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March 3, 2006

Section One Letters 3ColumnsHot Type 4Of ports and pundits

The Straight Dope 5The plane on the conveyor belt again

The Works 8The CTA’s latest landmark squabble

Chicago Antisocial 10A “ lesbian/gay/bi/queer/trans/intersexed/hetero”dance party

Our Town 12What the original Jason from Friday the 13th is upto this weekend; New Orleanians try to makeMardi Gras on Navy Pier; why it’s dangerous tocross the street in Chicago

ReviewsMusic 20New videos from Pink and the Gossip

Theater 24Fellow Travellers at Stage Left

Books 25Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love

PlusFree Shit 16How far can a girl get without opening her purse?

Ink Well 27This week’s crossword: Tee Time

Blaylock (left) and Hack/Slash creator Tim Seeley

Josh Blaylock, the founder of Devil’s Due comics, has known since day one that he’d need a herowho could make the leap to the big screen. Or heroine, as the case may be.

W hen Tim Seeley showed up for worklate last week at Devil’s Due Publishingin Ravenswood, he planned to spend

the day drawing elves. Instead he wound updealing with a mailbox full of congratulatory e-mails and interview requests. Variety had justreported that Rogue Pictures, the genre divisionof Focus Features, had purchased the rights to Hack/Slash, the satirical horror comic hethought up two years ago while soaking in his tub.

Seeley and his boss,Josh Blaylock, knewan announcementwas coming, but were surprised it came so soon. “Allof sudden everybody cared because it was gonna bea movie,” says Seeley. “They’re like, oh, you’re just alowly comic-book artist. Now you have a movie.”

Devil’s Due is one of the top ten indie presses inthe country, which means it controls about 1 per-cent of the market. At the time of the announce-ment, Hack/Slash wasn’t even one of their morepopular titles. The company has made its namepublishing series like G.I. Joe and ForgottenRealms, based on the best-selling Dungeons &

Dragons novels of R.A. Salvatore. But it licensesthose titles from Hasbro; Hack/Slash is a whollyowned property. If the movie gets made and booststhe popularity of the series, Blaylock hopes it willpropel Devil’s Due into the top three, alongsideindie giants Image and Dark Horse.

Blaylock and Seeley met at the 1996 ChicagoComicon, where both were flogging self-publishedcomics without much success. They stayed in touchover the years, occasionally collaborating, and in

2002 Blaylock hiredSeeley to be the house“art monkey” at Devil’s

Due, which he founded in 1999. Today ten employ-ees inhabit the company’s slick 4,000-square-footo∞ce, on the second floor of a glassy building thatcould stand in for the Hall of Justice. The tops oftheir cubicles are guarded by brightly colored actionfigures: heroes, monsters, robots, and their chosenmodes of transportation. The walls are hung withframed original art from the dozens of Devil’s Duetitles—impossibly rippled men, busty women, andother grimacing creatures glaring out from the flatinked pages. Visitors entering the continued on page 17

A Badass to Bank On

By Mike Sula | Photographs by Jim Newberry

16 CHICAGO READER | MARCH 3, 2006 | SECTION ONE

Our Town

Actions

Seniors Get ’Er DoneThey’re a bit slow crossingthe street, but boy are theyefficient when it comes tocollaring public officials.By Tori Marlan

On July 26, 2001, 79-year-oldSid Bild was crossing State atVan Buren with his friend

Marjorie Feren when he noticed thatthe pedestrian signal had startedflashing. He remembers warningFeren, who was a few steps behindhim, that the light was about tochange. Then he felt a nudge and anintense pain in his right arm. Hedropped to his knees before he couldreach the curb. “My arm looked pret-ty mangled,” he says. “It was drippingblood and grossly torn.” When herealized he’d been clipped by a vehiclehe turned to look for Feren. She waslying motionless on the street about30 feet south. The driver eventuallyagreed to settle out of court with bothBild and Feren, but Feren sufferedpermanent neurological damage. Sheno longer knows Bild’s name.

Six months after that accident 73-year-old Charles Spears was crossingRandolph at Clark with the lightwhen he was struck by an SUV. Helanded hard on his face, battering hisnose, breaking his glasses, tearing upthe inside of his mouth, and injuringhis right knee, ankle, and hip. Thedriver was never caught.

Bild, Feren, and Spears all hap-pened to belong to Metro Seniors inAction, an advocacy group with 100members ranging in age from their50s to their 90s, and after the threewere run down the group madepedestrian safety one of its topissues. “We tapped into a nationalproblem,” says executive directorAmanda Solon. According to theNational Highway TransportationSafety Administration, a pedestriangets hurt in a traffic accident everyeight minutes. Old folks are the mostat risk. According to the insuranceindustry, in 2004, the last year forwhich there are statistics, the deathrate for pedestrians 70 and up wastwice that for younger pedestrians.Metro Seniors tried to find out how

many accidents in Chicago involvepedestrians, but the police statisticswere outdated, and they couldn’t findanyone else who kept such numbers.

The group decided to start attackingthe problem by figuring out what thecity could do to its infrastructure toimprove pedestrian safety. They iden-tified five intersections where they feltparticularly vulnerable. Two were onthe north side (Sheridan and Foster,and Foster and Marine), three on thesouth side (47th and Lake Park; 79th,Stony Island, and South Chicago; and87th and Stony Island). At most ofthese intersections the painted cross-walks had faded, and when the sun hitthe stoplights it was hard for motoriststo see which light was illuminated.Pedestrians could get across the streetbefore the light changed only if theywalked at four feet per second. Thatmeets the standard in the federalManual on Traffic Control Devices,but in 1997 two Canadian researchersstudied the walking speed of olderpeople and concluded that it averagedjust 3.2 feet per second. The AmericanAssociation of State Highway andTransportation Officials assumes aneven slower rate of 2.8 feet per second.

Metro Seniors gathered info onhow to improve safety, but they had ahard time figuring out which cityofficial to ask to make changes.That’s not surprising, since three citydepartments—Transportation,Streets and Sanitation, and theOffice of Emergency Managementand Communications—control dif-ferent components of intersections:the lights, street signs, pavementmarkings, signal timing, pedestriansignals. And each department hassubdivisions—the Traffic

Management Authority, the Bureauof Electricity—that control pieces ofthose components.

When Metro Seniors finally foundthe right people to talk to, they had ahard time persuading them to con-sider changes. “The city of Chicago isvery traffic focused,” says Rhea Byer-Ettinger, the group’s lead organizer.“They said, ‘No, we can’t do that—wehave to move traffic.’ But once theysaw we were building communityparticipation with seniors and alder-men, they started backing down.”

In November members of thegroup walked through the five inter-sections with around 15 city officials.Brian Steele, transportation depart-ment spokesman, says the intersec-tion of 79th, Stony Island, and SouthChicago—a six-legged monster witheasy-to-miss traffic signals under theSkyway and lights within 30 feet ofeach other that give drivers mixedmessages—was already on the city’sradar. In 2003 more traffic accidentsoccurred there than at any otherintersection with traffic signals inChicago, and the city had just com-pleted a $2.5 million reconstructionproject to make it easier and safer totravel through. But Metro Seniorsmember Dan McGary says the day heand officials were there they watchedtwo drivers run a red light theyapparently still couldn’t see.

A couple months before the walk-through at Sheridan and Foster aCTA bus struck and killed an elderlywoman in the intersection. A fewyears earlier a bus had crushed theskull of a ten-year-old girl as shecrossed holding her mother’s hand.“The Sheridan and Foster intersec-tion was the perfect example of how

departments don’t work together atall, and they just go in and randomlymake changes with no coordination,”says Metro Seniors’ Amanda Solon.“You saw some new technologies,some old technologies, and no paint-ing on the street. Some of the signssaid NO TURN ON RED BETWEEN 7AND 7. Some of them were just NOTURN ON RED.”

“The issues they were talking aboutwere legitimate,” says Steele. Thefirst changes to be made based onthe group’s recommendations wereat Sheridan and Foster. The trans-portation department synchronizedthe street signs, and when the weath-er gets warmer it will repaint thepavement markings. OEMC changedthe timing of the lights to give pedes-trians longer to get across the streetand installed a “leading pedestrianinterval,” which keeps traffic stoppedin four directions for several secondsafter the walk signal is illuminated togive pedestrians a head start in beat-ing turning cars. Streets andSanitation replaced incandescentbulbs with LEDs—which arebrighter and easier to see in directsunlight (and 90 percent more ener-gy efficient)—and installed LEDpedestrian signals. Similar changeswere made at Foster and Marine,and the city has agreed to improvethe south-side intersections as well.

Metro Seniors hopes the city willstart assessing all of the city’s inter-sections. “It should not be theresponsibility of not-for-profitgroups to rally the community to getthe changes that our elected officialsand city-appointed employees aresupposed to be taking care of,” saysMcGary. “It is their responsibility.”

Steele says the city is always look-ing for improvements it could make.“We have public-way inspectorsassigned to all 50 wards,” he says.But he points out that they haveroughly 3,800 miles of street and36,000 intersections—2,800 of themwith traffic lights—to check. “We cer-tainly do depend on the public tobring our attention to issues wemight not be aware of.”

Metro Seniors thinks the city stillisn’t taking the issue seriouslyenough, and its members intend toask Mayor Daley to hire a trafficengineer for a year to work just onintersection safety—someone whowouldn’t have to go through threedepartments to design a plan. “Thisshould be at the head of someone’slist,” says Bild, “just as gang crimesand muggings are.” v

[snip] “George Bush and Rod Blagojevich have acouple of shared habits we need to shed,” formeralderman turned gubernatorial candidate EdwinEisendrath told the City Club of Chicago recently.“First, they name their laws. No Child Left Behind. AllKids. . . . Second, they pass costs down to local govern-

ments, unfunded mandates or just changes in the wayproject costs are shared. Recently the governor deed-ed back to Vermilion County 92 miles of roads with nofunds to maintain them. . . . Of course the biggestexample of pushing costs down to local taxpayers isthe state’s historic failure to pay for education.” —HH

Rhea Byer-Ettinger, Sid Bild, Amanda Solon, and Dan McGary from Metro Seniors in Action

JOEF

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CHICAGO READER | MARCH 3, 2006 | SECTION ONE 17

Devil’s Due

reception area are greeted by ateetering spinner rack stuffedwith comics and a life-size bust ofSnake Eyes, the mute, black-masked ninja who’s one of G.I.Joe’s most popular characters.

Despite the adolescent atmo-sphere there’s not much chattercoming from the cubicles. “Somany comics studios are morelike a dorm-room hangout,” saysBlaylock, a 28-year-old with agreen-streaked quiff cut. “It’susually too much of the artist’sinfluence, not enough of thebusiness influence, or vice versa.You’ll be talking to other studiosand they’ve got Xboxes andPlayStations. That’s cool, butthere will never, ever be a video-game console in here. If there isit’ll be locked down at certainhours, because it’s a place tofucking work.”

Growing up in Florida andOhio, Blaylock already had

both an artistic sensibility and anentrepreneurial streak. He drewcomics about gun-packing pen-guins and biked to school with afanny pack full of Airheads andNow & Laters, selling them tohis classmates at a ten-centmarkup. As a tyke he told every-body he wanted to draw the car-toons he watched on TV, and at11 he read a Walt Disney biogra-phy, which got him interested inthe business behind the anima-tion. “I’ve always been a suckerfor a rags-to-riches story,” hesays, which has developed into ataste for business magazines andbios about Trump andSchwarzenegger.

Until the early 90s Marvel andDC dominated all but the tiniestcorners of the comic-book indus-try. Once he decided he wantedto create comics and not car-toons, Blaylock took inspirationfrom indie publishers like Image,a group of seven Marvel artistswho broke away and swiped asignificant portion of the marketshare with titles like Spawn, TheSavage Dragon, Youngblood, andWildC.A.T.S. “At the time I was14 and here’s these guys comingout with their own comics, theirown characters, and makingtoys, movie deals, all that stuff,”he says. “They were pretty muchachieving the dream of anycomic-book creator. That’s whatI wanted to do and then herewere people doing it.”

In high school he began collab-orating with young artists andwriters he met at conventionsand got into the frequentlydeflating habit of pitching storyideas to publishers. At 18 he sayshe struck a deal with a smallpress to publish Minotaur, afour-issue series about anarchaeologist possessed by thespirit of the Greek mythologicalmonster, a character he’d beentoying with since eighth grade.But according to Blaylock thepublisher (which he won’t name)abruptly backed out withoutmuch explanation. “That’s whenI finally said, ‘Well, screw this—

I’m doing this myself.’” Though his artwork was subpar,

Blaylock says, he managed tosecure distribution for Minotaurthrough the major comics cata-logs. He sold around 1,500 copiesby hauling the series around toconventions—enough to breakeven—but, more important, hemade contacts and taught himselfthe basics of self-publishing. Hisfather, Larry, who invested a cou-ple thousand dollars in Minotaur,encouraged his son’s new strate-gy: “I would tell him you can’t justdepend on your art talent,because there’s a lot of people outthere and they might blow youaway. I said what you need to dois learn to use other people’s abili-ties. Keep an eye out for otherpeople that are better, try to usethem, get them working for you.”

Blaylock planned to finance hisown books with a straight job,and after graduating from theCincinnati Academy of Design hewas hired as a staff artist for a T-shirt licensing conglomerate,drawing Tweety Bird and the

Tasmanian Devil. Eight monthslater the company folded and hebegan working at a smallerCincinnati firm called RippleJunction, where he was able to getinvolved in the business end oflicensing, drawing up proposalsand making pitches. He tried topersuade his employers to licensesome of the cartoon and comiccharacters he and his friendsgrew up with. “We’d bullshit aboutTransformers and Voltron and belike, ‘Why don’t they bring thatstuff back? If they did everyonewould be all over it,’” he says. Butthe bosses couldn’t believe the 80swere ready to rise again. “When hefirst started talking about thateverybody else was kind of like,‘Oh yeah, I don’t know,’” saysRipple Junction president NeilHoynes. “But he was pretty insis-tent that we go out and get it, andhe was absolutely right.”

Blaylock finally got the compa-ny to print T-shirts with charac-ters like the Teenage MutantNinja Turtles and Voltron, whichended up in mall stores like Hot

Topic all over the country. “Whenit comes time for the retro to bepopular the older crowd proba-bly doesn’t realize it,” he says. “Ithink we’re getting real close tofive-year-olds busting out theirPikachu T-shirts.”

Though he thought it was a cooljob, Blaylock says he was stillwatching the clock, wishing hecould make comics. “I was kind oflike a vampire,” he says. “I wouldgo to a company, suck out all theknowledge that I could out of thatplace, then I’d get bored, move onto the next one.” Deciding he’dabsorbed enough at RippleJunction, he took out a corporateline of credit in 1999 and startedDevil’s Due. He took on commer-cial art projects from the likes ofProcter & Gamble to fund origi-nal comics like Misplaced, a four-issue series about a scantily cladblond alien who flees her authori-tarian dystopia for an earthly col-lege town. The primary malecharacter is a record-store ownerwhose psychobilly style resemblesBlaylock’s own, though he says he

wasn’t sporting it at the time. One of Blaylock’s first major

moves was to pitch the idea ofreviving a G.I. Joe comic toHasbro, which had first intro-duced the character as a nearlyfoot-tall doll in 1964. It had beenseven years since Marvel stoppedpublishing the series. “I loved G.I.Joe as a kid in the 80s,” he says.“It was one of those things I wasa huge nerd for, and I knew everysingle thing about it.” Partlybecause the franchise had laindormant for so long and many atHasbro were unfamiliar with theextensive lineup of characters—nearly 500 heroes and villains—the negotiations took months. Inthe meantime Blaylock and hisgirlfriend, Susan Bishop, whonow handles marketing forDevil’s Due, decided to pull uptheir roots and move to Chicago.“That was the riskiest time,” hesays, “taking the gamble of relo-cating and potentially losing allmy previous clients.”

In early 2001, after picking up

In the cubicles

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18 CHICAGO READER | MARCH 3, 2006 | SECTION ONE

temp work for a few months,Blaylock got the license fromHasbro. He then made a dealwith Image to help publish theseries. Most comic-book retailerswere unenthusiastic about bring-ing such dated characters back;it couldn’t have helped thatBlaylock didn’t have much of atrack record. “I think someoneinternally at Image had to con-vince the publisher it was a goodidea,” he says, “because I got a lotof the reaction, ‘Why would any-body want this 80s stuff?’”

But when fans of G.I. Joe sawthe ads for the first issue inPreviews, the major catalog forupcoming comic releases, retail-ers were flooded with some70,000 orders, an outstandingnumber for any title. Blaylockordered a print run of 100,000for the first issue, in which bat-tle-hardened veterans such asSnake Eyes, Scarlett, Roadblock,Stalker, and Spirit are called upto deal with a “cabal of some ofthe world’s most dangerouscriminals.” It hit shelves onSeptember 12, 2001, with a coverthat featured the team beneath agiant rippling American flag.Blaylock says advance orderswere so high he probably wouldhave sold out even if it weren’tfor the Al Qaeda attacks.

The immediate success of theseries prompted comics publishersto scramble for 80s licenses overthe next two years: He-Man, theTransformers, the ThunderCats.Devil’s Due followed with Voltronand The Micronauts and becameknown as the company that

sparked the retro trend. Blaylockbought a condo and allowedhimself a new toy—a BMW con-vertible—but sank much of thecash back into the business, hir-ing six staffers and putting outmore books, subsequently throw-ing work to dozens of freelance

writers and artists. Seth Tucker, assistant manager

at Chicago Comics, saw the crazeflame and die out. “Retailers werelooking at this and going, ‘Wecan’t sell this much 80s stuff,’” hesays. “They hurt each other bydoing it all at once. I think thewhole G.I. Joe freight trainwould’ve kept running a lot fasterand harder if it wasn’t watereddown with all this other 80sstuff.” Devil’s Due discontinuedMicronauts and Voltron afterabout a year, and though G.I. Joeleveled off it continues to sell.

Blaylock knew his companycouldn’t get stuck in the 80s. “Justlike anything else that gets popu-lar, we got a lot of backlash in thecomic community for starting thisretro thing,” he says. “When yourfavorite obscure band gets popu-lar you complain about it.”

T im Seeley, 28, grew up inRingle, Wisconsin, the son of

an o∞ce secretary and a mechanicwho collected cheesy horrormovies. “There was nothing to dobecause I lived in the boonies,” hesays. “All I had was comics andreams of o∞ce paper.” At an earlyage his dad exposed him to TheToxic Avenger and A Nightmareon Elm Street, fueling his fascina-tion with low culture.

Seeley studied illustration at theUniversity of Wisconsin at EauClaire, where his teachers wereopen to his drawing comics tofulfill his major. After graduatinghe landed a job illustrating chil-dren’s books in Minnesota. “Thatwas good, because I had to drawstuff I didn’t want to draw,” hesays. “Which is important,because there’ll be days where I’mjust gonna be drawing rocks andthat’s gonna be my whole day.”

After Blaylock got the G.I. Joe

license he invited Seeley to moveto Chicago to work as a backupartist, drawing covers and fillingin when primary artists were lateon deadline, redrawing mistakes,and incorporating licensor edits.Eventually he was drawing moreG.I. Joe comics than any of the

freelancers Blaylock brought on,and started doing it full-time.

Though Devil’s Due had agreat deal of creative freedomwith G.I. Joe—they once blew upthe Loop with a hijacked militarysatellite—they were beholden tolicensor guidelines. “It’s like ifyour parents gave you very, veryloose rules, and you didn’t knowwhat your rules were but you gotin trouble when you did some-thing wrong,” says Blaylock.

“What happens more oftenthan not is it’s ‘too booby, too vio-lent,’” says Seeley. He thinksthere’s something about the rela-tively solitary lifestyle of a comic-book artist that results in the pre-ponderance of big-breastedfemale characters: “That happens

to me, and I have people aroundme. Every once in a while I’mlike, ‘Whoa! Get the eraser out. Igot a little crazy there.’ It’s thisweird lonely job where they startto vent their romantic and sexualfrustrations. I think if morecomic-book artists were starvingthere’d be more comic booksabout meat loaf. Fortunatelymost of them are well fed.They’re just undersexed.”

By January 2004 Blaylockdecided Devil’s Due had growntoo big for its relationship withImage, and the company brokeaway. The way to bring the busi-ness to the next level, he felt, wasto publish original titles andcharacters that could be spun offinto movies, video games, or toys.In addition to Misplaced,Blaylock launched a new universeof superheroes called Aftermathand Kore, a series based on

Blaylock had learned that thenotoriously fickle and oversaturat-ed comic audience was slow towarm to new characters, so start-ing in April 2004 he releasedindividual issues bimonthly,allowing word of mouth to spread.Slowly it did, with fans discussingthe title on message boards andreviews appearing in comics mag-azines. “‘I know it looks stupid,but it’s good.’ That’s the usualreview,” says Seeley. He says thefirst issue’s sales were poor, andthough they’d doubled by the timethe second came out, they’vegrown slowly over three more.

Even before the debut issue ofHack/Slash was completedBlaylock was shopping the con-cept as a movie. Like most of thelarger comics studios, he’d hiredrepresentation in Hollywood:Alter Ego Entertainment andPrime Universe, whose previouscomic-book and video-game filmoptions have been attached toaction heroes such as Vin Dieseland the Rock. Devil’s Due soonbegan receiving calls from stu-dios and producers, and at onepoint there was talk of CassieHack appearing in a sequel toFreddy vs. Jason, but like mostof the proposals they’d heard itdidn’t come to pass. “The firstday we announced it some guy e-mailed me and said, ‘Hey, I’mthis movie guy and I want tomake this movie,’” says Seeley.“I’m like, ‘Shit, this is awesome.’And that was the only e-mail Iever got from him. That’s what Icame to find out—mostly whatHollywood does is talk.’”

Last Halloween the NewMillennium Theatre Companyadapted Hack/Slash into a stageplay, which gave Seeley the chanceto see his characters in action forthe first time. “I never tried to bethe douchebag from the comicbook who keeps trying to fuck upthe play,” he says. “I just hung outand started dating the actresses,which is what you’re supposed todo.” He’s only partly joking; one

Devil’s Due

Web store manager Caitlin McKay (top), marketing veep Susan Bishop (bottom)

continued from page 17

Minotaur. Though none of thesebooks took off, the work was lib-erating for Seeley. “It was cool todo the corporate stuff and thebooks sold really well, but god-damn, let’s just do somethingwhere we can do whatever wewant,” he says. Kore featured astrip club staffed by tiny pole-dancing fairies, the FieldMuseum engulfed in flames, anda scene where the title characterpunches an adversary’s head off,embedding it in a wall.

The previous Halloween Seeleyhad come down with the flu, andwhile convalescing on the sofa he’dwatched hours of slasher-moviemarathons on cable TV. Whilesoaking in the tub he had a brain-storm. “I think it was like somefevered-up thing, and I drank toomuch orange juice,” he says. “I wasjust like, you know what? The girlfrom Friday the 13th? She shouldfight Freddy.” He says he rannaked from the bathroom andbegan jotting down ideas.

Those notes turned intoHack/Slash, a satire of the slash-er genre in which the heroine,Cassie Hack—a composite figurebased on the “final girl” who sur-vives every movie—roams thecountry dispatching psychos andserial killers. In her origin storyCassie is forced to hunt downand kill her mother, a highschool lunch lady who, aftermurdering her daughter’s bulliesand feeding them to the studentbody, commits suicide by plung-ing her head into a pot of boilinggravy, is resurrected, and contin-ues her killing spree. The tarty,wisecracking Cassie is joined bya deformed gentle giant namedVlad as she sets about neutraliz-ing every horror cliche known toHollywood, including zombiepets, spring-break psychos, andfanged mutant babies.

Seeley, who modeled the goth-pot Cassie on two women he hadcrushes on, wrote the stories andenlisted Stefano Caselli, an artistin Rome, to handle the artwork.

“I think if more comic-book artistswere starving there’d be more comic books about meat loaf.Fortunately most of them are well fed. They’re just undersexed.”

CHICAGO READER | MARCH 3, 2006 | SECTION ONE 19

of the actresses, who played aslasher, is now his girlfriend.

Blaylock says the deal theystruck with Rogue Pictures is inthe six figures, but won’t saymuch more than that. ToddLincoln, who’s done music videosfor the Silver Jews and Aqueductand is currently attached to aremake of The Fly, is set to direct.

Even if the current deal fallsthrough, Seeley and Blaylock stillthink it’s only a matter of timebefore Hack/Slash makes it to thescreen. “At first everybody waslike, ‘Oh, no one wants funny hor-ror, people want Japanese horror,like The Ring,’” says Seeley. “Andthen they want gritty horror, like

Saw. But everybody knows things come back around, espe-cially things that are uniquelyAmerican, and I would say slasher-horror comedy really is.”

In the meantime Devil’s Duecontinues to grow. Last spring

Blaylock got the license for theentire library of Dungeons &Dragons universes from Wizardsof the Coast, whose parent com-pany is Hasbro. Forgotten Realmsand Dragonlance have beenattracting a crossover audiencewho know the novels and spendtheir money in bookstores ratherthan comic shops. These titlesand G.I. Joe continue to be the

company’s breadwinners, allow-ing Blaylock to invest in otherbusinesses like Kunoichi, a com-mercial studio he spun off to han-dle freelance work. He’s also beeninvesting in real estate in Floridaand bought into a comics-and-music magazine called Lo-Fi,which is distributed in Tower,Barnes & Noble, and Borders.Since then, both Snake Eyes andZaya Vahn, another Devil’s Duecharacter, have made the cover.

In late January Blaylockannounced that Devil’s Due hasmade a deal with Fox to publishcomics based on the Family Guycartoon series, which has stirredsome controversy on fan message

boards. “As soon as we get thehaters on there, we know it’s a hit,”he says. “Whenever it’s all positiveor mediocre reactions it’s never asgood of a seller as if there’s thispassionate community where peo-ple are like loving it or hating it.”

And Blaylock is still publishinghis own pet titles. He’s starting towork on a new series calledMercy Sparx, about a femaledemon contracted by heaven tohunt down some runaway angels,and his first foray into businesslit, a series called How to Self-Publish Comics . . . Not JustCreate Them. That one has wonhim yet another new audience—a number of middle school

teachers have invited him tospeak to their students.

Blaylock says he wouldn’t rec-ommend anyone get into comicsfor money, and swears his evolu-tion into comic-book tycoon hasn’t made him rich yet. “You geta hundred-thousand-dollar checkin your hands, and you look at itand it’s great, you’re excited, butat the same time it’s not as ifyou’re just a person living in yourapartment and you get a hundredthousand dollars. You’re like,‘that’s a few payrolls.’ You justhave to stop thinking about themoney the same way you used to.It’s all about the money flowingin and flowing out.” v