Tintin-related commission for relaxingdragon.bsky.social in which Rascar Capac, he-who-unleashes-the-fire-of-heaven, gives a brief demonstration of his abilities to a pair of bewildered onlookers.

initially one of my recurring fools was requested to be in the chair, and subsequently this purple one was suggested, and seems to be handling the situation with more decorum than most of them might.

in fact just over ten years ago I drew this same character in a similar scene also borrowed from a tintin book. I may have done a better job then! however, I appear also to have drawn an awful creature known as “nemitz” into the background which utterly disqualifies it. Maybe that is why I seemingly never mentioned it here. But sometimes that’s just how things are! The world is a treacherous place!

Especially da worlda tin tin. an’ me! wuf!

captain dope deserves only your scorn and derision! it is NOT a real captain!

unless if by “married” you mean “infuriatingly smiled at for an indefinite period” captain dope has no power, much less authority to assist you.

exclusively for the purpose of annoying me, nemitz replaced the bottom of this boat with a screen door and then rowed unwelcomely toward me while smiling.
as to HOW nemitz replaced the bottom of that boat with a screen door, which surely should be beyond mitz capabilities, I know not, but I do know that were it a useful thing to do nemitz could not have done it. when nemitz is around stupid things just HAPPEN.
including captain dope. I had hoped to never see captain dope ever again. Perhaps there is still time not to.

just two days ago i noticed the furnace in the basement here said “granby” on it, which reminded me that nemitz once said “eestgranby” and that I even called mit out on the deed.
the very idea, the absolute audacity, for it to even be plausible that nemitz would DARE declare “eestgranby” in my presence is itself unforgivable.
potentially but not necessarily forgivable, me attempting to integrate leaf shadows for the first time ever across the front of snikpel (angry creature at fore of boat) several minutes before posting this.

why would you name your steel tank company after a nemitz quote unless you were producing military grade tanks because you wanted to remind yourself to shoot nemitz with them?

pog explodes. must be tuesday.

unlike the case with the walking animation, I have no difficulty letting go of the old version

here is an attempt at a video showing what this looks like. A particularly annoying sound effect in there, which has been there since always, that I never realized was annoying until I put it into a video is presently meant to only play a third of the time but I don’t hear its two partners in here at all.
i neglected to show how easy it is to get trapped by the pogs. that should have been the main idea; why bother shooting them otherwise? in fact they DO destroy the player right after the first clip cuts out. why did i cut that out? I don’t remember, but it would take another twenty minutes to put that back in and I need to go for a walk outside good night. maybe i will put up a better video later!
the snikpels are unusually aggressive for a doom-engine monster. in the final “game” I won’t put so many of the shooting type into the same room. probably. This isn’t a real level anyway; just a test zone because none of the existing levels were designed for… well none of them were designed.
I THINK i can make the explodo-pogs create a circular blast impression directly on the floor, drawn as part of the floor, rather than a distracting sprite, but I haven’t attempted that yet. that is why I don’t like to make videos; there is always something that isn’t ready yet that I feel like is just about to be ready! Also the video capture and video editing softwares fight me every step of the ways, and they usually win, but I don’t ever remember that they are going to do that so that is not an effective method of discouragement.
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yes I can in fact make them leave a mark on the ground but it doesn’t work pleasantly on inclined floors. it stops in the up direction and floats over the down direction, both looking silly and allowing other objects to be partially underneath it. from what I understand “flat sprites” simply don’t work on ramps and probably won’t ever. Ramps are a novelty anyway and I usually prefer the orderly appearance of stairs!
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10-17 456pm also it seems that the microphone i have been relying on the past few years no longer functions, and I don’t know if that is because its function has been compromised or because computer manufacturers became prejudiced against microphones that aren’t attached to “headsets” and made them much more difficult to get working. I bought some weird port merging device which allowed the microphone to work on the previous computer but as this machine is newer it may have awareness of my present method and require a different purchased object to get past the latest unnecessary obstacle. unfortunately basic functionality is a bit more than a novelty!

10-16-2021 1201am: i thought i would make a quick video for today/yesterday so of course it isn’t quick at all but it is already late so i am not going to not do that to save time either.
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the new snikpel graphics seem to be “working.” there is still plenty to do, though!

for example something urgently needs to be done about THIS.

these monsters I still have yet to begin redrawing/redesigning. I forgot I made so many of them! the nemitz and lope became too specific of characters since I originally inserted them into this mess and no longer seem functional in these roles, particularly since they condone dopes so much.

the new pog can walk at least, and doesn’t need to do much more than that, mercifully.

only five angles now but I do not think the asymmetrical highlighting was necessary.
There is something very determined and stupid about the old version that I still like, particularly on the east-facing angle,, and maybe I shall use it as a base for another imbecile eventually. Because why would I allow for the possibility of this ever being finished?

I scream you scream we all scream for nemitz’s immediate and unconditional termination
I can tell nemitz is VERY proud to have served that. Of COURSE nemitz owns a GOLD scoop. which is to say, nemitz STOLE a gold scoop. or stole a regular scoop and painted it gold. Or most likely stole a scoop and gold paint and annoyed somebody else into painting the scoop gold. What a thoroughly stupid and complex sequence of occurrences.

However, why would anybody go to a store where that thing is behind the counter, much less initiate a transaction? and then why would you stand there and watch while nemitz delivers this ludicrous order, and THEN have a problem? Those customers should be fired also.

I had “chris” under toppings section early on in production because the father of my niece is named Chris with the actual last name of Topping but it seemed improbable he would see this, and most of the people who will see it likely do not know who he is. Of course chris is still a strange thing to have on your dessert so please do not go and do that just because nemitz isn’t offering to do it for you. There are more stupid possibilities than nemitz can possibly get to, which is one of mits few redeemingish qualities.

wurf this took long enough.
two supplemental pages for book 4 of this, showing something that is mildly alluded to later, since I introduced the idea of these dumb blobs so long ago without a plan, thinking a plan might arise, and then it never did and I forgot about them for a while. They are placed as 63 and 64 for now just so they will come after 62 but I want to put 62 earlier.

what is presently page 3-01 i may break into two pages since it is too cluttered for what it shows and it may work as 2-65 instead so the book gets and extra page, and then also i can end on a revelation with actual implications rather than the lurking robot since that ultimately is a non-issue.

Somehow it took me two weeks to draw these pages even though hardly anything is happening. The machine design was frustrating and I worried it looked too simplistic, yet the pages are still hopelessly cluttered. In fact I had a totally different idea for this insert from august 2019 but then COULDN’T FIND IT nor any sort of script describing it when I finally got around to dealing with it a year later, until a few days ago when I was looking for something else. And I couldn’t remember anything ABOUT it, either. In fact I eventually convinced myself I hadn’t made it at all in order to make myself give up looking for it. That it was too long to fit on one page is the SOLE detail that I recalled and that prevented me from totally believing it didn’t exist. I seem to have more anxiety about things not fitting on pages than what they actually are.
What this IS, whatever it is, it does not completely contradict what I did use, so it can be used as a foundation for a similar page later. probably for the best that I didn’t find it, for the book 4 spot, since this openly shows (or would once it was drawn better) kumquat becoming kaklabesk, and also some baser form which i have no recollection of designating as part of the process. since i fussed so much over the way i presented kumquat being kaklabesk in recent “book 6” pages, inserting an earlier page where i show it more blatantly would seem counterintuitive. Which would also be consistent since nothing I do is intuitive but there is still plenty on today’s pages that doesn’t work so don’t be concerned about that.

a startlingly elaborate commission drawing for someone known as Animancer featuring Luck, the jerboa type person, not quite succeeding at golf and possibly other things.
I had not initially set out to make it elaborate and thus some components seem incongruent. additionally the fire department has better things to do than keep getting pog out of trees.

oh fleeps I never made a website entry out of this

Obviously we are collecting boots today. I don’t see how you could have POSSIBLY messed that up. Hey, fool! We are not catching fish here. And yet you caught one. You couldn’t even catch cholera by ingesting the Vibrio cholerae bacterium, and still you caught a fish. Good job. “Good” as in “opposite of good.”
Atrocious. Typical nemitz move.

tennish years later

nemitz (orange imp) seems to be improving mitz skill at fishing. improved for nemitz, i mean. Presumably elpse (green imp) has something better to do. I hardly think there could be anything worse to do.

meanwhile I have I have not gotten much better at drawing!

on that page
older version
very older version

what better way to honor the recently ceased publication that was one of my major influences in artwork and comic strips than by removing the most blatant reference to it?

I wanted to renovate the text on a lot of older pages because somebody who doesn’t actually care about the comic that i inexplicably wanted to and thought that I COULD impress with a printed version of it, casually suggested to me replacing the hand-drawn dialog with fonts, not aware that I had taken considerable effort replacing fonts with hand-drawn letters. It prompted me to obsess beyond any past level over the legibility of the text in the second book. And I thought while I was at it I should deal with this old thing.*

I have seen some people (other than that one) in person enjoy this section, after being indifferent to the first few pages, but while it works for pog, overall it is terribly out of character for lope, especially when i introduce the concept that without its hat the pitiful lizard will not take bold action. I had worried about this prior to the first printing in 2015 but eventually decided it did not matter. However the more i saw it the more it mattered to me! At last year’s alternative space weekend art show, I was telling people who laughed at that page that it was out of character! As if I didn’t WANT them to like that page. Soon they will not be able to! Ha HA! That means I win!

And then for christmas last year a different person who I don’t know offered the first criticism of that page, which was enough to finally inspire me to remove it. But looking now I see that he is only criticizing the number of exchanges and not the logic of that sequence of exchanges! The person also called the package “the MacGuffin,” kumquat “the main antagonist,” and pog “his side kick” even though each of those takes longer to type and say in addition to being less specific, and maybe I should not give too much weight to what he says, positive or otherwise. But something good came of it which is what matters [if i am a reasonable person, which i am not]. Also up to that point I always thought of kumquat as the protagonist of that section. Being told the opposite does not mean I have to change anything but it gives me rare insight into how other people might interpret a work that I wrote so long ago that its content has become in part abstract to me. Except on this one one part that I specifically worried about. It works better in an inconsequential pencil drawn comic strip made without a plan, before the lizard was assigned a personality or existence outside of that minor role.

I also ended up having to remove a view of the door that I really like, in the frame where pog says “did you want something?” but obsessive compulsion of course has made this a referendum on the artwork as well as the text so I end up changing a whole bunch of pages, again, I may [mentally un]well end up replacing a blander view of the door on another page with this one.

On a later page pog alludes to one of lope’s comments, saying “didn’t you eat the package?” which i now also had. I like that line; it only works BECAUSE the question and answer part is so inappropriate. Outside of that interlude it makes no sense for lope to claim to have eaten the package, and it is possible to imagine that you only imagined seeing lope say that, or retroactively interpret that as a silly thing that didn’t “really” happen, like when I show inanimate objects talking or transforming between panels, and directly acknowledging that sort of thing is an act that characters apart from pog could not commit without being distracting, and now pog cannot even do it! Tragic!

I have a personal “rule” that no significant part of this comic strip should be dependent on a person’s awareness of other media. On a much later page, elpse mentions “an ethnic sidekick from a lame Indiana Jones ripoff,” in foreground dialog, but no other character acknowledges that elpse said that and it has no bearing on anything else, though I still may drop that line when I get to reworking that section simply on the basis of my personal assessment that the indiana jones series is rife with lameness and unoriginality already and more importantly my not wanting to imply that elpse, it of green and greenish skin, has a perspective on what is and is not ethnic in movies that don’t even exist where it comes from, EVEN THOUGH to ME it is obvious that the INTENT of the line is to have be implicit that the ethnicity of the sidekick is relative to the protagonist, which in the case of Indiana Jones is definitively established, ethnicity and protagonistship both.

Howdy.

*And also replace every instance of “keilphix” with “kielphix” since the second way implies a more accurate, kielbasa-like pronunciation even though i no longer like that name at all and have shown kumquat being annoyed by it on newer pages, which of course means it cannot be changed! Even though only a few pages earlier lope announces that it changed its name from scragthrax so it seems like I am being redundant by having two characters that dislike their given names. However, lope, who is a little bit like me, definitively changed its name, whereas kumquat, which is much more like me, would not commit to doing so, and I likewise have not! ALTHOUGH kumquat lives outside of the law of any remotely functional society and really could call itself whatever it wants, but I only need to think further than hypothetical people who might criticize the comic strip, not ahead of myself thinking ahead of myself. But I will anyway so in four years I will probably change every pertinent page again to have an entirely different name than kielphix and also have kumquat not be annoyed by it.**

**Howdest.

I prepared all the pages for the [proof copy] of the next comic book and sent away for the proof print. I do not consider the work finished and probably will not have time to make a full order for the November 2 + 3 art show, even if i do inexplicably finish by the time the proof print comes and I do not find anything with it that is wrong beyond what I continued to poke at meanwhile, but at least for the time being if something goes wrong it might not necessarily be my fault. Additionally I have updated all posted pages with my 3 months of changes and they can be viewed from this point onward.
Regarding that up there, it initially started the chapter, but I thought it was more “professional” to start the chapter with a view of scenery, and also establish kumquat and pog’s presence. Also, I like the idea of the comic strip having no narration whatsoever, but i also MADE this dumb thing and have always had it between the end of one part and the start of another, even though at THAT time, part one was in a state of disarray and the whole point of my redrawing all that was to render further explanation of what it shows unnecessary. However, obsessive compulsion states I must include it if I am able, and so for now I am doing so.
Kumquat still looks awkward, but the other three characters look slightly better. Elpse no longer has fish whisker things protruding from its face nor stripes on its thigh regions. I LIKE those details, but if I have them here, then I risk forcing myself to include them everywhere else like I did after I added little zigzag stripes next to its feet and hand areas. Also, nemitz is still a crumbag. THAT would be truly impossible to fix in time to get the books printed.
This is only a half page, but i used the second half to cram in my various website urls. Of course I still have people asking if I have a website while looking straight at my business cards that only exist to show urls for my 500 different websites, so this may be irrelevant. Yes so I have tentatively placed this on the inside front cover. I will of course scrutinize that text’s legibility. I do not yet have something for the back cover or a preview of the next issue’s front cover for this one’s inside back cover. I have a lot of cover left to cover.

page 34 of part 3 of that dumb old comic strip.
I probably wrote more text about this page than any other and feel like showing less of it than ever!

this script is so old, elpse initially said “get up, ramus.” Ramus is a character from the video game Lunar Silver Star Story Complete Absolute Total, who is unprepared for the life of a video game hero and gets knocked down a lot. lope was also initially quoting ramus’s “blarrrrgh.” I played Lunar Silver Star, in 2006, and last mentioned it, specifically with regard to Ramus, in 2007. I don’t remember if I wrote this part of the script then but I was certainly un-old enough to think I could put an obscure exchange like that in here and have anyone know what it meant, even though I didn’t actually post a screenshot of Ramus saying “blarg” anywhere because I didn’t think it was an interesting-enough line for that, so it most certainly was not interesting enough to allude to out of context nearly 12 years after the game was already a 7 year old remake of a game from 1992 which wasn’t even particularly innovative THEN. Also the one time a voice actor says his name it is pronounced “ray-mis” and I always say “ram-us.” I made myself obsessed with Lunar because I knew, at that time, other people who had been obsessed with it when they were children and I thought they would link to my website if I liked the same stuff they did. If they read my comic strips in 2006 they certainly don’t now! Probably.

Oddly enough one of them specifically denigrated the game Breath of Fire in favor of Lunar and I said nothing in its defense even though I legitimately liked Breath of Fire and still like it better and I don’t know that I have mentioned it even one time in the half-my-life of having this website. I don’t even have any screenshots from it since I last played it before I made this website or meticulously documented everything I did.

Literally the last time I played it, my computer had an MS-DOS based infrastructure. Three to four times as much time has passed since I last played it than had passed between the last time I played it on real hardware and the first time I played it in an emulator, which I thought at the time was a long time!

I may even have stolen pog’s name from it! Although I only remember being surprised to see the name in the game years after stealing it if I stole it, not actually doing so. All this is not to say I resent Lunar –I was able to make a forced infatuation be sincere back in 2006– or that Breath of Fire isn’t made of problems that only a childhoodded fixation can disregard (and I may resent BOF instead for making me steal POG from it), but of all the things I make, the bimshwellian comicoid least of all I ordinarily wonder who I am trying to please with it and why, but today I did!

Also lope being felled occurred, initially, during the altercation with the robots, but when I got to that point I decided the robots should just get beaten up without doing anything. Inexplicably I liked the dialog enough that i contrived a way for lope to fall down in the same spot at a later point, and now that is a permanent part of the “story.” i only removed the ramus line literally on february 22 2019. Or rather made a copy of the dialog bauble and moved it to another layer and turned it unvisible in case I wanted to bring it back (and look, I just did). I had drawn it in knowing it didn’t belong there but not feeling like dealing with it. Thankfully I still think it is funny that lope is pitiful and a substitute line easily suggested itself, so this is only a major problem with regard to me knowing i cannot be trusted and that i will probably be 60 years old before i get through the entire script as it is now.

Of course, as I indicated, much of what goes on is NOT in the script. i get to a point and i change it, sometimes significantly; initially nemitz was intended to capture pog out of view, but when i got to this point I thought it would be funny if elpse’s goop fell on nemitz, so then elpse had to run off and capture pog itself, and that gave me an opportunity to acknowledge the dope still exists and also exhibit pog’s unusual attitude toward captivity.

But I do not want to drop anything I think of for any reason and so try to think of in-character ways for them to behave illogically to accommodate script pieces that are no longer relevant. In this case, lope thinking that the goop-covered nemitz is a ghost (and at the same time avoid saying “I’m soooo dead”). From a long term stand point, do I really believe that lope really believes that ghosts are real or that itself was well and truly dead? I did not think about it that deeply. But I knew “wow I am sooooo dead” is obviously not how lope talks by the time I got here, even when I still thought elpse might call lope “ramus.” I wrote that so long ago I did not have a solid grasp of how lope talked or just how foolish it was and in what ways. But NOW I wonder: does lope live in constant fear of death and undead spirits? What occurred to make it be preoccupied with that? I know, or think I know, that nobody is going to DIE in this comic strip, and have worried about my ability to introduce matters of consequence as a result, but I did not want to face the issue on the big punchable nose either, since it is too permanent an occurrence to add on a whim unless you are making something stupid like Dilbert that isn’t supposed to be consistent or not contradict itself. A hypothetical future version of me with a clearer mind may think a character death is necessary or even devise an alternative that is not strictly “death” as it applies to real people but without relying on conventional cartoon judeo-christian afterlife tropes that have no business applying to dumb old lope who I won’t even let have a christmas tree, or even some of the other innumerable copout ways American comic books have, often on whims, undone once-significant or equally whimly deaths. And that version of me would then also have to determine if there are supernatural forces which have interest in or authority over death and life. The present me is not qualified and so should avoid topics which lead to that one!

additionally lope’s new comment about ghosts agitates pog, who now has no reason to be this bored by the dialog. Fortunately pog has a looser concept of reality than lope so I do not need to wonder about why it is afraid of ghosts.

Pog’s boredom complaint came about because consistently in this section of the comic strip i have worried that i had more dialog than interesting visuals could be made to accompany. But again and again, and indeed again, had to strain to cram in all the visuals i came up with. However, now a script revision that I added due to the boringness of the script was made irrelevant by a future revision. That is so convoluted, crowded and broken I am surprised now that I didn’t keep it in!

Beyond all that, this page is one that is very hard to get working without layout swapping or dialog bauble stem crossing because there are so many characters stuffed into it. Ordinarily you can switch around where characters are to facilitate better dialog flow by zooming in, zooming out, or going to the next page, but I don’t like doing those things! i had in fact gone to a bit of trouble to switch the layout already; initially the viewpoint matched the previous pages, with the dialog positioned to suit that, and then I realized that would mean drawing the back of this parking lot 12 more times and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to draw this side either but it at least is plainly a different page.

I should just put the word “trivia” at the top of a page every time I am conflicted about the overall relevance of its contents.

nemitz is no stranger to hugging, despite being strange

this from 2004, a far off period before the mediocre expectations of internet communities beat my creativity out of me but also before i could draw. nonetheless i did it with colored pencils, which when digitally scanned gave the drawing the unearthly quality of the blank paper actually being darker than the marks on it, so i just today artificially augmented the ghastily large eye-balls to look less grey. I miraculously resisted the urge to alter innumerable other components of the image.
ah yes and the image title is Unlawful Restraint. Don’t forget. nemitz is a fugitive from justice.

Also there is this, Imminent Self-Defense, from 2010, of colored pencil PLUS expensive prisma color markers, since internet people led me to think those would be crucial for functioning, right around the time they all switched to yet more expensive copic markers. It shows the creature Eliah, known to a person called, at the time, Science Fox, and I know not what these days, being physically assaulted by the scoundrel nemitz.

Hugly Situation, from merely 2011, in which Astro Q Duck (the Q stands for “Questionable”) and a terrible creature known only as nemitz reunite after, I assume, being exiled from every place in existence.


Fuzzcilities: not very long ago there was a Valentine day and I regretfully thought it prudent to check on who nemitz was hugging more recently.
nemitz x toilet, hollywood’s power couple for 2019

You HAVE to hug people who don’t want to be hugged. What a tragic, unfortunate, sad-emoticonable plight! I hate to admit that in seeking out inanimate emoticon depositories maybe nemitz has the right idea, so I won’t.

I am too mentally ill to make comics. Usually, on the internet, being mentally ill is good for comics, if you are mentally ill in a relatable fashion and it manifests in such a way where you don’t care how shoddily you draw. It may even be the case that the WORSE you draw, the more liked you are. Or if you are ill to such an extent that you have no idea you are and are extremely prolific in that. I have an illness of indecision, inability, hyper-awareness of inability and regret. Nobody on earth has any need for that manner of illness.

After relettering, respacing the same dialog boxes and redrawing the same negligible details ad-implausium I finally sent off the comic book order a few days ago. I won’t see them for a month but I sure can’t change them now! Consequently it is imperative that I do not look at any of the page images that I sent before the books get printed and sent to me. Or even after that point, just to be safe.
Ironically, the main person whose off-hand remark about the first book, that I should consider using fonts, looked over one my next to last proof copy inside a dark restaurant and said it was much easier to read the dialog, which meant I had done enough that I could stop, but I did not stop! I am like the text grinch; my scrutiny over my handwriting’s legibility grew three sizes that day when it was criticized. However instead of becoming a hero to the town i became a total outcast since I needed to scorn all other activity and contact so I edit speech baubles for months. Of course Madison Connecticut town would prefer not to have me in it so that suits them.

the first version of this cover image appears as the inside back cover of the first book, which was printer in 2016. Up until the most recent proof of book 2, this part of the image looked JUST FINE to me. But the night I was preparing to send the final set of updated pages, suddenly it did not! The line of motion was inconsistent with the image around it, and the bug was not sourced at all. I thought I could draw it better than that, and I did, but it still was not good enough. I remembered I had some insect references I had used recently, so I used them again and got a yet better looking bug, but I decided those were not good enough because all my references showed bugs not in-flight. And were moths, anyway. It is already bad to use a standing bug as reference for a flying one, and using a moth as a reference for a fly is worse! Amateurish! I found a very good fly reference! But the angle was wrong. And was perhaps too detailed! It looked too aggressive, too fast, too big (this version was not preserved so it is not in the montage). The viewer should be able to see the wings, not the legs, much less six multi-jointed legs. But I couldn’t just NOT include the legs because then it looks like I don’t value accuracy. I made it smaller and blurrier, so there still ARE legs but only really visible if it is your destiny to make sure that I gave the fly legs. but at some point the details stop being distinguishable, since there are too many of them. The first bug looked gentle, which is funny, and the simpler design reads more easily, since it is a very small creature in a very small part of the image! I decided to try a proper flying moth reference but none of them looked like what I wanted. I went back to the fly, simplified it a bit, so I could make it let smaller. Being too realistic can harm the joke, anyway. But what even IS the joke?
The “joke” hinges on it being obvious that pog has no brain, and something flying out of there implies that the space is empty because i don’t know why but it does.
Suddenly I had to think about it, and I didn’t see any logical reason why a fly indicates an empty space, which means it must be based on a stereotype or a cliche which has become far removed from whatever base sense inspired it. I could not even remember where I first saw an example of a fly coming out something empty, but for some reason knew it was probably a wallet, so I looked that up, and while I gained no insight as to WHY, i learned that it was in fact supposed to be a MOTH coming out of wallets specifically. Since I have already moved the logicless stereotype from its roots, which are purely symbolic, changing the insect type also cannot be done! It would HAVE to be a moth! *I* had been misled because the cartoon in which I observed this, presumably Pink Panther –based on most the panther’s situations are instigated by him being a lout and him specifically therefore needing a host of ways to indicate a lack of money without speaking– of course didn’t care what the bug looked like and nobody else, the entire staff of the cartoon, the production company, the distributor, the networks which aired the cartoon decades later, cared either, and nobody watching it did, including me.

Well maybe it was a garfield comic. That much is irrelevant! What matters is that drawing a generic unsourced bug is a-ok when thousands, millions of people are going to see it. But when only me and maybe 14 other people are going to see it, such negligence is UNFORGIVABLE.

Now please try and imagine that with 40 images I will probably have this sort of stupid problem over and over on every one of them. I am a very sick person. I need to make a full print book order not because anybody else wants these books, only so that the production of the books no longer holds me irrationally captive.

Anyway, I went back to the moth version. A miracle occurred so that I found it acceptable, as awkwardly posted as it was, with the matter of the motion trail still not resolved, so I saved the image, reduced it to the print size, collected it with the other pages I was uploading, into a 167 megabyte zip file, started uploading it, went to the bathroom. this was approximate 3:38am. I was misled, however. The tyrant was not satisfied, it just had changed its focus. I began to panic because I considered that I had, during this session, because I was zoomed in and having problems with everything, also absentmindedly applied a cartoon-derived stereotype to the left-inside of pog’s space (vertical lines) to imply it was metallic. Even though the inside of pog is NOT metallic and if I wanted it to look metallic I should not rely on hacky shortcuts anyway.

Even though it does not matter because this is an area smaller than the tip of a pencil. Without using the toilet I came back down, cancelled the upload, made a very minor alteration, exported the image again, checked that every other image was the right size, made a new zip file, and began uploading that again, and then I realized I had made the alterations WITHOUT reverting the image to its full size! Which means if I at this point decide to go back and change it again, as looking at this has made me sincerely, profoundly, want to, since I am now VERY conscious of the light colored streak on the right-inside of the space, I will have to first blow up the pertinent region and then draw over it to make sure it is a full fidelity image, even though is almost 0 zero chance across my lifetime or anyone else’s that there will be any need for a full resolution version of this picture, and then once I do that it may not necessarily have the desirable qualities of the pre-blown up and redrawn version.

And

and

and

nobody on earth will know that I did or did not do it!

An update for august 31:

Here is or should be a big slow-loading gif which shows a vague version of the state of one page at the time of each of the three example prints and the final print (which does not yet exist). All of them AFTER incessant pre-print redrawing, remember. The point is that after waiting several weeks, I looked at every part of every page, three times, saw something incredibly minor, after I thought I was done, and had to open it back up again. On only nine of the pages I restrained myself from making more changes, even though I wanted to! The point the point the point is that I lost my mind and have evidence. I did not regain my mind, I simply was too tired to meet its demands.
Observe that the upper and lower left frames were changed with each printing but other places changed fewer times. This means I was able to look straight at something, on paper, think it was acceptable (after having looked at it prior to then numerous times across years and thought it acceptable), then look straight at it again at a later point and find it inexcusable beyond all reason. This means there could have been fifth, and sixth, and seventh prints, and I could still find fresh problems, just on the dumb letters. Letters too close together, too close to the bauble edge, WORDS too close together, veering too much up or down, not aesthetically balanced within the bauble. At no point, after no period of time, can I look at what I made and be satisfied with it. Even when logically I know that the longterm benefit of spending more time on it, rather than on anything at all else, no longer exists. Not only am I too mentally ill to make comics, I am too mentally ill to read comics.

And in the lower right can be observed my attempt to amend a minor legibility error by rewriting the dialog in a new temporary image layer above the base layer, but forgetting to delete the letters on the base layer before merging the temporary layer into it, and then forgetting to look in that space again until after the book was printed, thereby creating a MAJOR legibility error that would be impossible to overlook! This means that for each subsequent print I needed to look at every space of every page to ensure I had not committed that error anyplace else, even though such investigation would increase the possibility of me finding and obsessing over yet more imaginary problems. And then I ended up doing that in at least four other places anyway.

Seeing this gif now, it bothers me that I made kumquat’s dialog green-tinted when kumquat is out of view, against a non-tinted room. This is confusing and makes it look like elpse is talking. I thought, for years, and then afterward, it is quite obvious from context and precedent who is speaking, but people always find a way to miss all my points, so they could well claim to be confused. But if they are confused by that then they couldn’t possibly understand anything else, so I leave this green. But I will go back to the first fear, and have to explain to myself why this fear is unjustified, repeatedly. I know this is not entertaining. I need to make this understood as clear as I can make it so that in the future I can refer back to it rather than attempting to explain it again!

OH the windows and other details on the buildings are misaligned, the design on the billboard is indistinct, there is a little black speck just under the right side structure’s roof, the eyebrows float off the panther’s head and that hat is WAY TOO SMALL! How did this cartoon get made?

The presumptive back cover to the perpetually oncoming second bimshwel comic book. As always, you may click on it to get a bigger version. I do not always say this, and I realize, despite sometimes forgetting that I realize, that usually means almost nobody knows it, and in this case it is crucial to having an idea what the text says, and some of it matters.
It took longer than usual, as little grasp as I currently have on what “usual” is, since initially i drew elpse in it.

(do not bother clicking on this one) and elpse was the most-drawn thing on it at that point! Because initially the idea was just the first three frames, which I drew in a sketchbook years ago, with pog and elpse. I imagined it went into the comic book somewhere, but forgot about it when drawing the part where elpse is actually in that place. After I remembered it for this, it seemed like it could function as abstract in space and time, like a stand-alone illustration, but then I did not know what to fill the rest of the page with. And so I extended it, and it felt then less abstract, and more like it would be seen to contradict a not-yet-drawn comic page from the near future (which admittedly I thought was in the near future a year ago) in which pog and elpse have not been properly introduced. In my MIND, this and the first comic book’s back cover happen at some point in the future (comic future, not actual future, though it would also be that, if it was anything). But with elpse here I would have to explain THAT, but only once I get to the point of the apparent contradiction, and it would seem like I just screwed up and made an excuse! I have plenty enough aspects of my life to give lame excuses for without adding new ones that actually aren’t excuses because I meant them to happen that way.

Anyway the reaction, telling pog what to do, then scorning pog without acting or commenting further, suits yibrik better than elpse. Of course in addition to drawing in the character I also had to go back to every prior yibrik drawing and give tails to them since apparently I never did. The only time I ever drew yibrik with a tail previously was on the other book’s back cover! I saw it recently and didn’t remember having drawn it. But a bit later when I thought to replace elpse, I remembered that I SAW that, and decided one tail ever indicated adequate past intent to justify permanent tailage (since I no longer remember why or what I thought about any thing I did more than a few weeks ago). Of course I might decide, if I WANT to insert this somewhere later, it will be in a story about kumquat giving out tails. But then it isn’t funny for kumquat to just out of nowhere offer to give pog one. Right? Sure. So I don’t have to go and erase all those new tails I just added and fill in the background around them. Good, I was worried for a moment.
I think, if I were to go through and redraw and rewrite all this a third/fourth time, and I would roller skate on an airport runway wearing a suit of armor made out of pizza before I did, I would make yibrik a more visible character, since the way I think of yib now, argumentative but potentially harmless, is considerably different than how I thought of it back in 1995, as likely villainous, which influenced how I introduced it here eleven years after that (twelve years before now).

Does all that make sense? It shouldn’t! I work this hard so that the nonsense behind my motives does not need to be discussed.

a pog on your houses and a toaster on your head.

You will likely be ashamed and/or unimpressed when you find out what I have been devoting my time to the past few weeks, but it is every bit as necessary for me to move on in life as drawing pog wearing a toaster was.