#306: Seven Ate Nine (Part 2)

Artie has a plan to turn the Seven Ate Nine joke into a graphic novel. I’m not convinced it has the legs for more than a handful of pages, but Artie thinks there’s something there. So here’s Part 2. (You might recall Part 1 was #254.). Just between us, I think Artie’s recent creative blocks have to do with him juggling too many projects. He’s supposed to have a daily deadline (5 days/week) for Inscrutables panels + he’s working on a screenplay and a novelization of ‘Ms. 4th of July’ at the same time + forming an exploratory committee for a presidential campaign. Something has to give. He might have to quit teaching his summer class at UW, ‘Archetypical Patterns in Single Panel-Comics, 1914-1946’. So the notion that he’s got the time to turn this little joke into a full graphic novel seems like a stretch, but when he gets passionate about something he’s hard to re-direct. And he’s definitely passionate about this little number-based murder mystery. I stopped by the houseboat the other day & his little home office looked like a scene from CSI Seattle, with pictures of numbers on the wall with little pieces of string connecting them. Seven is a sicko to be sure, so there’s a lot of issues there to unearth, going back to his childhood. And Artie thinks Six has a complicated backstory worth exploring. And he hasn’t even gotten to Nine yet, who apparently wasn’t so innocent in this whole thing after all. Call me skeptical, but we’ll see where it goes I guess. -Ed.