Spitball Press

And behold, a pale horse! And its rider's name was Earl, and Hell followed him. Also whiskey.

2011-03-09T23:38:00.000-08:00

Manuel and I have been banging away on scripts, page layouts, and final page art, all in the service of getting this book out to you wonderful folks, and in the trust that you will absolutely love what we're doing. Seriously, every time we sit down with this stuff we leave more excited about the final product than we've ever been. But it's a labor of love and it's going to take us a whlie to

In the wake of the Alternative Press Expo

2010-10-17T20:28:00.000-07:00

Holy shit.This weekend Manuel and I took our first real go at a comic convention table, taking the weekend off to peddle our crap and meet a ton of incredible people at the Alternative Press Expo. (We bought a table at last year's APE but didn't have much to give out -- plus, I was at a wedding most of the weekend. This felt more like a real go at it.)Manuel and I are both reeling from the

Spitball hits the airwaves!

2010-09-24T14:00:00.000-07:00

Recently, Spitball Press was featured on Creepy Kofy Movie Time, in an interview with Balrok and No Name!We knew we needed to do something special with it, so we worked up a comic in which our hero, Earl, is forced to... well, take a look:Thanks to our hosts on the show! It was a great scene, with old-time hospitality like you wouldn't believe: kegs to the side, a 200-pound pit bull, goth

The Posse

2010-07-02T15:27:00.000-07:00

The first characters to take some life in this impending tale of doom Manuel and I are fixin' to tell were The Posse.Now, this is what happens when the wait staff at a restaurant gets to bullshitting between plates of food coming out and walk-ins sitting down:A: "What if people did't die?"B: "What, like they lived forever?"A: "Yeah, like what if the aging process just kept going and going but you

Where we've been.

2010-05-25T18:40:00.000-07:00

Okay, so far this blog has been mostly a storytelling exercise, but Spitball Press is also a fledgling publisher – part of what we want to do with these stories is give readers a sense of what Manuel and I do together, a taste of our creative flavor so that when we start asking for your money, you have some idea what you're getting into.Yes, we're expecting parents, laboring over a book-length

Don't call it a comeback...

2010-04-19T20:20:00.000-07:00

Words and Art: Manuel Martinez

Manuel and the Wine Magnate

2010-02-09T18:44:00.000-08:00

Manuel and I met during the first couple months we were both working at a restaurant called Aziza. It was my first-ever bartending job and they only had a couple shifts per week for me behind the bar, so I ended up running food out of the kitchen sometimes to make extra money and Manuel was back there as an expo, calling the dishes as servers asked the prep line to fire them, and telling me where

Delayed, or: The Russian Driver

2010-01-19T13:16:00.000-08:00

So, we're behind on the blog this week. This is pretty much entirely my fault. We're going to be shifting to stories from Manuel's life for a bit, which I'm really excited about because the dude has some amazing stories. But I'm way behind on typing them up. I haven't even sent a draft Manuel's way yet for this week's story, so I suppose it's wise to just admit we're taking an off week.However, I

Benjamin Franklin: The Homeless Stereo King

2010-01-11T19:43:00.000-08:00

I met Benjamin Franklin as I was walking to Safeway ten years ago on a lunch break from my first real job. I was working for the San Francisco Design Center, a giant high-end interior design mall for rich people. One ironic thing about the place was that it was surrounded by some of the poorest streets in the city. The bus to work was full of homeless people and drug addicts and morbidly obese

The Time Sean Fought a Girl

2009-12-29T15:10:00.000-08:00

Sometimes my whole Fight Club thing got out of hand.We were living on campus in a trashy town at a dumpy school where High Times magazine interviewed my roommate (Doyal) for an article they were publishing about The Evergreen State College being the most pot-friendly campus in the country. Drugs were everywhere and everybody was a do-nothing know-it-all with something to prove. So there were a

Bobby the Banker and My Daring 'Do

2009-12-15T21:29:00.000-08:00

My best buddy working the bank was Bobby the banker. He was baby-faced and dorky but he was also about seven feet tall. It was amazing. I’m not a short man, but I had to do a lot of neck-craning when Bobby was around.Bobby and I first bonded, I think, over comic books. We were both big geeks about ‘em and we’d try to take a lunch break together every week or two to walk down to the comics shop

Banking: Not the Glamorous Life I Imagined

2009-12-09T09:39:00.000-08:00

When I was about 16, an older kid I was sorta buddies with got a job as a bank teller and I thought it sounded like the fanciest job ever. Boy, did I have it wrong.For a year in Olympia, I worked as a teller. I was desperate for the work. Less than a year before I got to town I’d bought an ’86 Ford F-150 that immediately shit its guts out and sucked up every last dollar I’d ever earned.The

The Time Whisky Made Me Gay

2009-12-03T00:54:00.000-08:00

One thing I liked to do when I lived in Olympia was to sit down at the big round table in our living-slash-dining room with a bottle of whisky and a shot glass and get myself good and drunk.The two state-run liquor stores in town actually sold stuff for a pretty decent price, all told. You could get a bottle of Jack Daniels for about fourteen bucks, Jim Beam for maybe eleven. Evan Williams, the

Delayed this week, yes.

2009-12-02T15:09:00.001-08:00

Hey everyone,Apologies for the late post this week. We got thrown by Thanksgiving and another, more exciting development -- our scripting process is finally fully underway! Manuel and I are chewing over beats and page breakdowns together, beating each other up to bring you a graphic novel next year that will rock your collective asses off.We're finding a rhythm to get both the blog and the

The Day a Giant Fat Man Exploded Our Toilet

2009-11-23T19:18:00.000-08:00

You might remember Doyal from last week’s story. Somehow, in between his rants about George W. and how Israelis were war criminals, Doyal found time to hate hippies. It was cool and all if you agreed with his politics, but most hippies (in Olympia, at least) were lazy and arrogant, as if growing dreadlocks and wearing wool ponchos was really all you needed to earn a permanent right to smugness.

A note on character names

2009-11-22T13:25:00.000-08:00

So, these are all stories about real people from real life.Me, I'm pretty firmly convinced that everyone's got some insane stories in their lives. Everyone's done stuff we all know you're not supposed to do. Everybody's been selfish, stupid, cruel, horny, reckless, venal. We're frail on all levels: physically, mentally, emotionally. We make our missteps in varying degrees of magnitude, of course,

Doyal gets something scarier than VD

2009-11-17T13:10:00.000-08:00

The shortest guy who lived in the apartment was a pissed-off Texan named Doyal.Doyal had two blue, ropey veins in his forehead that would pop out like angry V-shaped eyebrows in a cartoon when you pissed him off. It was pretty easy to piss him off, too, so the other five of us living in the Evergreen campus apartment always tried to keep him angry as possible so we could see the veins. Plus,

Super Bowl Boxing, part two: One-Armed Nate

2009-11-09T17:06:00.000-08:00

One-Armed Nate was a cool dude, but not the kind everybody would like. He was a total punk rock asshole and he’d come to our house with cheap bottles of whiskey and we’d all get blackout drunk and raise some hell. Mostly that meant destroying our apartment, then going to some party and getting kicked out for being assholes.He didn’t exactly have one arm; his left arm had grown funny and it was

Super Bowl Boxing, part one

2009-11-02T17:33:00.000-08:00

I was scrawny when I was a kid and got beat up a lot and it scared the shit out of me, so when I discovered in college that if you drink a bunch of whiskey getting hit doesn’t really hurt, I took to fighting all the time. It got a little rough. In my mind, I was basically a one-man Fight Club. I’d get liquored up and then go around poking at everybody in the house and

The Misadventures of Isaiah Flowers

2009-10-26T13:48:00.001-07:00

Guess what? There were drugs all over the place at The Evergreen State College when I went there. Shocking, right?Some of it was intense. Some kid took too much Special K (which I’d theretofore thought was a breakfast cereal) and died foaming at the mouth on somebody’s kitchen floor.Another kid went to a party at a house right on the lake near campus, where he started by drinking a bottle of Evan

Tim's Face Proves an Ineffective Substitute for Brake Pads

2009-10-16T12:17:00.000-07:00

I lived in Olympia, Washington, for a year-and-a-half beginning the day after 9/11. The drive up there was pretty intense but I’ll save that for another day.One of my favorite people I met up there was my buddy Tim. Tim was from Alaska so he was crazy as a shithouse rat. He was a big dude, like 6-feet-2 and burly, with a bald head and a huge red beard and a bull ring in his nose. He was huge, and

Welcome to Spitball Press!

2009-08-24T09:56:00.001-07:00

The best stories are conversations.I mean, I love the Lone Traveler trope as much as anyone. "A stranger comes to town," as the feller said. But even then, it's not so much the silent man on the horse that makes a story; it's the conversations about him. The buzzing of the townspeople. The inevitable clash when the man apart comes in out of the rain.It's not just the dialogue, though my favorite