In memiriam
“Laeta,” the uninspired small smiling imp, violently, horrifically decapitated at the moment of its much awaited debut.
As to why, if the website knows the edges will be chopped off and precisely how much of them, it does not make a bigger point of informing the non-paranoid non-artists using its site of things like this, or why it can’t factor the chop space it knows to within less than an inch into what size stuff is printed at, eliminating the need for every user ever to deal with it, rather than just making some lazy psd file with a red border that nobody is told about unless they ask, it’s because business. This website is advertised in tiny little letters on every one of my cards.
Though never myself a great proponent of its merits, I was disappointed at “laeta’s” misfortune. However much punishment the creature may have deserved, this was too much. A lethal injection would have sufficed. Another injustice: the blue dope toward the picture’s center came out totally unharmed.
2000-2008
In other news, some amount of years ago, a mysterious human known now only as Uncle Uterus told me, concealed amongst other bits of helpful information, that “laeta bovis” was the Latin way of saying “happy oxen.” (this was back when “Latin” was a dead language spoken by dead Romans and not a marketing buzzword to make Spanish people think The Media at large gives a chimichanga who’s in their murals so that they buy tacky de-harmony’ed sped up remixes of Train singles) I assumed the first half was pronounced “lay eat uh” and that it would make a good name for a perpetually happy thing but it seems to me now that is probably incorrect, so it is for the best of us all the creature is deceased. There is no other way this name which I have never actually applied to it but in my mind and sometimes not even then could have been amended.
And that is it! It is that! I am done for the year! I look forward to several hours of rest.
Yes, well, we must be getting back to business soon.
The repo man sez:
I had originally drawn a vagueconnection between the creature featured above and the bat-in-a-hat feature in that Pog calender page you displayed here at some point in the past. The truth, it would seem, is far moe sordid.
Porticulo sez:
This?
It took me many minutes to find that because I didn’t think to label any version of that picture (every picture has several versions) with words like gold, silver, bat, pot, pog, or calendar. Eventually I searched for “march” and it came up right away. I had forgotten about its miltaristic sense of order.
I do see the resemblance now. That I didn’t before is likely only a result of all of my “main” characters looking similar, and so I have had to train my mind to pretend they don’t.
There was a time when I drew only inaccurate bats. I distinguished them by making them different colors or wearing spectacles. Eventually it got to a point where it looked weird that they couldn’t turn sideways. Or rather that I couldn’t draw them that way and I was baffled by it, but I was no longer making their comic-like-stories at the time so there was no pressing need to figure it out. The problem was that over time they had grown slightly more “accurate” (represented here by the weird “finger” lines I learned from a book about bats along with nothing else), and the next step would have required me realizing that at no point during flight do they ever hold their wings like that, much less out from their heads, and they are incapable of just floating in space as I required them to do.
They yet survive in limited numbers, and I have been informed that there is one hiding somewhere in the vicinity.