blowingaway?

You know, I almost like the original prep-sketch of this last comic better than the finished one.


The progression seems somehow subtly easier in a way. It flows better.
I messed it up, somehow on the final rendering. Too much trying to wrestle with the materials (which, in this case were literally crumbling in my grip) maybe. Not enough attention being paid to the overall flow?
The final version seems to have lost something in the translation from sketch to re-sketch

Or maybe it's just me.

blownaway?

as seen at the yellowlight.

Well, this was supposed to go up last week (along with another truly tasteless gag which I thought better of than posting) but, whaddoyaknow? The Thanksgiving holiday got the best of me.

This is the last of the gag cartoons for a little while. I'm ready for something different.

I'll probably start with some simple sketchbooky-type comics and eventually start serializing short comics for a while.
I'm also now shooting for a weekly schedule. By "weekly," I mean one post a week. No set day.
So you can see why I'm calling this thing undisciplined.

Hope you liked the gags while they lasted. Should you ever wish to revisit these, they're archived at my site for easy browsing.

On to something else.

elegiac

as seen at the yellowlight.

Okay. Just a few more gags, I guess.
This week I showcase, once and for all, my lack of good taste.

icanbewhatyouwant

as seen at the yellowlight.

Are you tired of these gags yet?
Who's ready for something different?

definitionorjustabadpun?

as seen at the yellowlight.

thereisnohumorwithoutvictim

as seen at the yellowlight.

No text with this entry. Sorry.

okayokayokayokay

as seen at the yellowlight.

I had a bad day and this is the drawing that said day begat.
Really, it's pretty crappy. But it also has a kind of ugly charm, maybe?

I dunno. I may take it down soon. I may not.

ameetingoftheminds,i'mcertain

as seen at the yellowlight.

And thank you for reading.

youllonlyhurtyourself

as seen at the yellowlight.

The hazards of smoking, I guess.

allthingsmustsometimeend

as seen at the yellowlight.

It will. Someday. I promise.

letspretendthatthelikenessisdevastating

as seen at the yellowlight.

I've settled on a name to group these strips under:
Undisciplined.

Actually I settled on it a long time ago, but now I've committed to it. There.

iampreparedtoloseyou

as seen at the yellowlight.

Is it funny? Is it even supposed to be funny?
Who knows? I just follow my whims on these things.
At any rate, it's true.

howaboutacreepyhalloweencartoontoday?

as seen at the yellowlight.

Happy Halloween, everybody! Halloween is for creepy things, right?

In not so creepy news (and let me assure you, this is completely unrelated to this cartoon) today is the tenth anniversary of me getting married to my wife. And also vice versa. Happy anniversary, Rachelle! I love you in a completely socially appropriate manner!

lesimagesdelatrahison

as seen at the yellowlight.

You know, I should just quit after this one. As far as conceptual, formalist gags go, I'm never gonna be able to do any better than that.

Apologies to René Magritte.

Apologies to Scott McCloud, and to Tim Hall too, for that matter.
Apologies to David Lasky, and to Derik Badman.
Apologies to Emil Kópen ("So many cartoonists are afraid of words"). But I'm just being cute there. I mean Apologies to Dylan Horrocks, of course.

And Apologies to Alexander Danner, and Mark Danielewski, and Kenneth Koch (and Austin Kleon, just as well), and Jacob Lyon Goddard, and DRAW, and Saul Steinberg, and Mark Lombardi, and a million other cartoonists, poets, writers.

It's so simple, but it's got a lot of history behind it.

Apologies to you. And to you. And to everybody.
Everybody, everywhere. Apologies. Apologies.





It is a comic.

ifalltopieces

as seen at the yellowlight.

In the end he gets recycled. Like all gags.

justanotherclotheshorse

as seen at the yellowlight.

I fully expect these comic strips to continue to be the arbiter of men's fashion.

twoforno

as seen at the yellowlight.

Two comics in a row, riffing on the same theme but following almost opposite tracks.
Why, that could be called a duality in itself.
Appearing back-to-back like this, it's almost as if it were planned that way!


(it wasn't)

But, hey! Do you remember these guys?

justoneduality,please

as seen at the yellowlight.

This gag is either too subtle.

ohiamsosoclevertoday

as seen at the yellowlight.

This cartoon is a sight gag.
Get it? Sight gag?

Get it?

(rim shot)

withbroadcomedicappeal

as seen at the yellowlight.

When I was a boy, my big brother held on to my hand and he made me slap my own face. I looked up to him, and still do. He was trying to teach me something. Now I know what he meant.

He was giving me the idea for this strip.

dinnerdate

as seen at the yellowlight.

This comic kind of calls to mind something you'd see in the New Yorker, if the New Yorker ran comics with severed heads.
I drew this for a "real people" profile on me in the company newsletter at work. Apparently I am a real person and they felt it important to make note of that fact.

truestories

as seen at the yellowlight.

you'veseenittoo

as seen at the yellowlight.

lowbrow+rerun(already?)

as seen at the yellowlight.

politicalcartoon

as seen at the yellowlight.

andnoneofyourbusinessanyway

as seen at the yellowlight.

whatsinthepipe?

as seen at the yellowlight.

big angry

Another in a series. If you remember the first one of this set, I'll email you something like a dollar.

there be dragons

wait... does this spoil the ending?

Sorry about breaking your feed, here.

Announced today. Maybe you'd be interested to know that I've been awarded a grant from the Xeric Foundation to help me publish my comic strip, !
Pretty exciting news, for me. I join some good company in the current batch of recipients, as well as the former recipients (who include some of my favorite cartoonists)
I don't have many details just yet. I've got my printer lined up, and yes, it will be printed as one long strip (somewhere around 35 feet long) and look something like this:

(one of the mock ups I made as part of my Xeric application)

I'll have more details, of course, as I get closer to solicitation.

Anyway, I've taken down the archive I kept up as I was posting the rough draft here. It'll be back soon enough, but all re-drawn and stuff. Up top of this post is my original sketch of the story, which took about 45 minutes to draw and defined probably the next following two years of my comics making life.

Congrats to the other Xeric recipients. I'm looking forward to your books.
Special thanks to Alexander Danner who nudged me to apply for the grant in the first place.

And thank you guys for reading.

old comics

Remember me?

Haven't been real post-y of late, huh? Been pretty busy, but nothing I can show here yet.
I'm gonna try to get back in the swing of posting things, starting with some older stuff.
If you've been with me a while you may remember this one. A short story I drew, written by "Calamity" Jon Morris for one of his planned BOO! Halloween collections a couple years back. Jon's no longer displaying it at his webspace so I put it up over at my site. Thought I'd share it here too.

When Flies Were Big:

a brief lesson

If you look at this picture in the horizontal alignment, it's just a reg'lar old merman swimming along.


But if you turn it 90 degrees clockwise he takes on more of a topless trannie merman with a flair for the dramatic kind of vibe.


Context is everything.

do not be afraid of bad drawings

Another in my series of geometric breakdowns. Getting closer to what I want out of these...

More sketches:

It's good advice. Something I'm trying to take to heart.
Tico is our younger dog.


I've been playing with my kids' crayons lately. I've got an idea I'm toying with... a comic in this color scheme. Something abstract. Part of the the growing diaspora, I guess...

But I'll end this post with something more representational:

projections

Boy am I bad at this blogging thing lately.

I'm about halfway through redrawing my ! story. I'd hoped to be further along by now.
I've set a deadline to finish the whole thing by June 10th. I can do it but I've still got a lot of work ahead of me. Keeps me busy.
And I'm waaaay behind where I'd hoped to be on Uncertainty, too...
I'll get back to posting comics here someday.

But, hey! I built a wall this weekend!
The second-floor stairwell used to just open right into Sophie's bedroom. We had gates and everything, but her or Jamon falling down the stairs was always a concern. Chris helped me to build the barrier and to move around some of the electrical stuff. Now it looks like a real room up there. When you ignore all the still bare wall board.

Oh, yeah... plus I also fixed our flickering livingroom lamp!

Who needs comics when you can hear all that exciting stuff?

*sigh*

Here's another in an intermittent series of non-comic sketches. Not Quite Geometric.

titled

Hey! Remember when I used to draw stuff and post it here?

*sigh*

I haven't gotten to the inking stage in any of my bigger projects so I decided to take some time and work up these gags a little. Other than this it's been all Uncertainty and !...

You know who does finish things on a regular basis?
Boxbrown.
(how's that for a smooth segue?)

Boxbrown writes comics with a warmth and earnestness that's rare and appealing. His regular gig, a kind of slice-of-life gag strip called Bellen, is one of my favorite ongoing comic. Examining relationships is his thing (Bellen = Ben+Ellen, his two main characters) and he does it well, with honesty and humor and always a terrifically humbling sense of humanity.
Boxbrown's also just published a book of some longer form comics, done in a similar vein. Check out his Love is a Peculiar Type of Thing, self published and subsidized by a Xeric grant.
I wholly endorse this book.



Look at that! A sort of comic and a little write up of someone else's work! Not too shabby for a guy who barely posts anything anymore.
Now, to keep from appearing too competent, the concept doodle, for the above:

doodle drop

Why, oh why do we have to live in a world that allows insanely ambitious projects couched with unprecedented expectations to collapse under the burden of their own weight? Why, dammit, WHY?
(link from comics comics but maybe you saw it somewhere else...)


Here're some lousy doodles that I'm sure interest no one, but anyway...





I like the cat panels here:



the end.

"Uncertainty" process post

So, another reason I don't post much sketchbook stuff is that it looks like that. This is me figuring a page layout for the upcoming Uncertainty in my 5 cent Walmart spiral-bound notebook. The lines are awful and nearly unreadable, but that's okay because they're really only for me anyway. Naturally, I chose to lead the post with this.

Some stuff looks more like this.

Starting to work my layouts into a real drawing, still messy and loose... figuring things out.

Then I go to pencils.

(Sorry about the crappy scan. I'm keeping my pencils pretty light on this one...)

Then Inks, which I have yet to do, and some "post-production" type stuff on this one...

I'm treating this work with a lot more of an illustration-vibe than some (all) of my previous comics, giving each panel quite a bit of individual attention. I was even drawing it one panel at a time on separate sheets of bristol, but man does that not look right when you put it all together. I'm back to composing whole pages at a time.
Here's a finished panel, drawn in the old way, which I've since rejected.


And, yeah... that's what I've been working on.