Impressions from an Emergency Roompart 2

Impressions from an Emergency Roompart 1

Christmas Follow-up

This is a doctored version of last years christmas strip. Here's the original.

I skipped any updates last week, in case you didn't notice. We had a CRAZY run-up to the holiday, including taking Sophie to the hospital twice to be treated for dehydration. She's fine now - but it was a rough week for us. I've written a multi-parter on that, which I'll serialize here next 'cause that's what I do when my kid gets sick, i guess.

And that'll take me into the next year.

Hope everyone's holidays are going well, and best wishes for the coming year...

I guess I didn't have anything else to write about

I save the day!

Going through my files, I came across parts of a graphic that I was working on in preparation for a Webcomics Examiner article.



It was a take off on Phil Sandifer's concept of the infinite gutter to be written jointly by Phil and myself. It was an argument on the unique properties of space that the web brings to comics.

Traditionally, comics are restricted to two dimensions; x-axis width, and y-axis height. Much of comics' mechanics takes place in mentally bridging the gap between panels in the x/y-axis (the gutter). Phil argues that webcomics feature an additional axis in terms of their available archives. Your eyes naturally traverse the finite x/y plane and the forward/back links traverse the "infinite" z-axis. Phil argues that as much mental activity is completed across strips as is between panels in one strip, hence the term "infinite gutter."

I don't completely buy into Phil's theory, especially with regards his (apparent) definition of space itself. While the x/y plane is quantifiable space the proposed z-axis is purely conceptual in nature. Can it still be called space? Do the same mechanics as x/y panel transitions apply? These questions and the resulting discussion would have been the basis for the article.

It pretty much looks like the article is a dead issue by now, as I haven't even heard from Phil in about a year and the Examiner seems pretty dead anyway. So I guess it's okay to publish these here.





So, there. It's kind of a comic and I posted it on Wednesday, so I'm still on track for the week! Hooray for me!

For the record, I do think that something happens between strips (mentally). And I also think that the archives offer under exploited potential for monkeying around with narrative.

world changes, slowly

Apparently Tuesday is the new Monday. Imagine that.

Lotsa overtime at work - wearin' me down...

I got a haircut

Counting with Sophie

Son of Stupid Cat

There's just something I like about drawing these stupid cat cartoons.

What I did on my Thanksgiving Vacation - Part Three

So that's it. I spent most of my holiday just eating and smarting off with my siblings, so I didn't get any drawing done. Took me all week to tell you what would normally take just a few seconds of conversation. Ah, the magic of comics.

We did have a nice Thanksgiving, though. The whole family met at my parents' house in Illinois; Aunts and Uncles, Cousins... my brother flew in to Cleveland and drove the rest of the way with us. My sister even flew in from England (sans husband, however). We don't have a chance to all meet like that very often, so we all had a good time, I think. First time driving ten hours with Sophie and she did all right. The worst part was getting stuck in the traffic heading out of Cleveland from the Browns/Bengals game last weekend (after dropping my brother off for his return flight). Two and a half hours to drive what would normally be a less than one hour drive! Other than that things were great.

The other thing we did this Thanksgiving is go around telling everyone that Rachelle is pregnant with our second child.

Because she is.