Hi, everybody. It’s Wednesday - normally our update day in a typical week. That’s the intent, anyway.

So…I went to the doctor today for a tetanus shot. There’s a fun little story I’ll spare you, but suffice it to say that between last week’s Poison Sumac Encounter of Terror (I briefly had a zombie appendage grafted on to where my right arm should’ve been) and this week’s Back To Work Madness Plus Bonus Tetanus Threat Fun Time…well, I’m a bit off schedule.

Rest assured that while I’m running behind on the update schedule, we will not be missing any updates - they’re simply coming late. This will be a two-page update week. So expect the first update (last week’s late one) to drop tomorrow night sometime, and the next one will arrive shortly thereafter. Next week we will resume the standard update schedule unless I’ve died of the plague or been hit by a bus or something.

In other news, MOVIES ARE COOL. Having now seen Kung Fu Panda (beautiful to look at and fun), Get Smart (almost peed myself laughing), and The Incredible Hulk (full of win given the subject matter…Ed Norton rocks)…this is gonna be a good summer for me and my nerdy movie addiction. In another few days we’ll see the arrival of Hancock, and after that Hellboy II - which is a good bet for my favorite movie of the year.

I actually have a brief word to say about exactly how much I’m anticipating Hellboy II. See, it’s about fairies. In New York. The era and premise are different…but the idea of the pretty little things that go bump in the night, making their ire with mortals known in the Big Apple…well, it’s near and dear to my heart, to say the least. We’d been working on this comic (traditional scary fairies + modern urban setting) for quite some time - almost two whole years of plot and character development, and hundreds of hours of sketching character designs and props - when the news broke about the premise for Hellboy II. Fairies. Scary pale pointy-eared long-haired sidhe princes. Elementals. Not completely unusual fantasy fare, even in the urban fantasy genre. But still, it’s a big-budget film with very talented people making it go…and it’s closer to what we’re doing here than most other projects I’ve ever heard of. I’m intimidated, to say the least.

Thankfully, the basis for HEX’D is so out there and different from virtually all of the rest of the urban fantasy genre that I’m not afraid of anybody shouting “plagiarism” or anything. Besides, we have a couple years’ worth of written material of our own, and neither myself nor Josh is a big Hellboy reader (although I lionize Mignola and his amazing art skillz).

Instead, I’m practically vibrating with anticipation. Because I like fairies. Not the wishy-washy Tinkerbells. The beautiful, cold ones…distant and serene, elemental and mighty, achingly familiar and human, but still alien and aloof and deadly to the core. The stuff of dreams and nightmares. The roots of folklore so profound and resonant that it’s still with us centuries later.

And I think Hellboy II is gonna do ‘em up right. I can’t wait to see it.

-Wes