If anyone is still out there after that last thing I put up, which I stand behind, 93%, here is page 30 of part 3 of the comic strip.

My only consolation: finding out that I’m my one true obligation.
Who needs a dream? Who needs ambition? Who’d be the fool in my position? Not very many, the way things are going, there’ll soon be one less. No one in your life is with you constantly. No one is completely on your side. And though I moved my world to be with them, still the gap between us was too wide. And I won’t miss them, they made it perfectly clear: I was a fool and probably queer. Not a help, you’ll admit, to agreement between us. I’ve taken mitz for seven years and I won’t take it anymore. Each day got through means one or two less mistakes remain to be made.

Let man’s petty fandoms tear themselves apart. It brings me no joy adding to their satisfaction. Bit by bit the pieces fit the bimshwellian machine advances, not one move that won’t improve our nation’s chances. This is the one situation I wanted most to avoid. What on earth am I doing, I could be better employed! I don’t care if you’re a champion, no one messes with me. I am ruthless in upholding what I know is right, black or white, as you’ll see. I’m on the case, can’t be fooled. Any objection is overruled. One night in bimshwel and the tough guys tumble. If you don’t like it then it’s up to you. You’ve a better reason to be anti-nem than me. How can you let mediocrity win? Who do these foreign chappies think they are? I can’t believe that they don’t see my game; I’m like that tennis player — what’s his name? Maybe it’s a bit confusing, for a game, but rubik’s cubes were much the same. And the appeal, partner, of this deal, partner, Is we both stand to win; We’ll bring back the golden era.

No no, you’re reacting exactly the way that they waaaaant! And ehhhhvery poison word shows that you never understood. You take care you don’t let their shenanigans blind you. It’s all very well to say “you fool!” It’s now or never. I could be choosing no choices whatsoever. Sad to see the ancient and distinguished game that used to be very like another when your head’s down over your pieces, brother.

page 29 of this. i do not like to spend this much dialog on explaining things that i thought could be determined by paying attention, but since this concerns parts that happened much earlier in the “story” that i certainly did not write with this part in mind, it seems justified to a degree. Also I do not know when kumquat will be able to meet elpse again to potentially explain these things. Which means I also reserve the right for elpse to not be completely accurate in its assessment.

I like the color usage here. it does not look like it is from the same story as “page 1” of this “story” but that could be a good thing, apart from the hassle of making them consistent at a later point. The less obligation i feel to keep backgrounds consistent, or even draw them at all, the more pages I can make, and the less fight i will put up when i realize i have to scrap parts of them!

a strange comic strip

initially this was the sixth frame. it reminded me too much of “reaction memes.” That is a picture that somebody with no sense of humor posts in an effort to indicate the opposite. I like those people even less than furries, when they aren’t furries.

This one was funnier to me and more like something i would actually do when frustrated but i could not get it to work. then i went back to it and made it work, even though i had already posted the other version on some websites. But it still seemed like it went against my actual intent, which is to show confoundment rather than contempt. Then i looked up my scripts for the first, unproduced strip about a conversation between these two (in that one the non-pathetic character is based on multiple people) and realized it actually calls for an angry reaction so this might suit that better. Although I know from experience that trying to incorporate an old drawing into new material consistently takes longer than just making a new picture, the way I do things, and i already spend ages on that!

This just seemed rude! –It does not even say hello. Of course in reality it would type “howdy” which was no longer available– But also too mopey. The revised dialog is more truthful, probably, even though the end result is meaner. Hence the need to reduce the amount of unfocused spite in the last frame. Way too much thought and effort for something this dumb. I wondered why I would publicly post a strip implying that I don’t greet people and immediately complain about my life. I complain about my life because I don’t have anything else to talk to about with the people who ask me how I am doing and do not see any point to lying and claiming to be fine. If that was my only other option I would not respond at all, which is also rude. So I ought to put that in here. It seems unfair to the actual person this is, on this occasion, solely based on, who probably did have good intentions, and in fact was the sole person from the science fox crony cult to acknowledge me after I was edged out of that, But the net result of this and similar relationships was, by 2016, not positive. In fact ironically somewhat emblematic of the overall set of problems. Not exclusively of how people treated me, but also of how I clung by a thread to a system that didn’t work for me and kept pulling myself back into it, with ever diminishing returns because of course the former supporters I scared off through my increasingly regular outbursts of frustration were not coming back.

Viewers who commented still managed to misconstrue this comic strip as nothing beyond me complaining about pornographic fanart, like I think that demeans the characters. No I don’t care about fanart in GENERAL. If I was just going to list all the things I thought were gross and boring about furries I would have gotten much more specific than that and wouldn’t have wasted four frames before doing so. The POINT is that I resent having my material treated as if it is more maladjusted than a huge collection of odd behaviors just because there isn’t a community for mine. I suppose I could have gone totally abstract but again this is based on real conversations from years ago, exaggerated somewhat to seem outwardly as unpleasant as I mentally interpreted them. Don’t aspire to much since you’re unusual without being in a normalized unusual person club. Maybe we even addressed that I took issue with that, but the feeling of being annoyed at it lingered more prominently, in addition to some other typical exchanges which made this course of action seem more justifiable.

Ironically the person I am griping about in the comic here claimed to particularly enjoy this series and probably got the idea better than some others, but the comic’s goal if it has one is to help me out of this box and the whole furry mess is part of the box. Even though I have to explain what they mean afterward, it is a harder to miss prompt for the providing of explanations than just words without pictures.

I have regrettably much more text on this topic! And since I also have more comic strips on the topic that text may even be seen eventually!

page 28 of part 3 of this. More extreme expressions than usual here, a few of them justified. These imps think they are constantly in peril.

I feel like it is cheating to not draw dumb creatures in the windows but none of the windows here are visible enough for me to use window poses that I have not already used recently. “recently” in the sense of the last 15 pages, not necessarily the last three years of real time. I am reserving the right to show Squirb in full at another occasion and have it not be immediately apparent who that is, so showing just a scrap of it in the pertinent space here seemed undesirable, and i do not know what it looks like yet anyhow.

page 27 of part 3 of that, featuring a surprise guest: the rarely seen non-couch side of lope’s apartment’s non-kitchen zone.

one of an impressive variety of delays on the second comic book involved me abruptly feeling the need to reletter almost every dialog bauble in the 34 contained redrawn old pages (and two non-old pages) . I could not understand how prior to that point I thought any of it would be legible. I am reminded of that when I look at the NEW page I uploaded here last month compared to this one now, which is made to my new legibility standard-like-thing. Which consequently means I must reletter every dialog bauble I have ever put anywhere, including somehow the ones in the first book I have already printed and sold at least twelve copies of.

On other websites and the side-bar here, at least until future entries scroll the text out of existence, I identify this comic strip with the title “the grapes of asp.” I initially titled it “the grapes of rasp,” not realizing that “rasp” was not actually a snake, but merely the name of a snake-headed rulon crony in Dinoriders, and also the name of a robot I and Jerry Caro came up with in first grade that we imagined traveled around stealing chocolate brownies while saying “RASP…RASP…RASP…” Rasp as in “I have you in my rasp” instead of grasp because kids are dumb. Then (now) I remembered that “asp” was a snake, and it seemed odd that asp and rasp would be near synonyms. This is a pointless bit of trivia. There is a more poignant bit of trivia about this comic page that also concerns chocolate, but it is depressing and I will defer it to a future posting, which means I will probably never post it, which theoretically suits me, who can only survive by not being aware of things I know that bother me.

page 26 of part 3 of something or other
Not totally ready, and it doesn’t prove anything, (I will probably undo the one unusual development in a disappointing way on the next page) but it is mostly legible. I have to wake up “early” tomorrow for a dentist appointment so this will have to do for now! All the dentists want to come meet with me so I can tell them how to deal with dopes. Dopes have no teeth, which is extremely frustrating.
i still have to print that comic book of a part long before this one, right? Yes, and in fact I did, and there was so much stuff wrong with it that fixing it is yet ongoing. I needed to be needlessly obsessive compulsive about an actual new page to remind myself I am not just reliving the same years while my body turns to decrepit mush, hence the new page. Talking about what I still need to fix on the old pages makes me tired. Great I need to go to my sleep heap anyhow. Good night and goop muck.

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.

I have now at last updated all the comic pages 34-69. That does not seem like a big deal, but as I was doing it and it went and onward perpetually for six months after I resumed the task last year, it certainly required a big deal of effort. And it does not feel done yet! I have these notes to myself right now
53 nemitz’s queue still needs to be drawn in, plus the ceiling lamp
63 needs to be extended to fill the page borders
64 the bridge frame looks dreadful
67 68 still have problems
68 says “urkel” (ehhdit: it now says “grakpazirs” and I have to hope I remember to change all instances of that and then again if I think of a better name, and I could hardly do worse except to revert it)
But it is done enough to show here, because otherwise another mopey entry was going up, and nobody has time for that.

see here, for the first time since 2011, maybe, whenever I STARTED redrawing everything, there is no separation between old and new versions. There is also a completely new page, now 53, that attempts to cover up some inconsistencies in elpse’s character without it being terribly obvious that it exists for no other reason. 34, which formerly was new, set up some of that. A sequence that was formerly on three pages is now on four and is more coherent. Ideally, once I get the new books made and put this mess into my stack of finished messes, I will become more coherent. The story is still boring but the IMPORTANT thing is that I will no longer be working on it! And ideally will never have to draw that ugly bed room again, and if I do it will NOT be between very old pages in which I had obsessive compulsively, slowly, drudgingly, kept details consistent and outlined, necessitating that I then resume doing the same on the new insert page to make it not seem excessively out of place. I can go back to the front with the part that I think is more interesting, and pog willing I will have a book version of THAT by 2028.

Not surprisingly, the automated comic page displaying system that I implemented a few years ago to make things easier was more difficult to update everything on, but it did not take six months. And so the first part of the second part of the first part is there.

page 49 of that, redrawn. compare to that if you need proof this was justified.

I had to remove some visually interesting details from the exterior shot for more consistency, Even with all the silly nonsense going on it seems to be important to me to have some basis of what is and is not so. and so also i have filled in interior details which i only established existed when i first drew the page after this one, and unconcerned about consistency as I was then, never made so.

But now I wonder about the validity of a medieval watch tower on kumquat’s “property,” since everything else inside seems to be either dirt or industrial, as if kumquat is dwelling in an abandoned, converted factory. I re-considered the tower to have a shoddy sheet metal exterior, but that contradicts earlier shots of the spiral staircase whose specific mood, with the presence of a torch, was dependent on the walls being stone.
I could retroactively claim, if I ever “reveal” that kumquat IS in an old factory, that the tower was bought at a yard sale or was inflatable, but that would mean going out of my way to clarify an inconsistency that most people would not notice. And therefore I would need to show kumquat buying something ELSE at a yard sale with the tower there incidentally, which would be too strange to be funny unless it were the focus. And so i would need to show kumquat inflating a different stone structure, but I do not know when that would ever come up.
I COULD indicate that -all- the exterior details are fake, as if wallpaper or an exceedingly eccentric paint job are involved, but i would still need to redraw the interior of the spiral staircase.

Additionally, the next page shows pog emerging from a body of water that plainly is not the one near kumquat’s house, because that is full of blue dope goop and the dope was not able to climb out of it easily, despite having, presumably, greater reach than pog does. But THIS page shows pog in a little boat.
i could remove the boated pog, but that is the only interesting background detail here. Although the dope pond is shown to be a short distance from the house(s) rather than immediately beside and certainly not behind them, so this may still work. The other vessels behind pog on the following page are disconnected enough from “serious” details that I do not need them to seem plausible.
I wish I had given half as much thought as this ten years ago! Or just never thought of it at all since on further reflection the “i am known by many names” frame makes least sense of all and I never considered changing that.

this ought to be the last page which requires a complete redrawing, since I never really finished drawing it to begin with. and doing this brings me back mentally and it makes sense that i was looking for ways to not draw it. But it is not the last one that needs loads of work on it. And if I want to be able to show an example issue at the one art show I attend, in october, I will need to get through fourteen more. oh!

I ruin some middling to decent material by talking about it too much. But I feel I must explain here that this is meant to be funny, even if, had it potential to succeed that it now lacks through my saying so, and I am not wanting of ways to block stupid banner advertisements. If I couldn’t do that I would have dug a hole and lived in it ten years ago. This is not a desperate depressed cry for help. I could not GET help by doing that.

What brought this on: I started my a web-browser which happened to have an unfortunate part of my image-posting routine in it when I last closed it, and the ad-blocker did not load fully before the ads did, and so there was PREGOO right in front of me. Necessary to share with others in some manner but too stupid to speak about. Immediately the above illustrated situation struck me, and I refreshed the page about 20 times to see what else might come up that I could also include. And some in there are from YEARS ago. I would see those things inadvertently and save them for a reason that I did not yet have. THIS is not the stuff I am tormented by and hide from. This trash is so stupid that I enjoy how stupid it is. It is not likely to fully engulf the culture around me and ruin my life for a year. I can complain about this without being silently shunned by the small amount of supporters I have. I think. If it turns out I can’t, I am better off without those people, since pretending I didn’t care how stupid this was got me nowhere for eight years.
How can an energy drink be inherently “furry” without having fur in it? And how can music, for that matter? Without being full of animal noises? Which it wouldn’t be because the whole point of furries is that they take themselves seriously and magically disassociate themselves from the inherent absurdity of their preferred visual subject matter. These advertisements are aimed squarely at an extremely narrow range of people who are religiously devoted to the thought of talking cartoon animals and are looking to spend ludicrous sums of money just to buy products from other people that they believe reinforces their own outward appearance of being an enthusiast. “Gamers” have even stupider stuff targeted at them but for the time being I have no audience deep amitz them, and so I am spared awareness.

I have a half-written articloid on the topic of the first frame, which pre-dated whatever instigated this petty comic strip, and perhaps you will see that later.

Page 25 of this
After three irrelevant pages, why did I add another? I almost didn’t but I felt, since day 2 began like this, I would be skipping an opportunity for day 3, to do it in a manner, while still irrelevant, less frivolous ultimately. To prove that I COULD, perhaps. I resent when people refer to this as if it is totally random, dismissing it after reading one page completely out of context, like it is Peanuts or Garfield or [something considerably less lucrative], but pages like THAT one certainly do not help my case.

I should be drawing these with thicker lines. i do not have control over the thin lines and those scale down better.

pitylance artist
This could be seen as hypocritical since I myself do not often retweet things, but I also do not encourage garbage endeavors unless I WOULD retweet them. I do not say things I do not mean unless backed into a corner, and I do not invite corners to tea. “Hey, this thing that didn’t work that I won’t even touch, you should keep doing that since it privately benefits me just a scrap.” I imagine the person or persons who instigated this comic strip have no idea that I interpreted their actions this way, but I get terrible/insulting advice from just about everybody, and I followed it for years and got nowhere. I am still nowhere but it is my own nowhere. And just since 2016 I have had four different people whose interests and goals are totally apart from my own use relationship talk toward me, up from none ever prior to then, so I must be doing somenothing right.
Anyway the point of the “snake” comics are always that the snake is a loser. Seeing it lose amuses me.

page 24 of part three of whatever this is
shortly after I drew the scenes with kumquat’s komputers, it struck me how mundane and obviously based on contemporary computers they were, and I imagined I should have gone bigger and more old fashion,ed and stranger. but ten years on, and one more day on in the strip’s timeline, this computer now looks huge, bizarre and outdated.