From Hell's Heart I Stab At Thee, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr!
Sorry to have been away from you good people for so long, but I was Immured in writing my first-ever full-size professional comics script, and I dursn't take any time away from the panels and quips and so forth to chat about anything.

Said script is for The Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated, which will be coming out in August 2008 or so the word goes, and I'm still kind of giddy about it. I'm especially giddy because the artist on the book is the incredible Leah Hayes, so I suspect I could have really slacked off and the book would still be awesome. But I didn't slack off, as that would send a bad message to the kids out there who don't happen to be appallingly gifted cartoonists.

The book will be something like Larry Gonick's bravura Cartoon History of the United States, only with more panels and slightly less opinionated, as befits the august "Complete Idiot's Guide" series. Some opinion will still be detectable by fine instrumentation, as the brief was for something irreverent and fun, or words to that effect, and if you're making jokes about history you've perforce left the pure light of Rankean "wie es eigentlich gewesen."

But for these hallowed pixels, I will unburden myself of the opinion that one could construct a surprisingly accurate and compelling American history book by simply writing the inverse of whatever Arthur M. Schlesinger, fils et pere, have to say about any given topic. But especially fils, as he is a contemptible, scuttling toady of a Grima Wormtongue who should have been horsewhipped out of the AHA when first he vomited forth his panegyric to Camelot. Though that said, it would be pretty awesome to discover in his attic somewhere a copy of Schlesinger's Anekdota, in which he reveals that JFK was the son of a demon and killed one billion Libyans in a secret war.

And with that said, Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!