A week ago I found out that Robert L. Washington III had passed away on June 6th at the age of 47.
the writer as depicted on his Milestone Media trading card
Comic-Book Resources has a notice at its news blog Robot 6 that includes a reproduction of Washington's last piece of work, a one-page strip for Hero Comics 2012. It's a first-person piece, illustrated by Chris Ivy, in which the writer shares some of the struggles that prompted him to seek help from The Hero Initiative — a non-profit organization, mentioned on this blog before, which provides financial assistance to creators in dire need of it.
Unlike the few people who've been the subjects of memorials here and the several more whose passings I'd hoped to note — the comic-book industry lost a number of outright giants last year — Washington was neither a legend with a storied career, a creator who produced beloved works from my childhood, nor someone that I knew. But he wrote the hell out of a series called Static, which launched in 1993 from Milestone Media in association with DC Comics — later adapted into the Kids' WB animated series Static Shock. And he died way too damned young after some tough times.
Schmutz! But I'll get back to that. First we must rewind to the uncensored scribblings of someone named Sonja, who last week sent out a controversial set of near-sentences via Twitter.
I refuse to use the word "tweet" — unless we're talking about birds, of course. Call your service Tweeter if you want the messages to be "tweets". If it's Twitter, the gerund is either "Twittering" or the backwards formation "twitting" and the messages are Twits. Since Twitter and other social-media services that encourage short bursts of prose or graphics are considered "microblogging" I suppose that makes the entries "microposts". All I know is that I refuse to say "tweet".
Where was I? Oh, right... This:
I know that the above won't mean anything to anyone who hasn't both seen Game
of Thrones and read Watchmen, but I'm guessing that a large swath of this blog's dedicated visitors is folks who have.
Adrian Veidt, the genius tactician known as Ozymandias, clearly has more going on upstairs than petulant boy king Joffrey Baratheon even if you factor in their age difference. Yet my mind immediately jumped to Veidt when I saw a certain picture of Joffrey yesterday, and I was fortunate enough to quickly find images of the insufferably entitled characters in similar poses. Veidt certainly would've made a fine Lannister.
Kindred Posts: Webwatching • Blonde on Blonde • He... She... They
