“Shelter is bolstered by Matt Young’s ‘Three Stories’ on three different seasons in a foreclosed house’s life and the scams and participants involved in each.” – Rich Kreiner, “The Comics Journal,” Sept. 6th, 2010

What’s that? Why it’s a write-up mentioning MY contribution to Trees and Hills‘ anthology “Shelter” on The Comics Journal website!!! (If you don’t know TCJ, it’s one if the biggest names in our industry. Which suddenly means a lot more to me!)

Yes, it’s a quote from almost a year ago, but I didn’t notice it until a few days back when I was having a conversation with some other guys about search engine optimization strategies for our web site, and I tried Googling myself. (For the record, it felt good at first but I could see how easily it would become personally detrimental.) And lookey what popped up! That really made my day. Clearly it made a couple of my days, since I’m still pretty amped to write about it now.

It was especially nice because as of this week I am exactly half way through my year of journal comics! Yeah! (Or, at least, I will once I finish completing the comics of May. Don’t bother looking, I’ll be sure to crow about it once they’re all caught up.)

“It takes no time at all to become desperately lonely.” – Matthew (fellow artist Matthew) Southworth, talking about working right up to the deadline on his and Greg Rucka’s series “Stumptown.” (Check it out, it’s awesome. A Portland, Oregon detective series in the Rockford Files vein.)

I could feel that sentiment today. There’s a lot of moments in these journal comics when I feel that desperate loneliness of creative work, when you’re sitting alone in a sweaty room with two cats and dreaming up stories of people who are having a much more pleasant time than you. Today I could’ve gone out, gotten an ice cream, gone to the bar, watched a movie… a lot of things. Instead, I stayed inside all day. I was working on my Web Presence.

And though I didn’t get around to working on those SEO strategies (yet), instead, in the spirit of the quote that started this spillage, I built up my “Other Tales” page today. I’ve got a collection of a lot of the stories I’ve done that aren’t auto-bio strips that can be read, including the Shelter story that was mentioned.

Did I mention I’m very proud of that?