R.I.P. Maceo Benson Wegener

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Well it must be really swell having Labor Day off. You’ll all have to write and tell me what that’s like.

Just got the word that Atomic Robo is on page 338 of the Sept Previews Magazine. Diamond Code SEPT07 3914. Feel free to order right now! Also, the much awaited Robo T-shirts have shipped. If I can get them out this week I will.

So this week was good because the Widget went back to school and bad because we lost a member of the family.

On Thursday we had to make a hard choice regarding our old cat, Macio. He lost a leg back in the spring of 2006 to cancer and the tests had all come back clean. So we were all pretty surprised when a new lump appeared a few weeks ago.

It was really aggressive, but surprisingly didn’t seem to cause him any pain or discomfort. He was given a sedative and fell asleep with my wife, the Widget, and me petting and talking to him. Then when he was out cold they gave him the lethal overdose of anesthesia and his heart stopped almost instantly.

It was the nicest, most horrible thing, I’ve ever seen. Once again it strikes me as superstitious insanity that society doesn’t allow us to do this with terminally ill humans.

Since then I’ve been thinking I see him or hear him all over the house. I rush to close doors lest he get outside forgetting that he’s gone. I actually fed him Friday morning. And now, his little bed beside my drafting table is sadly empty. I never thought about it before now, but Maceo has been around as long as I have had my little nuclear family. It’s always been Crazy Wife, Nutso Kid, Stupid Cat, and me, Mr. Totally Normal Not a Single Thing Wrong With Him.

This is like when Mr. Hooper died on Sesame Street. An original member of our cast is gone.

Its bizarre the way pets infiltrate your life. I’ve only ever had one other pet (another cat) and it died in my mom’s home just a few years ago. It was always a psycho-cat and everybody hated it. So we actually had a little party when it kicked.

But Maceo was different. He was the ultimate fat, lazy, man-whore. He was half American short-hair, and half a mix of other junk, including a bit of ‘coon. Which possibly accounted for his immense bulk. Even without one back leg he still weighed in at 20lbs. And he had these awesome polydactyl paws. If you’ve never seen a cat with 6 thumbs you don’t know what you’re missing. He could get stuck to a hardwood floor.

Maceo was an ex-junkyard cat that Dorinda rescued from the pound a year or two before I met her. His ears were chewed to bits, his eyes, ears, and chest were totally infected, he had mites, and he was covered in so much oil and diesel fuel that it was a solid month before she found out he was a tuxedo cat and not pure black!

Yet despite a clearly harsh life he was a big mush. In many ways he helped cement my relationship with Dorinda because according to her (and her roommate), Maceo hated most of the men who came into their apartment. But he and I were buddies from the get go.

In the 8 years that I lived with him (despite my allergies) I became the one who fed him and hung out with him. Especially since The Widget was born. We were both pretty much tossed aside as useless man-things at that point, and we bonded in our mutual rejection by the only woman either of us had ever truly loved. ;P She had Widget. We were now expendable and essentially pointless.

I’m sure that there will be another cat in my life but not for a while. And no one can ever replace a cat like Maceo. He was a good soul, even if he was dumb as a box of rocks.

Not much else to report. Atomic Robo got a fantastic review on Earth-2.net’s Episode 151. If you don’t want to listen to any other parts of the show you can fast forward to about 17:35. Right after the review of Red5’s Abyss. I feel like I have to make it clear that we did not pay these guys to say the really nice things they did. Though I feel that perhaps we should . . .

I’ve been posting a lot of sketches lately. Anyone see them? J I like to “hang out” on Mike Oeming’s forum a lot and maybe you guys would like it too. It’s the only comic book forum I’ve ever found where 99% of the time we are not talking about comic books. It’s a great bunch of folks. You can get a taste for it via my Big Giant Sketch Post.

I’ll be down at the Baltimore ComiCon this coming weekend and I’m staying down there until Tuesday. So there either wont be a blog next week, or it will be very late. You can find me at Table #23 under CRANKSHAFT STUDIO.

This blog’s Random Splender is dedicated to Maceo, aka, Tripod.

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As you can see that whole leg cutting off things was pretty nasty.

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As you can also see, Maceo didn’t give a shit.

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“I dunno man, I woke up and it was just gone. But if you scratch my ass I’m sure it will all work itself out.”

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Once the hair came back you didn’t notice that his flank looked like a string of assholes lined up for inspection.

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Took these the day before we had the cat bumped off. I had just broken the news to him and you can see how affected he is by it.

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Luckily I’d brought beer and babaganoosh to cheer him up. (could we possibly have a more random collection of shit on our kitchen table?!)

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A case of Sam’s later and Maceo and I were feeling much better about it all.

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So long buddy.