Instead I think I will just post a couple of cool drawings.  The second one might be a taste of things to come!

Enjoy.

Mark

Our third partner, Tech Guy Paul, is on his honeymoon at the moment and we thought it best not to disturb him.  We’ll post his bio when we gets back.

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For those of you who are new to my world, here’s my modest bio (written in the 3rd person like a Football Player!  Hoo-ya!):

Scott Sigler is the author of INFECTED and CONTAGIOUS, major hardcover thrillers from Crown Publishing. He landed his book deal by giving away multiple novels as free, serialized podcasts that generated a large online following and saw over 4 million downloads of the individual episodes.

Scott reinvented book publishing when he released EARTHCORE as the world’s first “podcast-only” novel. Released in twenty weekly episodes, EARTHCORE harkened back to the days of serialized radio fiction and picked up 10,000 subscribers along the way.

His next podcast novel, ANCESTOR, drew 30,000 listeners and saw 700,000 episodes downloaded by fans. The buzz caused Sirius Satellite Radio to pick up the novel, making it the first audiobook serialized on the satellite network. When ANCESTOR was released in print from a small independent publisher, it hit #7 overall on Amazon.com despite no marketing, no advertising and no media coverage. 

Scott’s innovative use of technology puts him at the forefront of modern-day publishing, and has garnered brand-name exposure among hundreds of thousands of fiction fans and technology buffs. He’s been covered in the New York Times, NPR, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, Publisher’s Weekly, The Huffington Post, Business Week and Fangoria.

Michigan native, Scott lives in San Francisco with his wife and dog.

Scott is responsible for many inventions, including podcasting, the Internet, and the internal combustion engine. And trees, those were his. Okay, so he worked with Al Gore on the Internet, but Scott did most of the work. He made his first podcast in 1978. It is a well-known fact that he has podcast every Sunday, without fail, since that time (with the exception of Super Bowl Sundays, which Scott claims as the ultimate holy day).

Scott is 6-foot-10, can juggle four kittens and can hop on one leg for, like, over 10 minutes without falling over. That’s rad. Don’t lie to me, you know it’s rad, you just don’t want to look uncool in front of your friends. Fine, Mister Cool Guy, go ahead and act disinterested.

We know you’ll be back.

Scott

Want a close-up? Click on the image to see it mucho larger.

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The Doctor wrote a comment just a few minutes ago to let me know that this was happening.  Thank you, Doctor, for the head’s up. 

It looks like the service we use — Aweber — is down.  Strange.  Mark has used them for 2 years now on The Weekend Grillers and has NEVER seen them go down.  They are usually as reliable as Google. 
 
I hope it’s nothing serious. 

HERE’S THE DEAL

If you don’t see the Email Signup Box to the left and want to sign up, please check back in a bit.   I’m sure it won’t be long. 

ALSO check the very bottom of the page.  Some XP users have reported finding it there.  Mark’s Mom for one.  Wonder if she signed up?

Also, when you do signup, check your email very carefully.  If your signup was successful, you WILL get an email from us asking you to confirm.  No email = no signup.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Mark & Scott 

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Some of you might have noticed the lack of pages last week on both The Rookie and Black Jack Justice.  Those of you who live in the Mid-Western part of the United States or have been following the weather news know the reason — on Jan 29 - 31 we were hit by the mother of all ice storms.

Here’s my story from Louisville, KY. 

On the night of Jan 29 it started snowing.  It didn’t snow much, only about 6 to 8 inches.  But then, during the night, the air warmed up enough to turn the snow into a fine, misty rain. 

On the morning of Thursday the 29th, it had really just started getting bad and everything looked pretty normal.  A little snow, some rain — happens all the time.  Probably be gone in a day or two.  Especially if it was warm enough to rain. 

But it just kept coming.

The rain continued for the next two days — coating everything in a HEAVY layer of ice.  On flat surfaces this was on top of the snow adding about 2 inches of ice.

We lost power about 7pm on Thursday.  When we went to bed the house was still warm. 

I woke up before daylight on Friday to a cold house and the sound of breaking limbs and exploding transformers.  Literally, the sound woke me up. “CRACK” — “Teeeesssseee” as the millions of pieces of ice on the limbs hit the ice covering the ground or rooftop.  Over and over.  I stood in my front door and watched trees collapsing and power lines falling all around our neighborhood as the sun rose.  Very strange.

The rain finally let up on Friday afternoon — but as you can see by the pictures, the damage was done.  

Now 6 to 8 inches of snow is not that much for some of you (Gregg from Canada and Sami from Finland are probably laughing at us) and, really, it’s not a lot even by Kentucky standards.  But the ice… That was bad.   Our infrastructure and even our trees and bushes are just not used to that kind of abuse. 

Imagine the weight on the electric lines and tree limbs of 3/4 inch of ice on EVERY surface.

Our poor trees just couldn’t take it. Here’s my (once) beautiful Holly Tree and a tree across the road.  The Holly Tree was twice as tall just two days ago.  The whole top broke out.

This picture below — taken after the ice had started melting — shows what happened to many, many of the smaller trees.  They just litterally split apart — each side falling away from the others.

The Governor declared a state of emergency for Kentucky (something President Obama also did a bit later) on Friday and told everyone but emergency people to stay off the roads.  Hey, no problem — I wasn’t going anywhere anyway.

Nor could I have even if I wanted to — this is one entance to our neighborhood.   On MONDAY. 

Our power came back on Friday afternoon and stayed on until Saturday Morning.  Then it went off and stayed off until Monday afternoon.  Monday night it went off a third time and stayed off until Friday Morning — at which point it has stayed on for good.

As I write this, many are still without power in Louisville and the rest of the state.  They said on the news this morning that it will still be a week for all of Louisville to be back online and up to a month for some of the rural counties.

According to the Louisville Courier-Journal Newspaper, all told the storm cause 30 deaths and 769,000 + power outages in Kentucky alone (90,000 are still out as of Sunday.)

One last thing – Even though I know there’s only a very small chance any of them will ever read this, I want to say …

THANK YOU to the men and women of Louisville Gas and Electric for the Kick Ass job they do all the time.   You guys are the best.

Mark
   

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The Art of Addictive Comics Blog is LIVE!

We’ve wanted to do this even before we started the comics, but we weren’t sure if there was really a need for it.  As creators we love to discuss the story and artwork amoungst ourselves, but we didn’t know if the readers would be interested or not.

But the comments on the Blogs have convinced us that at least a few of you would like to delve more deeply into the creation process. 

So we’ve created The Art of Addictive Comics Blog.

Some of you may note that we only have one Art Blog when we have mentioned before that we would be doing individual ones for each book.  We decided that one would be better.  That’s all.

You might also notice, when you visit, that it looks a little sparce.  We’ll be fixing that as we go along. 

Our first post is all about the Black Jack Justice page for this week - Justice Served Cold - Page 8.  But don’t worry– The Rookie and other Sigler stuff will get its fair time.

If you are interested in Artwork, the creation process or you’re just wasting time at work until the whistle blows — Check out The Art of Addictive Comics Blog by CLICKING HERE NOW. 

Mark

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The Rookie is taking a Bye Week (a Football term which means the team isn’t playing) but will return next week.  If you like you can read the reasons on The Rookie Blog

VIDEO! (sorta…)  

In the previous Post below (and on the Black Jack Justice Blog) you can see Addictive Comics’ first foray into video.

It’s just a little Slide Show-type presentation, but we think it has a pretty good “Feel” to it.  What do you think? 

You may note that the comments are turned “off” on the video post.  That wasn’t because we didn’t want to hear from you .  We would love to hear what you think and any ideas you may have to make it better and how we can do more.  Please leave your comments and suggestions on this post or over on the Black Jack Justice Blog.

The problem is that Wordpress is horribly flakey where videos are concerned.  Each time you “Edit” a post (which is how we respond to your comments) you run the risk of the video screwing up.  It happens almost everytime. 

I discuss the “programming” problem over on the Black Jack Justice Blog.  If you are interested and especially if you can help please head over there and leave a comment.

New Videos

Anyway, we have this video for BJJ and a similar one for The Rookie, finished and ready to post on some of the video sharing sites.  The one below is only on YouTube and here right now and The Rookie isn’t posted at all. 

We’ll monitor the results and, if they are getting us some good results (more readers!), we’ll probably do some more of them.  So far it looks promising — there have been 42 views in a little under 12 hours.  Not bad.  We really hope this does well, because we want to do some personal vids.  Scott is especially excited about mouthing off in front of the camera.   

If and when we do more, we’ll post them here or maybe at the bottom of the comic pages, which have no problem with vids. 

So please let us know what you think and any ideas you have for more vids and any other “get the word out” activities.

We do thank you.

Here is the YouTube address –  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm18eRvwu8U

And here is the direct address of the Black Jack Justice Blog posting — http://addictivecomics.com/blackjackjusticeblog/uncategorized/hard-boiled-detective-stories-in-an-intelligent-webcomic

Mark

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And the Black Jack Justice fans will have read and enjoyed several posts and comments by BJJ writer, Gregg Taylor and artist, Sami Kivelä.

But many of you Rookie fans will have noticed an strange absence of the otherwise VERY talkative half of the Addictive Comics team, Scott Sigler, during the opening weeks of the site. 

There’s been a very good – and very bad — reason for this.

On our opening day, December 16th, Scott received some very serious news about a family member and informed me that he could not take part in the opening.  

Unfortunately, everything was scheduled, planned and announced.  So we had to go forward with the opening — even though Scott could not be involved.

Out of respect for his and his family’s privacy, we did not even reveal the problem.

However, I are happy to report that the news now is all good!  Out of respect for him (and a fear of getting something wrong), I’m still not gonna go into it here — but you can read about it on Scott’s own site at http://www.scottsigler.com/ and leave some comments of support for him. 

As soon as this crisis is fully over I am sure that General Siglerisimo (is that how you spell it?  For crying out loud — who talks like this?!)  will be back and as active as ever.

See ya soon,

Mark   

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The Rookie

Black Jack Justice

Check them out and then let us know what you think on The Rookie Blog and the Black Jack Justice Blog.

—————————–

We’ve been coasting a little through the Holiday Season — we know everyone is busy with family, friends and parties. 

But we have many new and exciting things planned for the New Year.

So keep your eyes on Addictive Comics.

The Addictive Gang

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The Addictive Comics Gang.

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