be making a stop in St. Louis on the way, and then arrive in Chicago for a Friday signing. But more on that later…

Tim Seeley

Mike Norton

Easter Eggs: Battle Hymn meets the Expatriate

I thought I’d reveal something that I’m not sure anyone who happened to read both BATTLE HYMN and THE EXPATRIATE caught the first time around. I’m also not sure how many read both books, but let’s pretend it was many, many people.

For kicks, EXPAT artist Jason Latour and I decided to toss in a couple of nods to the roughly concurrently produced WW II book, which was drawn by Jeremy Haun. One of the lead characters in the first EXPATRIATE arc was a weathered (and ill-fated) CIA agent named Conrad. Conrad had clearly been around for a good twenty plus years, and since Expat was set in 1964, it only made sense that he would have been a young agent in 1943 (which is when BATTLE HYMN was set). Here’s Conrad in issue two of THE EXPATRIATE (click on any of the small pages for a closer look):

That’s Conrad complaining about the heat. Twenty-one years earlier, the also ill-fated Dr. Cloud (creator of the Artificial Man) received a knock upon his door in BATTLE HYMN #4:

Of course, he probably shouldn’t have answered:

Another secondary character who tries to hold things together in BATTLE HYMN is our unnamed Colonel. Here we first meet him, as he’s introduced to the existence of Quin Rey:

Later, the good Colonel shares a bottle with our heroes in the wake of a funeral (BATTLE HYMN #4):

Twenty-one years later, in THE EXPATRIATE #4, we meet an unnamed General who might look a bit familiar, and seems to enjoy a snort of whiskey:

A closer look at a framed photo on his wall might confirm our suspicions:

It should look familiar to anyone who’s spent a few minutes flipping through BATTLE HYMN #2:

So, there you go. Some sly little Easter eggs that tie our two separate books into the same fucked up universe.