Vote for MY candidate. Today!!!

Getting antsy with all these political conventions and speeches and wanting to just get right out there and VOTE already? In the interest of your emotional well-being, let me offer an opportunity for you to vote for something. Right now.

My buddy Troy Hickman is a fairly well-known comic writer (that would be Eisner Award-nominated, beeyatch!), having made a big splash with his series "Common Grounds", a huge breath of fresh air that lit up the super-hero genre and got a load of critical praise (from Stan Lee, even!). His knack for creating real characters that readers really bond with and care about is uncanny, as his unconventional and amazing take on storytelling.

Currently, Troy is trying something new, and is part of something called "Pilot Season" at Top Cow Comics. This is Top Cow's second year doing this. They put out six self-contained one-shot comic stories, ones that could become a regular series. These issues act like a TV series pilot. You know the process, right? Everyone makes their pilot episodes, shops them to the networks, and then the lucky ones get picked by the networks and made into ongoing TV series (and if they get picked by Fox, they get canceled after about three weeks...). Same concept here, except the company isn't the one doing the choosing. The readers are.

Fans get to buy each of these comics off the stands over the summer and try them out. Then they go to Top Cow's site, or the Pilot Season MySpace page, and vote for their favorite. And they can vote once per day, too, so the faithful can keep coming back and pushing for their horse all summer long. At the end of things, the top two books voted for will get picked up by Top Cow and get their own series next year.


Troy's book is called "Twilight Guardian" (as you might have guessed from the photo above. I made that shirt and wore it for one of my days at Comic-Con this summer (yes, I'll eventually be blogging on that...)), and it's really fantastic (his book. Not the shirt. The shirt could have used some flair, but time was short...). It's a non-super super-hero book. It's the tale of an unusual young woman - with a particular kind of O.C.D. - who puts on a mask and patrols her neighborhood (a nine-block area that she considers her jurisdiction) each night. There's no action, no fighting, no powers of any kind. This is a straight-up character story, and a gloriously unique one, which promises to take us into the lives of all the neighbors she's keeping an eye on, and what secrets are going on behind closed doors in that suburb.

That is, if enough people VOTE for it!

I have been, daily (on my PC AND my laptop...), as have other Friends of Troy Hickman (F.O.T.H.) (We don't really call ourselves that. I just made that up. But it's a fun word to say, isn't it? Look out! Here comes F.O.T.H.!). And it's been paying off! Thanks to us and other smart people out there, Twilight Guardian hit the #1 position for two weeks in a row! But this week, it dropped to #2, which is, of course, making us all nervous (I would assume Troy most of all), fearing that the #3 book could get a last-minute surge and pass him up, knocking TG out of the running!

IT...SHALL NOT...PASS!!

(That's never not fun to say. I just used a broom since I don't have a staff).

So I decided I'd try to enlist some other voting help (that's you bloggery types), since we're down to the FINAL DAYS of voting! As in, voting ends MONDAY! So if you want to help me help out a good friend, a great guy, and a hell of a writer who put in YEARS of dues to get this far (never letting go of his dream), then please, drop by the Pilot Season MySpace page:

Pilot Season

...and vote for Twilight Guardian! And if you can remember to do so, why not drop back in each day through Monday, and see if we can put this thing over the top?

Thanks for the help, gang. WE-CAN-WIN! WE-CAN-WIN! WE-CAN-WIN!