A number of people have been contacting this site with questions about Crankshaft, the strip that I do with Chuck Ayers. That makes perfect sense and it’s as if they already knew that I one day plan to have a Crankshaft site neatly tucked into this one. Crankshaft doesn’t have its own site because the domain name was taken by a company that makes, if you can believe this… crankshafts. I figure they probably need the domain name more than I do in this economy, so, for the moment, I’ll use these blogs to answer some Crankshaft questions and pass on a little Cranky info.
First, to all of the readers who wanted to know if the story that recently ran regarding Lucy and Lillian McKenzie would be collected into a book along with the previous Alzheimers work that ran in Crankshaft, the answer is that there are no plans for that at the present. If I hear from enough readers looking for something like that, I’ll certainly consider pursuing it, but, for the nonce, the only book available is the previous Alzheimer collection Safe Return Home… and it’s not really all that available except to the very determined reader with fairly deep pockets. Second, for those readers who were interested in purchasing original art from that story… they are availableÊand inquiries can be made by e-mailing this site.
Finally, in a bit of Crankshaft news, the Crankshaft story dealing with the black baseball player Jefferson Jacks has been nominated for a Glyph Award in the Best Comic Strip catagory by the East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention which takes place on May 16th at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Philadelphia. Just a bit of backstory here… a good friend, Tony Isabella, had suggested I write a story about a black minor league ballplayer who would have played with Ed Crankshaft on the Toledo Mud Hens. I was out of pocket on the Lisa’s Story book tour around that time, so I suggested to Tony, a fine comics writer in his own “write”, that he do it… and he did. Later, when Tony’s scripts came in, I wrote the Sunday strips to wrap around the story and they were then beautifully illustrated by Chuck Ayers. If I say so myself, it’s a fine story and I’m very pleased that it was nominated by the judges.
Finally, part two… the current Jefferson Jacks story was written by me as I recuperated after my accident last year, but Tony and I had such a good time with J.J., that we’re working on some new stuff for down the road. Thus endith this update on all things Crankshaft.
