A.P. Carter and Spiderman (and Pizza)

Emerald City Comic Con has taken over the WA State Convention Center this weekend, and to mark the occasion, Seattle pizza chain Pagliacci has interviewed me about superheroes in their newsletter. (Yes, it's a pizza restaurant with its own newsletter!)  Writer Louis Whitford and I got pretty deep talking about superheroes as part of the culture... and of course we also talked about The Carter Family.  It may be the first time A.P. Carter has ever been compared with Spiderman!

Pagliacci's online newsletter

"Carter Family" short-listed for Slate Studio Prize

Frank and I have been speechless from the news that our book, "The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song", has been short-listed for the Slate Studio Prize alongside graphic novels such as "Building Stories" and "Goliath".  What a great honor! 

UPDATE: Congratulations to Chris Ware on a well-deserved win!

It's Here! It's Here! The Carter Family Graphic Novel! It's a Real Thing!Wowee!

IT'S HERE!!!!!!!

David and I each got one advance copy of our book today from New York! Woo hoo! It's really real, folks!

The printers did a super-duper job on it, and, of course, Abrams' Charles Kochman, Sara Corbett and Neal Egan (among many others) did so much to make this book a reality.

Later this weekend I'll post a video shot by our friend Jim Gill of David and I seeing the book for the first time. We waited 'til we could meet up and see it together. The temptation to rip the envelope open was enormous, but I figured... we've waited five years for this moment; what's a few more hours?

It won't be too much longer 'til this book is out in the world. It's a dreamlike experience to page through this book. It has a nice heft to it; it's printed on high-quality paper; the enclosed CD is really nicely sequenced, and offers a side of the Carter Family's performances that some folks might not know about.

More stuff very soon on this literally amazing (a word I seldom use) event in our lives and careers! 

Don't Forget This Song is on pre-order status at Amazon!

Our book was once listed on amazon.com, but due to the various hurdles David and I had to jump to get this baby done, that listing was soon a pipe-dream.

This time it's for real!


Click HERE to see the real thing!

As David said, "This is yet another marker for me that the book is a REAL thing, and will really be in print soon..." I second that emotion! 


If the book isn't physically being printed, as I write this, it's either on the printer's queue (or, perhaps, already run off) in China. The street date is October 1st, but copies may surface before then, depending on when the book is printed and how long it takes copies to arrive, via the proverbial slow boat from China, to our consumer shores.


It's exciting news for us, and we're glad to share it here with you!

And Now For Something Completely Different: Our Oregon Trail Graphic Novel!

Hi folks... while we were in legal purgatory over the use of song lyrics in DON'T FORGET THIS SONG (a chess-game of attrition that we ultimately lost), David and I were not goofing off. We decided to tackle a smaller (i.e., non-color) graphic novel. We're pleased to finally announce it here. (I would have posted this earlier, had I not been stricken with appendicitis, from which I'm still recovering.)

This is a page from local publisher Sasquatch Press' Fall 2011 catalog for our book, Oregon Trail: The Road of Destiny. The cover they chose is a curious hybrid of a rejected earlier illustration and their overall design for the cover. Here's what the real cover looks like:

I'm amused to be listed as "co-creator of Comics Journal." I was the managing editor of the magazine, 20 years ago, but there had been over 140 issues before I put in my stint. I'm sure this will cause some amusing questions in interviews!

David and I are really happy with this book. We both strove to keep its story vivid, real and humane. We both did a great deal of visual and factual research for the project. When I wrote the script, I concentrated on the down-to-earth, flesh-and-blood reality of what this trip must have been like for those who took it.

David outdid himself on the artwork. He brought all the humanity of the story front and center, and helped broaden the book's emotional range. There are some genuinely funny moments--and some heart-breaking pitfalls--throughout the book. Everything David put into this project was graceful, assured and sympathetic.

We're back at work on Don't Forget This Song, and hope to FINALLY have the book finished this year. The Road to Destiny will end up being our first published graphic novel. We often referred to it as "our little B-movie" while we worked on it. We couldn't dazzle the reader with fancy full color. Our hook had to be in our story and our characters.

This book is at the printers, and should be released around the end of August, 2011. You can see the ISBN number on the catalog page. Check in with amazon.com as this month comes to a close.

Here are four random pages from the book, so that you can have a preview of David's superb work:

We'll post updates as we learn of the book's availability. Now, back to our full-color "A-picture..."