American Gothic Press – Kane Gilmour

This week I’ll knock something off my lifetime bucket list: Professional comic book published with my name on it as writer. Not my first dabbling with comics, of course. There’s the amazing New Pulp series Warbirds of Mars, created by Scott P. ‘Doc’ Vaughn, a webcomic for which I was the writer from 2010. Doc collected the web strips and printed them up in actual print comic book form, and we sold them online and at Comic Cons, like the big one in Phoenix (not as big as San Diego, but getting there). I’ve also been working on a script for Doc for a printed graphic novel of the Warbirds, for which he ran a successful Kickstarter campaign.

But this week, Island 731 will be released in comic book stores, having been solicited and shipped through the Previews catalogue from Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc., the sole remaining distributor of comic books to stores across the land. I’ll get paid. I should get some comp copies. And I’ll be able to walk into my local comic book store, Wonder Comics and Cards, in Barre, VT, and see my comic book with my name on the cover, sitting on a shelf.

Been a long while since I made any updates here. Believe me, it wasn’t for lack of trying. In addition to the day job, the freelance work, and the writing in 2016, I’ve been going through a bitter and contested divorce and custody battle. Not the sort of divorce where I need anyone’s sympathy, but the kind where congratulations are in order. It’s been a long time coming. Needless to say, it’s been complicated and has eaten up a ton of my time. I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, though.

I’m now firmly entrenched in the brand new Central Vermont Chateau Gilmour, free of the offending former spouse. It’s an eighty-six year old Victorian duplex (I’ve got one side of the building), and the location is surprisingly quiet for being right in a city of close to sixty thousand people. But I’m at the end of a dead-end street, with a steep tree-covered hill at the dead end, and a babbling brook behind my back yard. Walking distance from the public library, but far enough from Main Street that I don’t hear any of the noise from the occasional New England summer festival or the thumping bassline from some wannabe gangbanger with the lowrider pickup truck with undercarriage neon lights and no muffler.