Here are the first four screen shots from the Afterward to the new ebook edition of ISLAND OF THE MOTHS (art by the pen-wielding bon vivant Neal Skorpen). These are excerpts from our email correspondence in 2006. As you can see, I suggested we stop a current project (which I was writing as he drew, a bit like trapeze artists). And not just stop that project and go home crying, as usual, but start a new one. This one would take a different artistic approach on the same grimace-faced Urge and grumpy, brooding Irritation (“that the girls love”) that motivated me (I think Neal too in his individual, cryptic, thousand-mile-stare way). And I would complete writing the text before asking him to draw… But first, he had to agree with the proposal! Would he? Tremble, tremble….
Ha! I read that I had the flu when writing that email…. so it all started with a fever dream. At this moment, October 2015, I’m getting over the flu again, so there is something going on here.
The Plume references are the project we halted to begin… ISLAND OF THE MOTHS (which I request you say in a certain ominous and intriguing tone of voice). What I called in the 2006 email “the Zonny project” is happily now finally available for you as a quite inexpensive ebook, DANGEROUS BICYCLE MYSTERY QUEST, available in popular eBook formats around the world, and will be available as a paperback in a few months.
How did that curious twinkle-eyed fellow and martial arts board-chopper Mr. Skorpen reply, back in that primitive year, 2006? Between “hiiiii-YAAA” cracks of his steely metacarpus against birch and pine blocks, which I assume supplemented his living, did he agree or decline? Well I can’t tell you, for it’s in the book; but okay, yes I can at least tell you that Neal replied with style ideas and specific graphic novel examples. You can read his actual historically-inscribed words through the dust of time, and see ACTUAL ARTISTIC EXAMPLES (don’t call them scribbles please) of his initial probing, experimental drawings, along with the rest of our first correspondence, in the ISLAND OF THE MOTHS ebook Afterward.
This is how the cover looks on the iPad. Curmudgeonly face optional!
The stunning and surprising ISLAND OF THE MOTHS ebook is available here in radiant pixels on Kindle …. as well as Nook.
It’s also available on your local non-USA amazon.com websites, as well as other ebook distributors such as Kobo, Scribd, Tolino, and Page Foundry. At this time the price is quite cheap!
The large paper version is available here (glorious large paper-from-willing-trees format with rich black–and whites at no extra cost, but without the new Afterward).
This is an example of Neal Skorpen’s exploratory artwork before starting ISLAND OF THE MOTHS. I love the fat cumbersome suite, the enormous helmet with lantern… must weight about eighty pounds. I don’t see a breathing tube but….
Neal Skorpen’s colorful website of comics ferment is NealSkorpen.com . Check out his new project, AETHERNAUT.
Danger Quest Mysteries 
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