Over at their blog the Cool Kids Table, my friends Ben Morse, Rickey Purdin and Kiel Phegley are doing a series called Our Comics Decade, where they’re going year by year through the decade and spotlighting a comic from each year that meant something to them, especially as it related to their life and their journey in comics (which resulted in each of them eventually working at Wizard, and now at Marvel, DC and Comic Book Resources, respectively). It’s a great series and well worth checking out.
I’d love to do something similar, but my memory is so crappy I’m not sure I could pinpoint a comic I read each particular year. Suffice it to say that I read a lot of great comics and a lot of not-so-great comics (to put charitably), and I still love reading comics as much as I did in the beginning of the decade, back before I knew how the sausage was made.
But if I could get a little introspective (hey, it’s New Year’s Eve), my personal journey, both in comics and, you know, life, is simply astounding to me when I think back on this decade. In 2000 I was a college sophomore with a lot of ambitions but barely any actual work done towards fulfilling those ambitions, and I simply wasn’t the person who I wanted to be. Now, at the end of the decade I’m married to a wonderful, wonderful woman (shout-out to the most important person in my life – Brooke Price Aclin). I’ve got two incredible daughters (which still surprises me sometimes when I phrase it like that). I’ve been working at what’s basically my dream job for over seven years, writing one of Year-2000-Justin’s favorite comedy comic strips (that would be Twisted ToyFare Theatre, as seen at the top of the page). I wrote and got published an actual comic book (fulfilling my biggest lifelong dream). This has been, without question, the most amazing, most life-changing decade of my life (out of all three of them).
That said, I’m looking forward to my next decade in comics (and, you know, life) even more. For one thing, I can take the lessons I spent a long decade learning and start applying them to my life from the get-go, so I can be the best husband and father I can possibly be. Over in comics, we’ve got Hero House finally coming out sometime in the early part of 2010 in comic shops (yes, I know I said November. It didn’t happen. Not sure why, and I’m not dwelling on it. The point is, it’s coming.)
And now it’s onto bigger and better. I’m not quite ready to talk about my first post-Hero House comic book project yet, but rest assured – there is a post-Hero House comic book project. If all goes according to plan, it’ll be the most exciting thing that’s happened in my comics career yet…and with any luck, it’ll hopefully be just the beginning.
Of course I’ll be talking about it here on AclinCorp, but as we transition out of the Hero House year, I want this blog to be more than just me talking about my comics. So one of my New Years resolutions is to blog more, and to blog about more stuff – pop culture, life, whatever it is that makes me feel like picking up the laptop and writing.
So even if you’ve grown weary of hearing me talk about Hero House (and lord knows, I’m almost at that point myself), subscribe to AclinCorp. Like everything else in my life, I’m hoping it’s going to be waaaaaay better in 2010 than in 2009. Happy New Years, folks.