Geek Speaking of Wayback Machine Wet Dreams

Geek Speak: Wet (Nose) Dreams

Panel one was fun to draw for obvious reasons. On a less obvious level, I think we all secretly dream of wearing a tux as well as, and being as seductive and dangerous as James Bond. Most men look killer in a tux, Bond actually is "killer in a tux." After a night of drinking as expression of denial I couldn't think of a worse way for Ted to wake up than nose to nose with the dog that drove him to buy the booze in the first place. 

Geek Speaking: The Wayback Machine Edition, or A Little Bit of Catching Up

I have a new cartoon for your viewing pleasure, but it does involve some characters from a previous story-arch in Geek Speak. To help you fill in the gaps I've posted links to the previous entries below. 

For the record, I would totally have used images instead of text links, but Blogger makes that as hard as fucking possible to do. It's way past time for Geek Speak to outgrow Blogger. It's just...overdue. I'm just going to say it here. I will now start looking for a way to move Geek Speak into its own official site. There I said it. Now I have to do it. Get a website that puts the comic front and center with a blog engine so I can write these posts for the five people who read them. It will have to have an actual archive as well so I don't have to go through this ridiculous exercise every time I pick a recurring character's story.

Ted and Wuffles

1. I know I'm gorgeous in which I'm reminded that Ted's name was originally Brian.
2. You can talk 
3. Wuffles! Still in the top five of best comics I've done to date. 
4. Don't let her take me! In which I talk about new art supplies that have really helped me take my artwork to the next level. 
5. Power of booze In which I said this, which is worth repeating, "Hipster Charlie Brown says, "I liked the cute little red-haired girl before it was cool."
6. Catch that bus In which I said something beautiful about my wife. Our anniversary is coming up again in a couple of weeks, and I don't know if I'm going to make it to a computer to write a post on that day (our lives have become far more busy and complicated in the last year), so I'll repeat the best thing I've ever said about being married to a wonderful woman, "Did I marry my best friend? No. I found a missing piece of my own being. One who was searching for a fragment of her own self. We held each other and didn't let go, and thus made ourselves whole. "
7. Amazing save... 
8. ...or not such a great save
9. Medicinal uses
10. Walk with the Animals
11. Hobos In which I allude to starting a job with Disney, without actually using the name of the company. Now I don't know why I was being so circumspect. Turns out Disney was a great place to work with some seriously wonderful people. 
12. Heroic Poser I still love Francis in the last panel, "...check out my sweet new heroic pose." 
13. Home at last Obviously the strip is referring to the classic Doctor Dolittle with Rex Harrison and not the (admittedly pretty decent) remake with Eddie Murphy. 

As I was going through and building the list of links to previous strips I ran across an earlier post in which I did the same goddamn thing. I really need an archive. 

The other thing I noticed as I was going through this is the amazing transformation in the look of the strip. It starts with incredibly rough illustrations with dirty line work and colored/shaded with a black colored pencil from Prismacolor. The content is fine, but open a tab and compare the most recent strip to the first time we see Ted and Wuffles together. The differences is pretty incredible. Back then I don't think I'd have even attempted something like panel one in my most recent strip. 

Geek Speaking of Loss

Geek Speak: The Lost and the Left Behind

This week I lost something special, unique, and irreplaceable. I lost a friend. Bill Otto was one of a kind. He was compassionately tough, seriously ornery, studiously geeky, and classically metal. A while back he was diagnosed with leukemia, and fought it. Over Memorial Day weekend he lost that battle. In the thick of the fight he reached out through his family and the power of social media to his extended network of friends and asked for pictures, music, comments, books, anything to help him fill the time, keep his spirits up, and take his mind from the pain. For a while I wasn't sure what to do. I sketched out some ideas for original art of Wolverine, by far his favorite of the X-Men, but those weren't turning out. One day at work I sketched out a long-haired, head-banging, metal dude holding a cup of coffee and yelling "FUCK YEAH!" I added a caption, "How Metal Guy drinks his coffee" and it stuck. I did several Metal Guy cartoons, and by all reports he loved them. I was working on this one when I got the news.

Bill was special for a lot of reasons, but three things really stick out in my mind. First was his...love isn't the right word...not dedication...his reverence for The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. It was looking at the books through his eyes helped me to read them in a new frame of mind. Particularly The Fellowship of the Ring. Let's be honest, at the end of the day it's a book about nine dudes on a (whoa! watch out for that orc) nature hike. It's a tough read. Looking at it through his eyes I was able not just to enjoy it, but to savor it. Bill was like that. He could make you look at the world through a different lens. He's one of the few people I'eve ever known who could help a person find perspective.

Another thing that sticks out in my memory of Bill is when I had decided I was going to enlist in the Air Force to be a combat photographer. I was, rightly, surrounded by family and friends who were skeptical and apprehensive about the decision. This was the end of 2001, and the United States was already in Afghanistan, and the writing was on the wall to take us into Iraq. To put it mildly, as a combat photographer I was not going to have a shortage of work. Bill never asked if I was sure. He'd already heard through the grapevine that I'd made a decision by the time saw him. The first words out of his mouth were, "So when are you going," and the look in his eyes said "hoo-rah!" When I was barred from entrance and handed a permanently disqualified status it rocked my world. I had to look at where I was and think seriously about the answer to the question, "well, shit. Now what?" He supported me then, too. 

It would be impossible to talk about Bill without also talking about gaming. When I met Bill I was still in college, dreaming of being successful and maybe a little famous, hopelessly smitten with Mildly Sensational, and desperately broke. When you've got your head in the clouds, and a bank ledger redder than Spider-Man's long johns, entertainment is where you can find it. My friends and I often found it in role playing games. Dungeons and Dragons was a perennial favorite, but we dabbled in just about anything that excited our imaginations. Bill was there for a lot of that. He played a long running Aeon Trinity game, which then became Aberrant, and many others. More weekends than I can count were spent starting a game Friday night, playing until Saturday morning, crashing for a few hours, getting up and maybe doing a few things around the house, then getting a game going sometime Saturday afternoon which would last until sometime Sunday morning. Then, exhausted to the point of deliriousness, we'd fall into our beds and sleep for a few hours, get up in time to get things ready for the rest of the week, then collapse, sleeping with the knowledge that we'd be gaming up again at the end of the week, and dreaming of the adventures we'd enjoy through the shared experience of collaborative story telling. Bill was right in there with us, often playing one variation on the soft-spoken tough guy or another. You know. Bill. We laughed, we played, we ate mountains of pizza, and built memories that all of us will carry of each other for the rest of our lives.

Good-bye, Bill. Rest in peace. You are missed. 

Random Sketch Dumping on Blog Announcements

Random Thoughts

Coffee metaphors for life: Sometimes you're the grinder, sometimes you're the bean.

Work-a-Doodle: Another Friday Edition

Introducing some more of the doodles from the notebook I keep at work. When I look at all of these together it looks like I've been playing around with some different styles. I assure you that wasn't deliberate. Mostly I just draw whatever sounds like fun at the moment. I am kind of proud of the drawing of French lovers on a Vespa. There's a bit of a story behind that one. 

 

The Adventures of Normal Guy will be taking it a little slower

More like "The Vigorous Evening Walks of Normal Guy" than "adventures."

This is kind of a short blog post today as I'm running out of time in the day. There never seems to be enough of that does there? For the foreseeable future my posts will probably run a little short as I'm going to be working on something for the career I've landed into. I need to take things to the next level, which means a lot of time hitting the books. I will still be posting, but I may only manage one or two a week. At a minimum I want to try to post a new Geek Speak every week.

Sketch Dumping on Ten Weeks to Baby 2

Work-a-Doodle: Sketch Dump Friday Edition

Work has been really difficult lately. With one thing and another August is shaping up to be the most stressful month I've had in a while. To try and preserve the last battered remains of my sanity I've been doing a little more doodling in my notebook than usual. Out of the pages of drawings filling a notebook that, honestly, should be full of notes here are a few of my favorites. 

  

T-Minus Ten Weeks

In just a little over two short months everything in my life is going to change for the second time. Mildly Sensational and I are expecting our second child in mid-October. The baby'll be a boy this time around, so we'll have one of each. 

As I sit here typing this, Mildly Sensational is asleep on the sofa behind me. Sometimes it's surprising to me that she can sleep through the vigorous pounding my martial arts strengthened fingers deliver on our innocent keyboard. It's somewhat less surprising when she's pregnant. Her first pregnancy with our daughter wore my wife out on a more or less daily basis. This time around I can tell she's fighting to stay awake by the time I get home from work.

Part of that is being pregnant while taking care of a two-year-old and all the demands she can unleash on a daily basis. The other part of that is this pregnancy is just different. 

Our daughter was always a quiet baby, even before she was born. She moved and squirmed, but didn't ever really fidget or kick. Our son subjects my wife's internal organs to a rigorous daily pounding. As she snoozes quietly on the couch I can see him moving around, kicking, and squirming. I watch and wonder, is he bored and just repositioning because staying in one place gets old, is he demanding attention form his mommy, or is it something else entirely? Some pre-natal struggle known only to babies still in the womb that they will forget immediately on being born? 

At some point during every pregnancy you get to a point where you start wondering what the new little person is going to be like. Are they going to be a happy, quiet, mild child, or a dervish of cries and poop who won't let anyone in the house get a wink of sleep? It's a short hop from there to more frightening questions like, "will I be a good father to this new little person? I think I'm doing all right with the first, but what if I can't handle two and I screw them both up?"

On moments like that I take a deep breath and assure myself that I'm doing everything I can. I'm doing the very best to ensure I screw up my kids just enough to be interesting, but not so much that they spend their lives living in a dumpster with eighteen cats and negotiating peace treaties between the banana peel pixies and the discarded fast food gnomes. 

I'm looking forward to meeting my son in October, but not without a certain degree of apprehension.

I take some small comfort in knowing that probably means I have some common sense. 

Work Sketching the Foglios of Comic Con

Work-a-Doodle: Sketch Dump

I'm doing the finishing work on a new Geek Speak, and while I'm doing that I would like to share some of what goes into my notebooks at work. These are some recent drawings, mostly done between taking notes while listening in on a conference call.

 

 

The first drawing, of a young witch on a broom, is me experimenting with drawing a pin up. It does occur to me from time to time that my notebook at work may not be the best place in the world for me to be drawing even mildly racy content like this, but when it turns out relatively well I convince myself it was worth it for the experience and practice. 

The next one is Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin and one of the major villains in both Spider-Man and Daredevil comics. For this drawing I actually pulled out my Prismacolor markers to do the shading. That's not something I can do a lot of at work. It takes time and attention that I usually don't have time to spare. On this day I was mostly doing time sheet updates, so I had a minute here and there to spare for coloring in a little bit. 

The third one is kind of a play on the song by Shakira. I had the thought, "if hips don't lie, what would they say?"

Finally, I drew Batman holding a toy from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. For those not hip to the MLP, that's Fluttershy he's holding. That's right. Batman's a Bronie. Deal with it. 

Comic Con - Day 2 - Continued

When I left off last I had waited in a long line (though not the long line) only to be shut out of getting into the Korra Panel. On the one hand, it sucked not being able to get in and get a look at what lies in store for the titular (snicker) Avatar in The Legend of Korra: Book Two, but if I had been able to get into that panel, it would have radically changed my entire day. 

As I said last time, after being disappointed at the doors to ballroom twenty I headed to the floor. Once I got to the floor I knew the author and artist of Girl Genius, my favorite webcomic, would have a booth in with the rest of the groups who were promoting webcomics. On my way to their booth, however, I got side tracked by another artist's display. The Noah Fine Art booth featuring works, conveniently enough by, Noah had amazing paintings featuring Disney characters. His work has a whimsy and a lightness to it, while maintaining solid technique that grabbed my attention and held me at his booth, even as I saw Kaja Foglio (who writes Girl Genius) walk past on her way to something elsewhere in the Con. I would like to have lingered over Noah's work a while longer, but I did want to try to catch one of the Fine Foglios while I had the chance. 

When I did make it over to the booth it was to find that both Phil and Kaja Foglio were elsewhere. I had a great talk with the lady holding down the fort for the absent professors. We talked about her being a preschool teacher by trade, but helping out in Studio Foglio, and about the comic in general. Then she mentioned that Phil was drawing for donations to the Cartoon Art Museum in another booth just a little distance from where Girl Genius was set up. I thanked her and headed over. 

I didn't actually get a picture of Phil, but he looked pretty much exactly as I had pictured him. I started talking to him and asked if he would mind drawing a picture of my daughter holding a lightsaber from a photo my wife had taken and modified (she added the lightsaber). He was happy to oblige for a fifteen dollar donation to the Cartoon Art Museum, which I was happy to hand over. This would be the best money I spent at the entire convention. 

Phil is a gracious, fun person, and he chatted with me while he drew, which he certainly didn't have to do. On a slight digression it's always interesting to watch pros work. They make it look easy, and every one of them has a different approach to starting a drawing.  At one point Phil asked me what I do and I said something marginally witty like, "I'm a project manager by day and a cartoonist in what little free time I get." The comment was innocuous in and of itself and he went on drawing and talking, but somehow the conversation swung back around to my drawing.

I don't really recall how we got there, but something was said and it opened the door for me to ask if he would like to see a drawing I had been working on of Agatha, the main character in Girl Genius. He hesitated for a moment before saying, "Sure, let's see what you've got." I can understand the momentary hesitation. In his position, especially attending events such as ComicCon, and presumably Emerald City Comic Con in his hometown of Seattle, he must constantly get people running up to him and saying "I'm a a cartoonist, would you like to see my sketchbook." Still, he invited me to pull out my Nexus tablet, open it to the drawing I had been working on, and hand it over. 

Whatever reservations he had appeared to vanish in another moment's hesitation before he said, "hey, I like this! This is really good!" Which he didn't have to do. He could have politely handed it back with something non-committal such as, "that's very nice," or, "nice, keep up the good work," or "is that it, whatever, NEXT!" The latter would not have been too unlike my experience in auditions. Not only did he not do that, but he took it a step further; escalated the awesome, if you will. He asked if I had comic strips up, which (if you've been watching this blog at all) of course I do, and he asked me to send him a link. 

Phil Foglio, an artist whose work I respect and follow, whose regular comic is a bright spot in my day every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, asked to read my comic strip. I never understood the expression "you could have knocked me over with a feather" until that moment. Honestly, I felt so light that a feather might have done me grievous bodily harm. 

I immediately went to the car to put his drawing of my daughter away. While I was down there, away from most prying eyes, and safely away from either of the Foglios, I immediately did an exuberant happy dance. I don't dance, at least not well, but I made an exception on this day. 

In its own way this was another authentic Con experience; making a connection, no matter how brief, with someone who creates work you admire. It occurred to me after the fact, in the midst of the glow from talking with Phil and while sharing the experience with Lendell Prime as we walked over to lunch, that if I'd been able to get into the Korra panel, that whole experience with Phil would likely not have happened. I probably still would have met him and spoken with him, but it wouldn't have been the same. 

I ultimately did send a link to this blog and, by extension, Geek Speak to Phil and Kaja through an email address they share. I haven't heard back from them yet. Whether I do or not, and whether he really intended to do so or not, that talk with Phil made my day. 

Sketch Dumping on Comic Con in San Diego

Work Day Sketch Dump: I Do The Weird Stuff

I was in a sketching mood today. One of the things I took away from ComicCon had nothing to do with the other artists at Con, the panelists, or anything else. On the last day of Con I was walking through artist's alley and chatting with the exhibitors there when I stepped up to a booth where an artist was drawing something for a boy who could not have been more than ten or eleven years old. The artist had the boy's sketchbook open in front of her and she was drawing one of his creations. His sketchbook caught my eye. There was no theme, no structure, no single character drawn over and over again. He was just drawing whatever was in his head and it looked so...free. So when I picked up my pencil to doodle at work today I thought of him, and I thought, "fuck it, just draw, don't try to make something that looks amazing, just do what feels good."

When I look at that last sentence and then at these drawings there's only one rational conclusion. I need serious professional help.

Comic Con Day 1 (Continued)

The Witty Women of Steampunk was really good panel where the creators talked about their work and the role of women both in steampunk, and in fiction in general. They broadened the discussion to talk about what steampunk is in general, and personalized it by discussing what it means to them. My notes form the panel are fairly incomplete but the moderator of the panel was nice enough to put the panelist's websites on the screen.

After the panel it was more or less lunch time. None of the four of us really know San Diego at all, so we ended up in a parking lot where Fox had set up some kind of big event for Axe Cop, their new animated series. Free pizza was part of the event, and we were both hungry and sleep deprived so we decided that not paying for lunch was a good idea. The lesson of today's story is this, don't make decisions about meals when you are hungry and sleep deprived.

After lunch we parted ways again. Some of us had panels to go to and some of us were going to the floor.

Not sure how I forgot to mention it, but during my wandering around the convention floor I wandered across a booth where a sculptor was selling his wares. In the collection of scantily clad gorgeous heroines I found this good looking fella. Friends and readers of this blog will know I'm a huge fan of the Savage Dragon by Erik Larsen. I saw this, found it it was sixty dollars, struggled with myself for basically three seconds, and bought it. Money well spent. I know it's a sixty dollar statue of a comic book character that's nowhere near as well known as Spider-Man but it's money. well. spent.

The sculptor signed it for me as well. There was a rumor circulating around the booth that Erik Larsen was at the con and might sign it if I could find him, but I was never able to prove that for a fact. 

Back to "current events"

The next panel on my list was "Advanced Digital Inking Techniques" with Brian Haberlin, co-creator of Witchblade and the artist and co-writer of Anomaly. After a lengthy plug for Anomaly, which is the longest graphic novel ever produced, Haberlin got down to dropping the digital inking knowledge. 

I've started working with digital illustration tools which is why I attended the panel in the first place, so I was looking forward to getting front loaded with some serious techniques. Not wanting to fuck around I sat in the front row. No hiding in the shadows like a timid shrinking violet for this eskimo. Haberlin set up, picked up his stylus, looked at the panel attendees leaning forward in their folding chairs, yearning for knowledge on brushes and opacity controls and said, "we're going to focus on Photoshop today." Fuck. 

I use Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, not Photoshop, so this was going to have almost nothing to do with me...and I was sitting in the front row. What followed was basically a painfully dull look into how great Photoshop is. To be fair the content was great, if you use photoshop, it was only particularly dull for me because I don't use Adobe's program, and I can't afford to buy it. With that said, Haberlin is a good instructor and I'm going to keep an eye on his site www.digitalarttutorials.com. He mentioned there might be tutorials coming for other illustration software packages like Manga Studio and Sketchbook Pro. 

From there I headed back to the floor where I picked up a copy of Battlepug and the Lone Wolf and Cub omnibus edition, volume 1. Lone Wolf and Cub is a very famous samurai epic about an assassin and his son that may have been one of the inspirations for The Road to Perdition. The other book, Battlepug, is a hardcover collected edition of the webcomic by the same name. It looked like a fun read, and the book was beautiful so I picked it up, which would not be the last of the impulse purchases for the weekend. 

Around this time I met up with Lendell Prime and we made our way over to artist's alley. While we were over there we met Philip Moy who was selling original panels from his run on G.I. Joe and Samurai Jack. Lendell Prime's face broke into the widest smile I've ever seen on him when he found the G.I. Joe original artwork. I'm pretty sure that smile stayed for the rest of the convention.

While we were wandering artist's alley Tea Leaf and Celluloid Girl called Lendell Prime and asked if we were ready for dinner. By then we were starving so Lendell Prime and I met them and we headed into the Gaslight District to find a place to eat. We finally settled on a Mexican Seafood restaurant. 

Something you may not know about guys when they hit their thirties, some foods you've been able to eat your whole life suddenly don't break down all that well. This means you get to be more prone to gas. Mexican food is one of those things that's a no no unless you live alone, or you've been married so long you've given up keeping track of who's farted on who. When we sat down I raised this indelicate subject as a gently as I could.

"Let's agree here and now," I said, "that since we're having vaguely Mexican-ish food for dinner (it was really more of a Mexican fusion type place), there's no judgement tonight. Even if one bed sounds like heavy artillery is shelling the city; no judgement." They laughed, but I don't know for sure if there was any judgement. I'll get to that in a minute.

After dinner we wandered the Gaslight District and ended up in the Chuck Jones Art Museum. I want to go back to San Diego for this alone. The walls were covered with the most amazing original paintings by Chuck Jones and others. The collection included iconic moments from some of the most memorable of Looney Tunes animated shorts. I looked at them and was transported back to the first time I saw many of his cartoons on Saturday morning television while staying with my grandparents at their Kansas farmhouse. I wandered the smallish space soaking in the artwork and reliving moments I thought I'd long forgotten when it occurred to me that my friends were waiting outside. With no small amount of reluctance I made my way out to the street and we headed back to the convention center.

The next thing on our list was the Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog sing-along. Tea Leaf, Celluloid, and I were really excited about this so we made our way to the huge conference room that had been set up for it. We arrived early, and there wasn't a line yet, so we were able to go right in, where we caught the last half of the Spike and Mike Twisted Animation panel. 

By this time all of us were beyond tired. Tea Leaf and Celluloid both looked as if they might happily sleep through the sing along, and Lendell Prime was looking grimly determined that he would not fall asleep until he was horizontal on something resembling a bed. I made the call and suggested that we didn't have to stay if everyone was getting really tired. There was a short debate, and just as everything was getting ready to kick off the sing-along we decided to head to the hotel. 

That first trip to the hotel was one of the most difficult drives of the whole weekend. It involved navigating surface streets in downtown San Diego so we didn't have to go through the Gaslight District, driving four different highways, then finding somewhere to make a u-turn when we found our exit in El Cajon. 

Exhausted, sore, and happier than any of us have probably been in months we checked into the hotel, got to our room, showers happened, and beds were staked out. I excused myself to sneak in a phone call with Mildly Sensational. By the time I got back the lights were out and all three were already sound asleep. I made my way to my side of one of the two queen sized beds (I was sharing with Lendell Prime), climbed under the covers and...did not go to sleep. 

Not right away, at any rate. Some asshole's car alarm went off about every five or ten minutes for an hour before I finally managed to drift off. When I did, it was the soundest, best night's sleep I'd had in a long time. I'd let go of being a square peg in a round hole for a day, and it had done me good. 

Doodling in a Sketch Dump

Work-a-Doodle: The Sketch Dump

So...holy crap...it takes a long, long, fucking-long time to do finish work on my comic strips using my Wacom tablet. What would take me an hour with my art markers, and would look more than passable, is taking me freaking days to do on the Wacom. The results look good, but my God I hope that it starts going faster as I get more accustomed to working with it. 

Anyway. I had promised two Geek Speak strips this week...That's looking like it's not going to happen. I'd still like to share some of my work, so I went back through some older drawings that I've had sitting in a folder for a while now. Mostly these are doodles taken from my notepad at work. When I started looking through the pages of doodles it reminded me that I'd been meaning to scan these for ages, and it just never happened...until now.

I've clearly come a long way, but there's still some good stuff in here. I'm presenting them here in no particular order. Enjoy. 

Months ago, probably closer to a year at this point my office had a problem with bugs, mainly cockroaches. Now, California doesn't really get roaches the way Texas or Florida do, but the roaches we do get are harder than hell to get rid of. I never actually saw any bugs myself, but the building where I work eventually did have to call an exterminator. Gross as that is, there's still something funny about it. 

I want to say this one came from watching a nature special about turtles that discussed how hard it is to determine their sex. That would be a great excuse, but I'm pretty sure it's not the case. 

In the end I think this is just me being silly. A little gross, too, but does anyone really mind?

This one was drawn a while ago, around the time that a co-worker's son was graduating from high school and going on to college in Boston. At the time I think my co-worker was saying something along the lines of there was no way her son would stay in Boston because it's too cold and he'd miss his mommy (not sure if that last part actually happened, but it kind of fits my co-worker). It occurred to me as she said it that she might have been setting herself up for disappointment. His college in Boston had to have at least a few perks like girls, epic St. Patrick's Day parties, and lots of really good beer. 

That, and seasons are pretty. People from Los Angeles lament the cold in other states the way a vampire laments the rays of the sun, but it's a kind of sour grapes situation. If Southern California got anything resembling real seasons I think most people would really enjoy it. 

I'm pretty sure this is one of the few drawings I've ever done that employed the use of a straight edge. 

This was drawn years ago, so I don't remember the context at all, but I'm pretty sure I was having a bad day at work. 

 

Another one that was most likely drawn on a bad day at the office. In spite of that I really like this one. It has that feeling of cruising along and then suddenly hitting a wall, either of your own making, or one that was dropped in your way. Is there anyone working in a standard-issue cube farm who hasn't beat their head on their desk from time to time? No? I'm the only one with forehead bruises? ...awesome...

Hulk Smash Puny Espresso

Not so Tiny Heroes

My wife and I sat down with our daughter tonight so Mildly Sensational could read to our little girl. While they read I pulled out the smaller of my sketchbooks and started doodling. The first thing that came out was a tiny-hero Daredevil that I'm reasonably happy with, but not so much that I want to post it right away. It's definitely not on-par with tiny Nick Fury. 

After drawing The Man Without Fear I naturally turned to drawing his on-again, off-again girlfriend/booty-call, the Black Widow. That one I will post at some point. The pencil drawing turned out really well, I just want to touch it up with ink before putting it out there forever on the interwebs.

By this time our daughter was calling for her third book, "other book, mommy, other book!" Since they were still preoccupied with Sesame Street, Doctor Seuss, and book about noses, I started on what was supposed to be a tiny hero version of the Hulk. It turns out it's more difficult than I thought to draw a tiny Hulk. The Hulk by his nature is not. tiny. Instead what I came up with was the idea of putting the Hulk somewhere you wouldn't ordinarily see him. That turned out to be a coffee shop. 

Coffee Bean and Tea Hulk

Randomly Posting the Fury of Nick

Random Thoughts

You know how I know deep down inside I'm really still a twelve year old boy? I think this is hilarious:

69, DUDE! (har har har)


Tiny Heroes: The Fury of Nick!

This time I wanted to try a hero who is a little more challenging. The latest incarnation of Nick Fury is awesome, but he's just a guy. Kind of like Batman (without the obsessive tendencies or sadistic neat to beat pure snatchers to pulp) all of his heroics come from his toys, his grit, and the twelve pound brass ones he hauls around between his legs. He's not really my favorite hero in the Marvel universe, but I've started enjoying him more since Marvel (rightly) updated him for the Ultimates.

Before the one-eyed super-spy in blue tights (seriously, what military would ever issue a uniform that consisted of anything you would call "tights") was given a cool make over as a love letter to Samuel L. Jackson, he was this middle-aged white guy with dashing (smug) white hair at his temples. He looked kind of like a muscly Hugh Hefner with guns. He was perpetually chewing on a cigar and glaring at people.

The original concept of for this character was a dated archetype more fitting the period post WWII or post Korean War. He was visibly better suited to fighting "commies" than dealing with the modern "war on terror" world we live in today.

As much as I love Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, I've never thought of Nick Fury as one of their best. The original character was so lame that in a made for TV movie that was ultimately (so to speak) released directly to DVD he was played by David Hasselhoff.

The reboot of the character shed the campiness that had followed him from his debut in the '60s. In the Ultimates, and eventually in the more "mainstream" Marvel titles, he's been given some gravitas and infused with an uncompromising nature that makes him feel like the crazy-dangerous super-spy he's supposed to be.

All of that said, it's fun to draw a little one-eyed guy holding improbably enormous guns.

Geek Speaking Gesundheit Arts

Geek Speak: Gesundheit
I don't remember what prompted this strip. It's one I did a while ago, and I think I was in the middle of dealing with a cold at the time. Nothing more to it than that, I'm afraid.

This actually reminds me of a collection of Bloom County cartoons I've had for most of my life. In the collection Berke Breathed included an illustration he'd done for an art class when he was a kid. It was of an astronaut sneezing mid-EVA and accidentally ripping out the hose that provides his suit with its atmosphere. Of course the astronaut's head is exploding, an effect he achieved by filling his mouth with red paint and blowing it onto the paper. His teacher, according to the anecdote, took one look at it and said, "It's awful. You're going to be rich." In his case it turned out to be true. Maybe I'll catch the same lightning with this.

Arts Education: Where Do the Oddballs Go from Here?
One of my oldest friends is a drama teacher in Colorado Springs. He recently put up a post expressing frustration with the state of his chosen vocation and lamenting that it gets harder for him every year especially when teaching an "arbitrary," "untested," and "useless," art. I don't know if the quotes he used were pulled from the article he was referencing, or things he'd heard from parents who don't approve of their kids getting involved in the theater, but it does reverberate with the rhetoric of current educational policy.

For most of my life it seems as though the rich, (predominately) white, (mostly) men who serve as our elected officials have been crying about the state of education. The remedy has ranged from shouting from the hilltops about the "three Rs" (anybody remember those? only one actually started with an R) to "no child left behind."

The trademark of legislative activity in education has been a stalwart focus, a zealous commitment to promoting education in math and science above all else. The way a co-worker jokingly put it recently was, "we're not going to beat the Chinese with art."

Arts education is something that is near to my heart. My dad was an art teacher, my friend is a drama teacher, and I took several art classes in high school and eventually went on to major in Theatre. Art is a diversion, a hobby, an avocation, but for me it goes beyond that. Creativity and the being engaged in a creative pursuit, be that writing, or cartooning, or acting, is the thing that pushes blood through my heart and fills my lungs with oxygen.

Arts education is more important even than that. Not all of us are meant to be programmers, or business leaders, or politicians, or accountants, or scientists, or mathematicians when we grow up. There are the oddballs, and I count myself in with this group, who see the world a little differently. The oddballs who place value on intangibles instead of material gain. The screwballs who see accumulating wealth as a means to an end, not the end itself. In a culture that values only how well you score in math and science, where do these people fit in?

The arts gives the oddballs, the misfits, the people who don't fit a place to go; a refuge. The world can be unkind to people who see it differently. I know I wouldn't be the person I am today were it not for the shelter provided by the theatre group in high school or the catharsis I find in writing and drawing.

To my friend I would say this:
Art, any art, is not useless or arbitrary, it is essential. You never know what a person educated in the arts is going to go on to become, be it CEO of a world changing software company or being elected president. For the sake of the oddballs, the misfits, and those like you and me who don't fit anywhere else you have to hang tough. Give those of us with nowhere else to go that place of refuge, a place where to belong.

Daddy Does Drawings

One of the joys of being a dad I'm finding is that I get to do creative things for my daughter. For about a week now I've been hard at work on some cartoons. Between the cartoons I draw other things, and one night I decided I'd do something special for my little girl; I'd do something that was just for her. She, like many a toddler, I'm sure, loves Finding Nemo, especially the scene with the whale. She goes nuts when it's time for the whale. I'm not kidding. She turns into a squirming, thrashing, squealing pile of crazy. It seemed like a natural choice for something to draw for her, and this is what I made.

When she got up in the morning I showed it to her. She took one sleepy look at it, then her eyes snapped open, she beamed her brightest little girl smile and yelled "oooh a whale!" Deep inside my heart my own inner child did a cartwheel. At some point during the same day my daughter was bouncing around the house and being generally disruptive because we'd run out of things for her to do, until I put the picture of the whale down on the scanner and printed out a copy. I handed her the image I copied from my sketchbook and a couple of crayons. She beamed that smile at me again and some secret little part of my soul where I keep my store of happy did a backflip. 

She took those crayons and the printed whale and did this:

I don't know if it's fridge worthy, but overall I'm pretty proud of it. 

After I'd drawn the whale it opened up a range of possibilities and sometime later that weekend, maybe the next morning, I was drawing a cartoon when my daughter crawled up into my lap to see what I was doing. The cartoon I was working on was a little more complicated than I could manage with a toddler all up in my business. I asked her if she would like daddy to draw an elephant. I don't know if she understood more than "daddy," "elephant," and that I was asking her a question, but she said, "yeah" and that was all I needed. I drew this for her in about ten minutes. 

Those of you who have toddlers or have had toddlers will understand that ten minutes is really the threshold for how long they can pay attention to anything, but I managed to get an excited exclamation of "ELEPHANT" before she scampered off to destroy something in her bedroom. 

Since then I've gone on to do a few more drawings for her in the same vein. Here they are. 

    

I really enjoy these, and more importantly my little girl really seems to like them as well. It's something I hope she doesn't grow out of too quickly, because I would like to go on making little cartoons for her. 

Geek Speaking of the Wealthy

Geek Speak: I Don't Pity the Rich

Which side of this do you come down on?

From the tone of the thing it should be pretty clear where I come down. I don't pity the "rich." To be fair, the few genuinely wealthy people I know don't want pity, and don't need it. They're doing fine without it. The point here is the wealthy of our country can take care of themselves. Public policy doesn't need to shelter them because they don't need government protection or special political consideration. They can take care of themselves. So, when I see wealthy people crying about the unfairness of "tax hikes," I don't feel anything but contempt for their naked selfishness. They should be asked to contribute to the system which has been manipulated to support their affluence and excess for the last thirty years.

The cartoon is in response to this photo which has been making the rounds on facebook. I've seen it posted by otherwise reasonable, rational, compassionate peole. This sentiment, however, is none of those things. To state that an entire group of people are less fortunate because of a shared characteristic or failing is not advocating a cause, it is trading in misinformation and prejudice and engaging in nothing less than bigotry.

For the idea on this man's poster board to be true demands that you accept the notion that people who aren't doing as well as someone who is wealthy, must not be doing well because they don't work as hard. This would be vastly untrue if the animosity aimed at those in this country who are struggling stopped there.

For the last several years corporations, the very wealthy, and the lobbyists they pay to influence public policy have been changing the conversation about income inequality and how most of us, but particularly those on the right, think and talk about the poor.

It makes me sick to listen to it, because it is no less than the language of hate. This kind of naked contempt didn't exist when I was growing up, and there has certainly been a division between the haves and the have-nots for longer than I've been around.

I was going to write a long vitriolic post on what I think of this, when I stumbled across this article on the Webcomics Overlook. The article itself is good, and I'd encourage anyone to read it, especially if they're interested in webcomics. For the purposes of this post I've taken the most relevant part and included it below:

5. Anyone can do it or Just put in lots of hard work and you’ll be successful.The latter first. If you truly believe that, then how come Tim Buckley makes way more money than David Willis? How come Chris Hazelton needs to run a kickstarter in order to do his comics full time after nearly ten years? As for the former, if that were true than we would have tens of thousands more people making a living off of their work. 

I tend to be optimistic but ‘just work hard’ is some of the most naive bullshit I have ever heard and it just pisses me off when pros out there imply others aren’t working as hard as they are.

As for anyone can do it, no. Not everyone has the ability to connect with an audience like some other creators. Rich Burlew isn’t your average writer. Jim Lee isn’t your average artist. They made better products than many of us could ever hope to and that is why people are willing to give them their money. Most creators are not interchangeable.

With apologies to the author I've included the full text of the excerpt so that no one can accuse me of doctoring his words to make my point. Yes, this is about webcomics, but the reasoning applies to any industry. The CEO of a corporation doesn't work any harder than the Spanish speaking woman on a work visa he pays to clean the office and bathroom. In fact she probably works harder keeping everything clean and scrubbing piss out of bathroom tiles than the CEO works all week. If all that was required to be successful was "to work harder" the CEO would be working for the janitor.

In the discussion of income inequality we need to accept that wealthy people and corporations in our country are doing fine. Corporate profits are at record highs. Income growth over the last three years has broken double digits for the top income "eaerners." We also have to accept that income for the middle and lower income brackets has not grown at the same pace. Income for those in the middle class has grown less than three percent and for those in the lowest income group the news is even worse. Their pay has actually contracted. 

The conversation needs to change again. Instead of allowing Washington to wrap its arms around the wealthy and corporations, we need to acknowledge those groups are doing fine. They don't need anyone's protection, and they can take care of themselves. Where we need to focus our efforts is on those working hard to provide for their families who don't pull down paychecks in the six (or seven, or ten) digits.

Will that mean ending some subsidies, closing tax loopholes, and taking away incentives like those that encourage American companies to outsource jobs overseas? Yes. Will that be painful for these corporations? Yes. But, and to end on a geeky note, in the words of Star Trek II: the Wrath of Kahn, "The good of the many outweighs the good of the few..."

There's no getting Away from Blue

Blues Clues: No Escape
My wife and I now have a two year old in the house, which is both fun and challenging. The big reason this age is referred to as the "terrible twos" comes from the child's tendency to test you...on everything. Here are some phrases you'll hear in the house throughout the day:
"Don't draw on the walls."
"I mean it don't draw on the walls."
"Do you want a time out?"
"No! I said no!"
"Don't play in the blinds."
"Don't balance vases on your head."
"The kitchen torch is not for little girls!"

One of the challenges of having a toddler in the house is keeping her engaged in something. We try not to be the parents who sit our kid down in front of the TV and let her zone out to inane programming full of garish colors and grating music, but every now and then you find yourself dangling from the fraying edges of the end of your rope and there's nothing to do but switch the idiot box over to something she wants to watch.

It is due mainly to that last part that Mildly Sensational and I have watched a lot of Blue's Clues. When I say a lot I mean that if someone mentions the show I immediately get the title song stuck in my head and it plays on an endless loop.

After watching so much of the show it occurred to me that you really should feel sorry for the main character, Steve (seriously, the first actor to star in the show's name was Steve). He appears to be trapped in a house that is seriously haunted, and the restless spirits have taken in on themselves to torment him by taking the forms of cartoon animals and household objects and force him to sing and play children's games.

I wondered what it would look like if Steve ever tried to reach out to the world for help. That led me to doing a rare full-color cartoon that turns some of the most beloved characters in the history of children's programming into evil, sadistic beings bent on tormenting an innocent captive. I can be a bad, bad man.

As grating as it can be after the hundredth time you've had to endure it, the show is very well done. It also seems to be good for our daughter, or so I tell myself to salve my conscience when I occasionally do break down and let her zone out in front of the azure puppy and the man in the verdant shirt.