dangoldmandotnet

I’ll be attending the NY Comic-Con at the Javitz Center this weekend on foot, ronin-style.  Walking around showing up my fresh-from-oven wares, promoting THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE and the online banana nut-bread that is ACT-I-VATE.

If you’re going to be around and want to link up, get in touch via IM or email me for my celly.

The big secrets are the hardest to keep:

I was approached several months ago to adapt the politically-charged play THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE by Donald Freed into a full-color graphic novel.  The play details Noriega’s last night in Panama City, hiding at the Vatican and surrounded by George HW Bush’s snipers determined to topple their former drugs/weapons bedfellow conveniently spun into “narcoterrorist” when he became less than cooperative.  Over the course of the play, the layers of Noriega are peeled like an onion under the relentless counter-arguments with the Vatican representative Laboa, exposing the hollow veneer of what modern “civilization” really is.

The London production of the play staged in November 2005 met with rave reviews like:

In Freed’s play we see Noriega trapped in Panama’s papal nunciature during the American invasion. His only companion is Vatican representative Archbishop Jose Laboa, and the men engage in a cat-and-mouse game of accusation and counter-accusation. The general seeks the cleric’s help in gaining sanctuary abroad. When that is denied, Noriega rebuts the charge that he is a living Satan and shows how, having been recruited by the CIA in the 1960s, he was a tool of US foreign policy before becoming its latest victim.

Freed packs in a lot of information: not least about the Panama Canal, over which the US lost control in 1979 and which was the ultimate reason for the invasion. But the virtue of Freed’s play is that it exposes US hypocrisy without sanitising Noriega. Although attacked for drug-trafficking, the general argues that his Latin American money-laundering was sanctioned by Washington, that western capitalism has always depended on narcotics and that junk bonds are not idly named. Even the archbishop, who acts as his interrogator, finally concedes: “You and your generation of tin-pot dictators tortured and terrorised for us.”

Donald Freed has previously written, among other works, the play/screenplay for SECRET HONOR directed by Robert Altman.  A Criterion Collection DVD of that film is available here. 

The project hasn’t been officially announced as we’re still looking for a publisher.  Publishers can contact me directly for more information.

Larger promo image can be seen here.

ACT-I-VATE is a new cyberstudio on LiveJournal that features exclusive online ongoing comics work from writer/artists Dean Haspiel, Nick Bertozzi, Josh Neufeld, Leland Purvis, Tim Hamilton, Michel Fiffe, Nikki Cook and myself.

For more info, read this group interview on Newsarama.