still friday, and I should have put a dope in there. even with peter the phoenik bird fulfilling a dope-like role I think that would help me feel better about it. it would mean one more dope that is there and not here.
I keep forgetting i put that dumb texas belt buckle there. I feel reassured whenever somebody acknowledges it. There is a tendency for fan-art to be very reverent and homagey without having anything to say beyond “hey! a popular thing exists! and I have tied myself to it!” The Texas isn’t making a point at all but it is distracting enough to keep the piece from drowning in self-indulgence. I indulge myself to include Texas belts but most people don’t konw that.
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Friday now! The picture is “finished” enough to post on websites where I cannot replace the image but I still think I have better avoid looking at it since there is definitely stuff still wrong with it. There will always be stuff wrong with it but I have dealt with all the wrong stuff that is at my level and within the range of what I can tolerate without taking a prolonged break from it, but I already put off dealing with the sketch for several years and I most certainly do not want to be putting this away until 2024 and having nothing at all to show for whatever the heap I was doing the past four weeks.
I cannot help thinking that the real value was forcing myself to learn a faster way of changing layers and controlling transparency because ultimately this doesn’t look a whole lot better than the awkward garbage I was doing 10 years ago. Individual bits are more skillfully done but the whole looks like an inorganic mess. Spending weeks making pictures like this will not get me closer to out of the hole! It was not supposed to take weeks or have hole-rank-improvement as a goal, but anything that does take that long needs to pay off in some way that a product this irregular cannot. However the RELATIVE payoff of not working on it any further should be fairly pleasant.
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I forgot to put out the trash for wednesday but I did poke away at this picture some more. It still needs help but less help than it previously needed.
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not really complete but the areas in massive trouble are by now largely localized to the lower right corner and I can fiddle with that some more and probably update this before anyone apart from me is realistically likely to see it.
It is based on a scene in the video game “Shining Force II: Ancient Ceiling” with an attempt at analyzing and adhering to the concept art far in excess of my organic capabilities or what anybody else would notice or care about.

i should have a drawing to post on tuesday. I should also have had it on sunday but it is a tricky drawing. everything is tricky these days! even that nemitz picture which was simple became very tricky and unpleasant once I attempted to talk about it so ideally i will say very little on tuesday.
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a needlessly nemity variation on a widely circulated image of uncertain origin

I am fascinated by this image, and plainly a lot of other people also are, often altering it to suit their needs. The envelope is apparently from 1895! I found this using the tineye reverse image search. Once in a while that actually works, yes. So I presume the picture is from before then, though how much before then I am unaware.

At my home from 1985 to 2001 this game was in a bathroom closet that never seemed to be closed, maybe it couldn’t be closed. I never saw the game be played, in fact I don’t believe I even saw the back of the box until I found it for sale on e-bay, but I always remembered the drawing.

I see now that Word Of Mouth’s is the only version to have a hat and non-clenched hands, and after comparing them I saw that its hands indeed had a more casual 1960s low budget school house rock animation sort of style to them than the rest of the drawing.

It was only years later, some time after the feature film was released, that I became aware of Sweeney Todd using a very similar drawing. I was only able to compare them recently, and saw that Todd’s is drawn by a different hand. I appreciate that Frank Verlizzo’s Sweeney Todd version redrew it outright to make the alterations less out of place and to match the Angela “Murder She Not-Yet Wrote/Did” Lansbury mutant that had to be drawn fresh. Also back in the 1970s fewer people assumed you could just change something on another person’s drawing or song and copyright it exclusively for yourself forever.

Another odd bit is that the one on the left was drawn to resemble Angela Lansbury but obviously the one on the right just is that same guy it was before. He does VAGUELY resemble the drawing but only as much as any other large 19th century man with his hair parted in the middle would, and yet that was enough. Verlizzo didn’t even incorporate the suspenders and nobody ever thought to ask: does this drawing actually look like the character?

Ironically, the Johnny Depp Todd DOES look like the drawing, wearing a vest and striped pants with messier side hair but the film never used that artwork in promotion. Presumably there was concern that Helena Bonham Carter looked less realistic than the cartoon Angela Lansbury.

unlike Todd’s, the collective soul version of the very angry man edits the an imprint directly and poorly and it is obvious (and the print itself is somewhat shoddy, as if somebody scanned a t-shirt that it had already been printed on). The whitish glow and white (or actually green)-tinted shadow against an inappropriate-colored backdrop resembles a vintage geocities gif and the mouth looks like somebody drew it with a mouse in GIMP. However, gimp and geocities didn’t exist then. Somebody had to work much harder to make an edit this bad in those days.
My older brother Colberon had this album and I had to ask him what album it was that had the Word of Mouth man on the cover, and fortunately he remembered. I don’t know what the MUSIC sounds like; it probably isn’t good if they think this cover looks good.

ohhhhhh it’s THAT song, the heaven let your light shine down band.

neh nehneh nehnehneh nehnehneh nehneh neh

yeah

I forgot Colberon used to listen to slightly more palatable garbage off the radio before he was actually in bands. I figured it was some mopey cheaply produced garbage like I used to find in our shared Kazaa folder years afterward. “Sparta’s” singer sounds like a sick puppy and the music sounds like what I hear while passed out when I am sick myself.

ehhhnyway, wikehhhpedia sez:

The title is claimed to be just lines lifted from that annoying Paul Simon song about wanting me to be his body guard. Why name your entire debut album after irrelevant lines in somebody else’s song? How can you have any respect for a band about which you believe that? That would mean the bums weren’t even trying. And the “fact” has been on the page so long that obviously loads of folks are quite willing to believe it is true, while I seeing that statement for the second time knew I needed to look it up. AND the actual Simony lyrics, apart from being fairly strangleworthy, don’t include the “and things left unsaid part.”

I am tired of garbage like this. I used to think it was funny when I found dumb lies on wikipedia but now it just makes me mad because people who know nothing will paraphrase those lies to prove they are smarter than and dismiss someone like me when they don’t know a ding dang thing, and then hundreds of other fandom wikis and automatically generated clickbait landfills will copy all the same junk and then after being established long enough each can be cited as sources by any other.
I don’t even care about this album and I easily proved both these statements to not be provable. I went there because I was angry about one thing and then became angry about something else in the same paragraph.
I don’t need my edits to be permanent, but I like knowing that anybody who goes to revert them will have to become aware of how annoyed I was. I was in a bad enough state to not realize I derisively used the word “bit” twice. I haven’t been that angry since somebody claimed [adventures of] Lomax was voiced by Kath Soucie, even though Lomax has the exact same voice as every other character in the game and only says things like “oh no!” and “let’s go” that sound like the same pitch-shifted probably sound-effect guy voice samples used in Lemmings 2.

I was kidding, sort of, with the manner in which I present these objections, yet this sort of thing really is a problem.

Soucie is an actor popular for squeakily voicing female often animal-based cartoon characters that became the target of lascivious affections from viewers, some of them extending their taste in animated wank fodder on to soucie herself. I don’t know WHY such a person NEEDS her to be Lomax’s voice, but now it is phrased countless different ways out there, so that each is harder to identify as copied from a casual falsehood on wikipedia, and I doubt Soucie remembers every single character she has given a voice to and every name that character has been known by, and maybe eventually she will also believe she voiced something called “Lomax.” But she didn’t! True enough, real lemmings don’t voluntarily run off cliffs to kill themselves, but 70 years ago Disney’s crew filmed some lemmings being deliberately shoved off a cliff just because they thought that was interesting, and real people younger than me still believe that happens so in comparison the lomax matter perhaps seems like a relatively benign invention.
Some people just NEED trash like that to be true for their lives to have meaning. And I get angry about it because my life also has no meaning because everything is run by imbeciles who trust fiction written by nobody to dismiss real people in their own orbit. msg, gmo, qanon, nft, sjw, inherited lies and stupid abbreviations everywhere. Even over stupid inconsequential trivia. Perhaps especially over that. I am a pariah across all the lands because I don’t trust anyone who tries to tell me who to trust, and that is typically a condition for peaceful coexistence.

I of course blame nemitz.

comic strip part 3 page 52 of that
nope nope nope I am not getting any faster, even with blatant background recycling, but this page had an unusually high amount of points for me to needlessly make the process harder with. in fact I didn’t get to all of them yet but everything RELEVANT is in there, I believe, for now.

commission drawing for dookingplaza of the twitter website. Which is to say I was given money to make this, which is probably just about the silliest thing to spend money on. Imagine not being able to buy a pizza because you spent that money buying a nemitz instead, truly tragic The elpse is there also but I am more experienced blaming nemitz.

Yes indeed the scene shows this edition of these two suspicious imps resting in this manner in roughly this sort of place.
I seemed to like drawing some of the foliage here. The fooliage however is more difficult to justify.
it is frustrating to see the date on that page and realize I posted it almost five years ago and have only just inched past that section of the “story” in the 36 subsequent pages! However I have in the finished pages and the adequately legible scripted bits sorted out numerous dangling chad “plot” points so theoretically I should be able to move forward more concerned about what is going to happen than what already has, even if my speed and cultural references continue to be two or more decades behind.
I forgot to include elpse’s rope belt, but even after I noticed it I forgot it again, and Mr. Plaza didn’t seem to notice it either so it might not be important, at least not to those who are not elpse. Ordinarily I find rope belts funny and it is possible this scene was not supposed to be funny so it might be best not included anyway, apart from sparing you the unspeakable boredom of reading about how I forgot it.

I have a really great prank planned

I got this back in fourth grade, which was probably roundabout 1993, from a school book fair or something because I would buy ANY book of comic strips that appeared in a weird place, and the character looked sort of like Calvin of “and Hobbes” fame anyway, and I had all the books with actual Calvin in them. I had never seen this big Nate that is smaller than a pencil before and have not seen it since,

but apparently it found an audience somewhere eventually among influential scumbags.
I don’t know how you make a tv series about a kid who draws comic strips in his note books, or why you need to save money by making it 3d since it would probably cost 2 cents to animate the notebook sections, which easily comprised about a third of the natebook that I had, assuming the tv series doesn’t just opt for static images.

I still had the book, along with this from the same book fair, a large hard cover edition of Roald Dahl’s The Minpins, which wasn’t actually mine and I don’t know how I ended up with it, but had HAD it so long i stopped mentally being aware of it, and several Cracked Magazines in a trash bag where they’d been at least ten years as I was always weird about throwing things away, but amidst trying to get the house sold last June I finally did, and I guess this tv series being made is revenge. I don’t know anything about it except for that picture, but I don’t really need to; I am 80% assured to hate any animated series whatever it is, this just happens to be a character that I recognize.

But it does go to show, if you stick to your craft, 30 years later a soulless corporation may commission an ugly computer mockery of it while desperate for new material not spun off from stuff they’ve had on the air almost as long or produced by sexual predators they finally had to fire after too many people found out they were covering up predation.

All this is not to say I hated the comic strips; I preferred the Nate book to the Marvin book, and it was my first experience with the expletive “dang!,”

which prepared me to encounter GRAYDANG in doom some time later, but I didn’t care enough to make an effort to track down more of Nate’s biggery. Meanwhile I eventually acquired each Calvin volume, though admittedly those were more common sights in book stores and finite in number.

I remember being really bothered by the way Lincoln Peirce drew the breast zone on Nate’s sister Ellen and apparently later other characters. I do not understand how this is preferable to not detailing a character’s chest at all.

However the bignate fandom wiki, which exists, features graphics which indicate this specific matter was toned down at some point. Peirce still draws mouths on the fronts of the heads regardless of what way they are facing.

the wiki also features up to the minute updates about which characters’ hair is pulled too close to their faces.

you are missing the bigger picture that Gina is a living cubist painting.

I additionally learned there was a big nate novel series by the same author that is REALLY banking on one remark from Jeff Kinney, whose “ugly comic strip about dork going to school excused by being ostensibly drawn by character in the comic” work actually came out a full 13 years after Lincoln Peirce’s and made heaps more money, and I wonder if Peirce knew the publisher was putting that line there. It is on all eight of the books,

and is also on reprint editions even less subtly. He definitely knew by then, I suppose.

Ah I said I hadn’t seen “big nate” since reading that book I had, but then I remembered I looked at its syndicate website at some point because I found and saved this extremely tacky strip from 2011.

I wonder how this works; how is a perpetual 12-year old commemorating the tenth anniversary of a national disaster that occurred when he was two years old? Or does this serve to acknowledge that he is in fact much older than that and simply not aging visually, like an elf?
Perhaps every moment of Nate’s life exists in its own separate timeline where he had been two years old ten years before, and in this one he has been surrounded by stories of heart-rending tragedy about nine-eleven and, unlike my cousin Delainey, about the same age, at the 9-eleven museum in New York City, or myself, mildly older than that on the actual nine-11, experiencing disillusionment and social terror at just existing every single day, totally over with being ordered to care about the one time people older than them experienced it, and got interviewed about it, and got validated in feeling that way, Nate REALLY relates to IX-XI. Alright that bully kid is STILL going to wreck that dopey pair of mounds, because the only thing bullies hate more than you standing there looking like that is you trying to get out of what’s coming to you. The only way to make bullies respect you is to beat them in a fight or make them laugh, and Nate, as the title character of a daily syndicated comic strip, is never going to substantially alter his behavior to get tougher or become funny so obviously those are both out. The only way that sand sculpture stays up is if bigger kid has mega right wing parents/guardianship that have hammered into him how SACRED 9-11 is, and new york’s FINEST, and the MEN AND WOMEN OVERSEAS, and PEARL HARBOR, and BOOTSTRAPS, in which case he is going to murder Nate and threaten Nate’s buddies into hiding the body for daring to invoke the divine power of 9-11. He will then call the newspapers, tell them he made the sand towers, get an award from the mayor and the city will make a bronze cast of it and display replicas at every intersection.

also: who the heck does this? places the end of their tongue out one side of their mouth to show how hard they are working. It is also in the title logo and apparently numerous other nate strips even without considering the logo. I sure don’t do that. I hate the feeling of tongues on my skin, whose-ever they may belong to. I would definitely have to scrape-wipe that part of my face afterward with tissue paper. I don’t think I have ever seen somebody outside of a comic strip or my mother’s description of a Norman Rockwell painting do that. And I don’t know what it’s called and searching for pictures based on the description is getting me way too many photographs of gross mouths so I cannot research this further. But my belief is that nobody really does this.
It is like talking while pointing one finger upward.



None of them are real people! I drew nemitz (orange annoying imp) doing it because nemitz does stupid things that are annoying, and even mit doesn’t engage in side-tonguing.

actually now that i think of it, the dork from goblins 3 looks sort of like nate (but not at all like calvin). they both have weird gravity-defying black spiked hair that looks more like grass and hold both feet in the exact same direction when facing to the side but only turn one of them and all the way around to face frontward, marking a considerable, charlie chaplin-esque posture change.

well THAT is the sort of thing i notice! too late to try and change it now.

some people notice other things.

this has no relevance but it is the specific inspiration for me referring to dopes as “decadent” on one or more occasions.

the end of the rainbow seems pretty overrated these days

this is less topical than it would have been had I been able to post on march 17, but Gold Bond fortunately does come in a topical variant. I don’t actually know what it does but nemitz probably doesn’t either and the dope absolutely doesn’t.

I acknowledge that this is rather similar to the stupid sketch I added on the previous entry.

initially mit was stepping on the pot with one foot but the pose was not functional. nemitz is not functional but mitz distribution of weight usually is. The bottle mit is holding in the final version is still out of scale with the ones in the pot because it seemed too stupid to bother correcting; plainly this scene does quite enough bothering on its own!

The initial “idea” of this was to redraw legend of zelda sprites based on how i remembered interpreting them as a child looking at a blendy television screen, so they don’t all have a point, and then the idea itself got somewhat warped as I added more figures.

my elder brother used to refer to the lamnola as “the toilet flusher,” as in “here comes the usher, the ol’ toilet flusher,” and I didn’t really know what that meant but I thought it was funny and always remembered it. Years later I realized he probably meant “toilet brush,” and so I took the initiative of drawing it as one. He had also at one or more junctures declared that Rudolph the Six Gun Shooter had a very shiny gun, and that if I ever saw it, I would drop my pants and run, even though I would run far more effectively without the preceding action.

The “gel” blobs were my favorite monsters when I originally played the game and I made up a dumb song about them. I do remember the tune and it is not worth reproducing, but the words to it were
We fat men
we like you
we bouncy bouncy bouncy bouncy
you kill us
we bounce on you
cuz we fat men we like you
but you keep that between us
I didn’t see any way to misinterpret the form for this but wanted to include one anyway!
I also remember playing the game one morning and was in level 3 quest 1, with the blobs, and my father saw this going on, attempted to sing the song, and I yelled at him for it because kids are jerks, and I also recall precisely how he got the tune wrong, and I today wonder how different it would have been had he been permitted to finish. We should have collaborated on an album about stupid nintendo monsters, and then he would at least deserve to get yelled at.

I don’t know why I didn’t think to include a “peahat” in this (or 2019’s very important hat video, especially considering i inadvertently put one hat scene in there twice) because as soon as I learned what it was called, I think from a television advertisement for the game, I always thought of peahats as actual sentient, wrathful hats, possibly with bladder issues, since I didn’t see it spelled out and couldn’t read and that makes as much sense as associating them with little green vegetable balls, and that is very much in the spirit of the drawings up there, even if more mentally than visually.

And alas now this has to happen instead.
the fbi should start its own peahat club and then arrest everybody who tries to join. yes nemitz would definitely attempt to join additional peahat clubs apart from mitz own. It now occurs to me that any hat nemitz wears while posing proudly instantly becomes stupid and incarceration-justifcation.

You will possibly need to click at this in order to be able to read the words in the event you are interested in doing that.

I have told of the encounter that inspired this a few times before I went and made it. One person claimed to know what a fort night dance was but was unable to explain it, and I was uninterested in personally investigating.
The intent of this comic strip was to express frustration in relating to other people, not that I just don’t know what sort of music I like or how to find it; I have been hoarding it for decades now! Rather I think people who rely on youtube, spotify or ueck record stores to provide music for them suffer more than I do in this respect. I can hear what I want when I wish to and need not worry that I will abruptly lose access to it if stuff gets deleted, my connection goes or what have you.
obviously if I still have to type out an explanation then the comic strip has failed in some way but it still provides a foundation for an explanation that people will attempt to grasp, whereas when it is ALL text it is more likely to be completely ignored, or perhaps worse, skimmed.

I seem to have multiple versions of this image sequence; one says “energetic” and another says “Japanese” and I no longer remember which was an edit to try and be more clear. “Video game music” on its own means essentially nothing at this point, as you can put sappy acoustic guitar drear or imbeciles yelling over static into a video game and legally it qualifies as “game music” and somebody will mentally contrive a way to think I am referring to that if I say I like video game music, as if I am that arbitrary and simple. Because, in fact, I often am; there are foods that I know contain certain ingredients that I don’t want to think about, but I can eat those foods so long as the ingredients are not brought to my attention within close chronological proximity of my eating the food. And I just spent over an hour removing tags from “new” bedding material (it formerly belonged to someone else), including the inside of pillow cases where they were never at risk of coming in contact with my skin, because otherwise I will have dreams about the tags somehow getting me if I succeed in sleeping no matter how far away and rolled up into the . But about music my arbitrariness only extends to not wanting to hear anything from someone that I feel personally secretly in competition with, but nobody knows that. Nobody can guess the stupid rules that control me! I should* make a comic strip about that!
*n’t

Yes I think “Japanese” was the earlier version, because I didn’t want someone saying something like “BUT WHAT ABOUT ROB HUBBARD?” But for every Rob Hubbard that made the best use of their technology and did interesting things with it there are seven Kingsley Thurbers who banged random notes on a keyboard, painted bad electric guitar sounds and default spc kit trumpets over them and did the base minimum a job required. Apart from that early western developed video games rarely had more than a few tracks, if they had more than one, while Konami, Namco, ah ahh ahhhh-Arsys, whoever, were diapercharging games with heaps of music as soon as the technology permitted, and sometimes they even credited the people who made the music!
Anyway even having just the one word in there breaks the flow and I should prioritize entertainment attempt value over information since as noted I inevitably end up explaining everything anyway. weh