Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. I thought the only lonely place was on the moon.

Jet Jaguar

Watercolor on 7” x 10” watercolor paper

A little painting of my favorite character from the Godzilla universe who isn’t named Godzilla. He also has the funnest name to say, as my wife has discovered to her delight! The trick is saying it fast. Speaking of fun, it seemed like fun to have him flying through the sky with some doves around him.

Here’s a preview of Thursday’s new Mina Shirakawa painting, because everybody wants Mina.

Card subject to change.

Rob’s Art on ShopAEW
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Rob and Jason Arnett's novella Rudow Can't Fail!
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Rob’s prints and shirts at Pro Wrestling Tees
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Bluesky
Cara
YouTube
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Katy’s book Oldest Kansas City

Blue Moon is brilliant and I shouldn’t be surprised that I thought it was. I’ve loved all of Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater’s collaborations, especially the Before Sunrise trilogy. It’s about Lorenz Hart, the first collaborator of Richard Rodgers, on the night of the opening of Oklahoma! which Rodgers of course wrote with Oscar Hammerstein II. It’s all set in a bar where the cast party is being held, as Hart serves as his own unreliable alcoholic narrator, portraying a version of his life that everyone around him knows isn’t true. It’s equally charming and heartbreaking, seeing this raconteur who’s been to the top refuse to see how his own omission of reality is destroying him. There’s a moment near the end when a door closes that will haunt me for sure.

Down Cemetery Road is off to a great start. I admit to not being fully on board with the first episode but by the end of the second I’m a convert. A house explodes next to our main character’s, leading her to just try to deliver a get-well card to the surviving young daughter, which draws her into a web of conspiracy and death where nothing and no one are what they seem. Ruth Wilson does a stellar job as the lead, playing an interesting take on the noir trope of the character drawn into a dark world by trying to do a good thing. Emma Thompson is an equally great twist on the hard-boiled self-destructive private detective.

Fittingly, I finished listening to the audiobook for King Sorrow by Joe Hill on Halloween. If it’s not Hill’s best book yet, it’s for sure my favorite. A group of college friends in the 1980’s summon a dragon spirit to help them get out of an impossible situation, asking it to kill someone on Easter. But they don’t pay attention to the wording of their request and now they have to pick someone to die each Easter. The book slowly moves forward to the current day and gives a lot of great metaphors for how this responsibility slowly tears them all down, like trauma and the exhaustion of trying to fix all of the world’s terrors. There’s also a great analogue for understanding another’s past traumas and having empathy for that, but not letting it excuse their own decisions and how they can harm others in turn. It’s a compellingly-told story from multiple viewpoints, with a ton of unexpected turns, big action, legitimate laughs and the deepest darknesses and brightest lights of the human soul.

I finished up reading Guardians of the Galaxy: Homecoming by Jim Valentino and friends a few days ago. This was one of my very favorite series as a kid and it’s fun revisiting them for the first time. Valentino did an excellent job giving all of these characters their own distinct and interesting personalities while taking full advantage of the idea of ‘exploring the Marvel Universe of the 31st century.’ There’s a lot of fascinating stuff like seeing a new Phoenix (long before that concept was played out), an alien Ghost Rider (three decades before Cosmic Ghost Rider), the legacy of the X-Men maybe not being so great, and the idea that maybe a lot of heavily-armed loosely-moraled people adopting The Punisher’s skull logo wouldn’t be so great. Valentino went on to have greater financial success with Shadowhawk but in my opinion this stands as his best work.

If your vote didn’t matter they wouldn’t work so hard to suppress it. Every election is important and I hope you join me in going to the polls this Tuesday if there’s one happening in your jurisdiction. Your voice should be heard.

To close out October and our haunted doll season, I did my biggest move with her yet. During the day on Thursday I drove out to the place where Katy and I play trivia and hung her behind the bar where we always sit. When we got there that night I kept nodding at it and Katy wasn’t seeing it and then…she did.

We named the doll Winifred, by the way.

This coming Thursday is our 15th wedding anniversary, if you can believe it. Still feels like I was in high school longer! I’m glad I can continue to manage to find grand gestures to do like hanging a cursed doll at trivia night.

Love you more,
Rob