Fall Begins"

Today is the first day of Autumn, but one could hardly tell it, due to our high temperatures still here in South Central, KY. (In fact, our leaves started falling over a month ago due to the Summer-long drought.) Today it's in the 90's, and it didn't take me long until I was nearly over-heated attempting to further repair my walkway leading out from the house to the sidewalk.

So after a rather uneventful trip to the local flea market, I returned home and pried up the four stepping stones I had inserted into the concrete yesterday, poured a layer of gravel a good inch thick in those holes and leveled that off, and replaced the stones. Then I got four 2"x4"'s I had in the shop and made a frame work for the further bags of mix I was to add trying to level the whole 12 foot+ project.

I worked on this a good three hours, making my time investment thus far at ten hours total. I'll let this dry a couple of days (which is one of the good things at least about our hot temperatures) before I dig the trench on either side of this walkway to add the bricks for trim. Adding the brick work doesn't sound like it'd be a big "thing", but I can assure you that it'll end up taking probably another four hours to accomplish.


In other things, I finally got the time to finish going through that lot of approximately 120 misc. Disney-type books I recently purchased as a lot. They are various late 1990's on up to around 2006 titles such as Uncle Scrooge, Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Donald Duck ("and Friends") and Mickey Mouse ("and friends"). After examining all of them I discovered that I did better than previously thought (even though I just gave $35. for this lot), because 20 of these contained work by Don Rosa, twice that many (42) had Carl Barks reprints, plus a LOT of issues had the work of William Van Horn, some with Vicar, and even one with Floyd Gottfredson.

Amazing how good Van Horn's work is; extremely close to Barks'. But I always did think that guy had talent. I had a little correspondence with Van Horn back in the mid 1980's when I was publishing an annual folio of various small press artists. Van Horn had an independent title at that time called Nervous Rex (See Above Cover), which revolved around the adventures of a little T-Rex and his nagging wife that was being published by the (now defunct) Blackthorne Publishing Company. Van Horn sent me a small signature sketch of his character and I ended up publishing it in one of those yearly issues of Upperground.
Speaking of comix, IF this one publisher that's been in touch with me doesn't print the anthology he's promised, I think that I might just give self-publishing a try again soon myself. I have several complete and previously unpublished strips that I'd like to get out there (in particular, the "Such Characters" comic). It all depends on whether he actually does publish this work under his own banner and he said he would by the end of this year.