I was standing over an open grave in a snowy country cemetery out in the wastelands of rural Ontario last weekend and I got to thinking, “I should really take a vacation from funerals.” Three funerals in three weeks, it starts to feel like a routine. I know so many people who died this year, it’s like living through the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1919. Twenty-two days left in 2008 and I’ll count myself lucky if I get out of it alive myself.

Let’s ignore all that, shall we, and get some updates out of the way. The body count may be out of control, but life marches on. My career is taking off, even while the number of friends and family who might be pleased by that fact dwindle.

Turbo Dogs  started running on Saturday mornings on NBC recently. Two of my episodes are somewhere in the mix. Supposedly the CBC is airing it too, but I have no clue when. No one tells me anything. I suppose I could look it up myself, but I’m lazy. And there’s a limit to how interested I am in watching computer animated cartoons aimed at five-year-olds, even when I was one of the writers. Someone will send me a DVD eventually. But if you have any five-year-olds handy, don’t let me discourage you from plopping them down in front of the boob tube bright and early Saturdays while mommy and daddy stay in bed and get busy making more pre-schoolers to fill the ranks of that essential pre-branding demographic broadcasters lust after like a salivating pedophile chaperoning a pajama party.

Looking like a lot of fun for older kids up to my own advanced age is Kid vs Kat. Apparently only a few episodes aired earlier in the fall as a teaser to the regular run that hasn’t begun yet. But a couple of clips on Youtube have surfaced, including one from a development episode I wrote, and they look pretty damn cool. Of course, I can already tell the end results have been toned down from my original scripts. A bit. For instance, in this clip, Coop no longer attempts to hammer a wooden spoon through Kat’s heart with a meat tenderizer as originally intended. Gone, it seems, are the days of the Looney Tunes ramming dynamite up each other’s asses and lighting it with a flame thrower. And I don’t think Standards and Practices will let those happy days return anytime soon. Still, I encourage you to keep an eye out for KvK on YTV, and scan the opening credits for my name, which will be on four of them.

Last month I was one of five writers in Quebec selected to attend the “Feature It!” Telefilm workshop and get some seed money to develop a feature film project with your tax dollars (unless you’re not a Canadian tax payer, in which case I don’t owe you shit). The workshop amounted to four days in a Delta Hotel hanging out with writers, producers and distributors, listening to lectures and talking business over bad hotel food and worse coffee.

It was sort of like being inducted into a cult, complete with long hours, sleep deprivation, and utter lack of private time — including in the toilet where the wheeling and dealing continued unabated. I’d never personally witnessed film industry people talk shop during a bowel movement before, but I can now cross that one off my bucket list.

The project I was shilling is the crassly titled Sex Tape which, surprisingly, is not targeted at the same demographic as Turbo Dogs or Kid vs Kat. I’m in option talks with it now, and looking to make the next funding deadline which will kick it farther down the road towards the eventual goal of getting it in front of cameras and making everybody enough money to pay Telefilm back.

For reasons that remain nebulous to me and pretty much everyone else who attended the Telefilm workshop, we were required to take a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. Quote my results, “Shane, your scores indicate a preference for introversion, intuition, thinking and judging. That gives you a temperament of NT.”

I think that means I’m a sociopath. Or something. I’m not really clear, and I meant to ask someone before I stabbed them all and danced naked in the moonlight wearing only their blood and a modest loin cloth of stitched-together scalps. Oh well. Guess I’ll never know for sure.

Not that I’ve ever had much luck with any of the tests meant to determine just who or what I am. I took one in college that told me my personality was overwhelmingly feminine, and that I didn’t have a single creative synapse firing in my logical clockwork brain. And the last IQ test I took saw me score a mere 136, an extremely irritating four points short of genius level. I demand a recount!

If you want to take a personality test I consider much more informative, try this one to determine your nerd-geek-dork leanings. I like this test, because it finally defines the very real differences between what makes a nerd, a geek, or a dork. They’re actually quite separate concepts. In case you’re wondering, I’m 74% Nerd, 48% Geek and 39% Dork. For once, that sounds about right.

Speaking of nerds, geeks and dorks…COMICS! Yes, the comic book. A medium that truly embraces all variety of spaz. After many beer-soaked visits to our comic jam dive of a bar, a new issue of What the F***?  is now complete. Due to a tragic inking mix-up, the infamous “Fucking Raccoon” page did not make this issue and it will likely be another year before we finally get to see the end results in all their rascally glory.

Still, there’s gobs of good material to be had in issue #8, including work from the far-too-young and far-too-talented Nicolas Plamondon, the newest member of the gang who I refer to as “the cute goth chick” behind his back. Mostly because I’m a prick who wishes I could draw so well. But also because he’s got it coming for misplacing the raccoon page so close to deadline.

Three bucks postage paid will get you the latest from Chompers Comics, 700 Richmond Street, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3J 2R9 or you can go online here to get more information about back issues and some of the contributors.

If you know your comics, you’ll know who Steve Gerber was. And you’ll also know that he died last month. Back when mainstream comics were dominated by superheroes (which, unfortunately, they kinda still are) he was writing satire for Marvel. Yes, satire. For Marvel. I’m not exactly sure how he managed that, but one of the most interesting comic books to come out of the 1970s was Howard the Duck. Although this title was sadly tarnished forever by the George Lucas crapfest movie that came out in the 1980s, those who remember the original comic book remember it fondly as a skewed look at America (and American comics) with a whole bunch of bad attitude. Steve worked on many other comic series, but he’ll be forever remembered as the man behind the duck.

Another comic industry figure you may also be aware of is Rich Johnston, one of the top comic book columnists out there. He writes Lying in the Gutters, and I once had the pleasure of sitting through the Eisner Awards in San Diego with him back in the mid-1990s. Referring to Steve Gerber’s death in one of his columns, he continued with the thought:

“But one thing stuck out about Steve not being appreciated by the industry during his lifetime. Which sent me thinking. Who else are we ignoring right now, who has been rewriting the rules and setting the scene for many?”

Among the select list of notable names and projects he rattled off, there was this paragraph.

“Shane Simmons. Author of the two ‘Longshot Comics’ and the lesser ‘Money Talks’ series and one of the most inventive, creative and consistent creators. Imagine Chris Ware crossed with Groucho Marx. He writes television now. We lost this one, folks.”

I’ve been writing television for about twelve years now. And when I started to get enough screenwriting work to earn a living and keep me financially afloat, I quickly began to drift from the comic book scene. It’s been years since I’ve published anything new outside of my contributions to Rick Gagnon’s What the F***? comic jam compilations. Even my attendance at those events has become spotty. Not through disinterest, mind you, but thanks to frequent scheduling conflicts.

I was able to get to one of the jams just a couple of weeks back, however. Since the days of the massive Gallery Stornaway events that drew comics artists from all over the province, outside Quebec, and even outside Canada, the local Montreal jams have become smaller and more nomadic, drawing no more than a dozen artists at a time and often far fewer. This latest one was held in a dead little dive of a bar, selected not for its inspiring ambiance, but for its bright lighting and lack of loud music. There we sat, a mix of Francophone and Anglophone comic artists, and worked on the next batch of pages that would grace a future issue of What the F***? — now due for its eighth small-press volume. Among the attendees was Jack Ruttan, a frequent contributor to the scene. He snapped some photos and drew some portraits and wrote a blog about the event on his web page.

I started the evening with a single large panel I had dreamed up earlier in the day. I had the layout in my head, as well as all the words and balloon breakdown for the dialogue. I decided to spend an hour or so penciling and inking the entire thing, completing my first whole panel, start to finish, in far too long. It was labour intensive and felt like a long time to create something that people would read in the space of about five seconds. Yet I felt strangely satisfied in way I haven’t felt…well…also in far too long a time.

Recently, copies of the new Italian edition of Longshot Comics: The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers arrived on my doorstep. It’s been out since November, but I only got them now after the first batch went missing in the mail and the second batch was stopped, opened and inspected by Canada Customs before being allowed on its way. It’s a routine I grew used to early on in my self-publishing career when I was receiving packages of comics and videos from all over the world. Our dutiful authorities must open everything coming into the country just in case in contains child pornography. Good work guys! Glad to see you’re still trying to catch the one remaining pedophile who doesn’t have internet access yet. Keep at it, you’ll nail him one day.

As I’ve been informed by the publishers, the new translation is selling briskly in Italy. Reorders are building up and a lot of copies moved at the Lucca Convention. It’s also been nominated for a “Best Independent USA Comic” Comicus Prize. Shhh. Don’t tell them it’s actually a Canadian comic.

I’ve been exceptionally pleased with the care taken on the design and translation of the book. There’s even an index of notes to further illuminate some of the historical references and terms sprinkled throughout. It feels weird, after all these years of screenwriting and the associated ham-fisted butchery that goes along with it, to have my words so carefully handled and respected by others. And it also feels weird that such respect has become so alien in my career. It didn’t used to be like that.

Longshot Comics, remains, I think, the most artistically successful, well known, and widely renowned project I’ve ever worked on. And there’s one simple reason for that. There’s not a word or a letter or a dot or a line I didn’t put in there myself. Editorial input was zero. I sent the artwork to the publisher, they sent it to the printer, they sent it to the distributor and they sent it to the comic shops. It was a pretty long route to get it into the hands of the consumers, but the end result was a direct unfiltered line between my brain and the readers’.

I don’t much care for the prospect of spending my days second guessing the decisions I made years ago. A successful screenwriting career is nothing to turn my nose up at, but I can’t help but wonder, almost on a daily basis, if I’m on the right track here. I think I am generally, but not all the wheels feel correctly aligned with the rails. Something’s grinding and kicking up a lot of sparks.

Maybe it’s this early-onset mid-life crisis I’ve had going on perpetually since the day I turned 30, but I’ve been wondering a lot lately. How lost have I become?