Life in Comics

An Excerpt from Farris’ Diary

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 21:55:10 -0700

The following except was taken from a journal found by State Troopers in a Nebraska Hotel room two weeks ago in connection with an investigation into a string of animalistic murders...

Saturday, April 9th, 2011

Slept like shit again last night.

The dream was something about the end of the world. A virus had taken over, fatal for most. And those that were left turned fatalistic. I had to get away. Be safe, with my people.

I’d taken up at a lake house far from anarchic chaos, filled the place wine and canned goods and all the lovers I’d ever had. The best times were there. Because the house was denial, I think. We hunted by day and drank by night. We lived well in our secluded commune.

But that world shuddered when morning came. A bleached piercing sun invading my bed through the drapes, creeping over my skin like a doctor with cancerous fingers. The ground quaked with the feet of the walking dead. They smelled the life in us and clamored to tear down the walls of our sanctuary.

A mass of them pushed up against my cabin, crushing infected bodies against the exterior, popping like grapes mishandled at harvest. On the inside, the drywall seeped blood as my harem of broken hearts huddled together. Wooden studs cracked. As our fear reached it’s highest pitch, an unexpected calmness eased my rigid skin. As the infected snapped the hinges on the reinforced door of my coward’s refuge, I knew I was going to die.

I felt a wave of relief... just as I woke up. Damn.

Sandpaper sheets in a joyless cornfield motel snap me back to a grinding reality. The pavement outside radiating nuclear heat already at eight in the morning, it’s going to be a scorcher. Here I am, like a suicide victim waking up in a hospital bed.

It’s like the morning after the dream where you win the lotto. For just a second after the alarm goes off, you still think about how you’re gonna spend the money. And then you realize that there is none.

...My mind boots up my to do list. And I can’t stop wondering if I’m going to end up killing anybody today.

Best Perk of Being a Comic Writer: Shooting Guns is a Tax Write-off, Bitches

Tue, 8 Jun 2010 11:52:06 -0700

In researching a super-secret new comic I’m developing, I decided that it was about time I learned how to shoot a gun for real, none of this pansy-ass paintball stuff - we’re talking about actual implements of death. Time for a field trip - YAY! Clearly this is the greatest thing about being a comic book writer - I’m doing research here...

Driving to the range, my friends and I excitedly nattered about who had shot guns before, and even who’d been shot at - a subject, I was surprised to find, was rich with stories among my much-more-sketchy-than-I’d-previously-realized companions. - An aside, my buddy Dave, who was not with us that day, was shot in the face when he was twelve. That’s right ladies, he took a cap to the noggin, chewed it up, spit it back, and now lives a quite normal life in Santa Monica. You’d never know it to look at him that his jaw once stopped a speeding bullet. Just as an FYI, Dave, for all his mild-mannered chill nature, is clearly the toughest motherfucker I know. Come on, he caught a bullet with his face! I caught someone’s fist with my face once, and that wasn’t too cute. This guy ground hot lead to a halt with his teeth. Bad ass. But I digress.

So I headed down to LAX firing range, my local emporium of firearms and the bullet-heads who love them. Gotta start by saying: for anyone, like myself, who has never held, loaded, or shot a gun before, the ease with which one can sign away any rights if the gun unexpectedly blows their skull to pieces, and be standing on the floor of a target range with no earthly clue what they’re doing - well - it’s simply stunning. God bless America. The weathered employees at the range are happy to give you a 30 second tour of the gun you’re renting, but you need any more than that and you get the feeling you can screw off as far as they’re concerned. I’m not ashamed to say, it was kinda terrifying to be holding a Beretta in my sweating right hand and a clip in my left and thinking to myself “Hhmrmph, this could go very badly.”

mzjane.com and friend Mario try to figure out how the hell to load a Beretta.So yeah, the firing range isn’t the place to learn how a gun works, but you can have a lot of fun shooting them there, once you get past the initial heaviness of the idea that everyone around you is training to kill people. And, come on, no one hunts deer with a handgun, these pistols are man-killers we’re steadying at targets shaped like Norman Rockwell era drawings of racially ambiguous characters - a not so subtle message from the powers that be: you are preparing yourself to shoot a human being when you take aim at these.

Walking into the range, I felt like the air had been sucked out of the room. The place is thick with the scent of gun powder and the percussive popping of ordinance rattles your ear protection and chest. There’s a tense atmosphere, guns are not happy things. I once had a friend say to me that buying a gun is “bringing the devil into your home.” Well, a shooting range is the devil’s playground.

My friends and I rented an 9mm Beretta (pictured), known as one of the more common and reliable handguns in the world. Everyone talks about how a gun kicks, well it does, but that’s not really the most surprising aspect to a newbie gun toter. What shocked me about shooting was a) how easy it was, and b) that the hot shell casings that fly out of the gun and hit you in the face, chest, and arms. What the hell? I mean, the last thing I want if I’m chasing down an evildoer and attempting to gun them doThe 9mm Beretta. Safety off. Red for dead, people.wn in the street is a hot casing bouncing off my face and distracting me just long enough to get eviscerated by said villain. This is a clear design flaw.

Anyway, after a stunningly quick adjustment period (once There’s no crying in baseball and no smiling at the firing range.I’d squeezed off just a couple of rounds) two surprising developments occurred: 1) I genuinely started to enjoy the experience of firing the gun and 2) I absolutely wanted the fictitious man on my paper target to die. Maybe it says more about my psychological state than the general act of shooting in a range, however I found myself almost literally feeling as though I were channeling all of my tension and stress, up through my feet, past my torso, down my arms, out of the barrel of that Beretta and through the target. I don’t know what you did to wrong me, paper man, but the bullet holes through your forehead and nose at the end of the day let me know that I will never need to worry about you bothering me again. It feels good to solve a problem, even if that problem is a paper target hanging from a hook in a firing range.

After ripping through a hundred rounds of ammo, we called it quits. Smelling like gunsmoke and caked with the humidity of the range, we naturally decided that refreshments were in order. Nothing like a hefeweizen with lemon to wash away the dark aftermath of shooting and free the mind to contemplate a new experience in a weekend’s leisure hours. Be sure to enjoy your libations after shooting and not before! Notice the small burns from shell casings on the clavicle of poor www.mzjane.com

So, in true American fashion, we came out of the LAX Firing Range having shot some shit to hell without learning a damned thing about how a gun works.

Here is a bit of info on how firearms function, their physics, and history that I’ve cobbled together from across the internet:

- The earliest known surviving gun is Chinese, made of bronze, and dates from the 13th century.

- By the 14th century, firearms had spread throughout much of the Europe, the Mideast, and Asia.

- The first reliable and cheap guns used in large quantity were flintlocks, famously utilized by the British and American soldiers in the American Revolutionary War. Flintlock’s were hugely popu“I’m a Flintlock. Don’t you love me?”lar for about 300 years from the early 1600’s through the 1800’s when they were replaced by percussion cap locks.

- The invention of percussion caps allowed for guns to be fired in all kinds of weather. After their invention, many flintlocks were converted to the percussion system. Percussion caps are essentially what we now know as modern bullets (though the chemistry of the primer used to ignite the gun powder inside has changed many times over the last 150 years).

- When a bullet leaves a modern handgun it travels at a speed of 600-4000 feet per second, also known as stupid fast - it’s an industry term.

Ya need a pretty quick camera to be faster than a speeding bullet.- In 2007 Reuters reported that that 270 million of the world’s 875 million known firearms were owned by private US citizens, making America the most armed country in the world. In The United States, we have 90 guns for every 100 Americans with India ranking an extremely distant second with 4 guns for every 100 people (that’s one hell of a drop off). The same report stated that more than half of the firearms manufactured each year were purchased in the US and that only 12% of civilian-owned guns worldwide are believed to be registered with authorities. So sleep well tonight, kids.

Berserker Character Bio - Karl Locke

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:18:04 -0700

Karl Locke comes from one of the wealthiest families in America. Lockes dad made his fortune in aluminum mining, a self made man who spoiled his children with the best of everything - its fair to say that no one in Karls family ever had to worry about, well, anything. Locke grew up with the best of best - private plans and five star hotels - hating his spoiled friends and feeling doomed to a drab, if not extremely comfortable, life in the family business. He could have easily leaned on his massive trust fund forever, instead he opted out as soon as he was old enough to enlist in the army.

Karl quickly rose in the ranks to become a commissioned Lieutenant. Then, he joined Delta Force - despite the many protests of his father all along the way. After five years as a sniper in Special Forces, with deployments in the Mid-East, Eastern Europe, and the Mediterranean, Karl had his first blackout... It was a simple extraction. Karl had orders to provide cover for a black ops team on a rescue mission: a low-level diplomat who had been kidnapped in South America. Everything had gone as planned as the unit arrived at their rally point. Karl crouched in nearby window watching the scene as Blackhawks hovered low for extraction. Out of nowhere, an RPG ripped through the air towards the chopper. Karl took aim at the back end of the smoke trail, looking to take down the shooter. Thats when he heard a snap and felt a cold shock down his left side.

A week later, he woke up in the sick bay of an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Mexico. His father sat by his bedside (lord knows what favors he had to pull to make it happen). That was the moment that Karl learned about his familys dark secret. His dad called it The Devils Temper. Karls father had always been fearful of the family abilities, suppressing them with a massive cocktail of anti-anxiety medication and the occasional psychedelic.
Karl couldnt believe that someone who had such power would ever run from it. He knew he had to exploit this thing inside him and use it to his fighting advantage. That day was the last that he ever spoke to his dad.

Karl left Delta Force and dedicated his life to the study of Berserker fighting arts. He found Midgard, a small compound of Berserkers, working to understand their powers on a plot of land in the heart of the Naskugeisa Indian Reservation. Though their philosophy of balance and control was way too soft for him, Locke learned everything he could from their Berserker masters.

When his inheritance vested with the passing of his father, making him a billionaire, he sold the family business and bought a sprawling piece of property in Utah. He built a massive training facility on the land and opened an elite private military contracting company, which he called Asgaard. Asgaards rise was meteoric. Locke cherry-picked disenfranchised members of Midgard for his private Berserker army, then brilliantly utilized his connections in the military and private sectors for lucrative contracts. His high-level security clearance made his crack squad of mercenaries the obvious choice when the US needed distance between their policies and their black-ops missions.

But Karl has a greater purpose for his company. He's going to write the last chapter in humanity's depraved cautionary tale. As far as he's concerned, the government contracts are simply training missions for the ultimate battle. The final bloody fight - that will set the whole world back in order. Separate weak and strong. And kill every last hollow-boned, mindless, pathetic loser on earth.

Top Cow to give away free copies of Berserker #0 at San Diego Comic-con

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:31:02 -0700

Bad economy keeping you from buying all the comics you want this year? You should let Top Cow win you over - they’ll be giving away both Berserker #0 (a full-on blood-soaked eight page tale complete with tissue-snapping action) and the Cyberforce/Hunter Killer First Look at San Diego Comic-con.

That’s right, free comics for your reading pleasure. And if you show up at the Top Cow booth (#2629) between 4 and 5PM on Friday, I’ll even sign it for you. This whole deal is a “while supplies last” sort of situation, by the way. So, the sooner you get to the Top Cow booth to claim your copy, the better.

You heard it here first, unless you heard it somewhere else already...

CBR Reviews New Book - The Art of Top Cow

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:24:46 -0700

CBR just posted a review of The Art of Top Cow, a beautiful new coffee table book for fans of Mark Silvestri, Michael Turner, Dave Finch, Joe Benitez, Eric Basaldua, Stjepan Sejic and Berserker’s Dale Keown - among others.

It’s a fantastic collection of some of the best artwork Top Cow has ever put out - a must have for any fan. For those who aren’t as familiar, it provides an interesting overview of the brilliant imagery this company is all about.