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.
Page 23 of part 3 of this.
When I made page 22, I said I would try and reuse the backgrounds because they took so long to make. That really didn’t work! I can’t help but do everything weird every time so that it does not match anything from before. This kind of page takes so long that I forget what the actual story is. I will go back and populate more of those bottles and supply the tengu creature with legs and proper proportions relative to whatever doctrel gorp is in more frames if I feel suitably uninspired at a point in time when I have nothing better to do.
page 22 of part 3 of whatever this is.
Not only does this page not accomplish anything, it was almost impossible to draw. And i worried with all the brown it would be very boring to look at, but I like how the colors worked out.
There are two more like this; maybe I will paste in the frames I just used and only change the relevant parts. It will still take a month and be a complete redraw but I will not have to worry about forgetting to include anything.
page 21 of part 3 of this!
this page accomplishes one thing: it saves me from having to draw a character that looks like a cat in the future. my tolerance for cats has dwindled considerably since I first introduced this character without any attempt at “design” whatsoever.
The sequence that follows does not actually prove anything but i am amused by the script I wrote and the little previews I drew. it is all information that can be introduced later. And I tried to cram it into an absurdly high number of frames on one page, but hopefully restraint will win out and I will make two pages out of it, however little information is conveyed.
page 20 of part 3 of this! Except it’s actually just part of page 19 again because I decided 19 was far too cramped, and there was one final frame I wanted to add in, which I was going to then have to put on the next page, which was already ludicrously cramped just in the layout stage, before I start adding in whatever has not even occurred to me yet. Notice how this still feels too cramped, and despite the copious amount of new drawing I have done, it still feels rushed and incomplete, if you want to thoroughly undermine my effort. It was terribly demoralizing to have fallen so far behind on redrawing old pages, so it seemed prudent to start redrawing new pages.
Also, I have been quite sick, my father has been in a hospital with an uncertain fate, and I have been futilely trying to get my service provider to fix my broken email but they inexplicably keep finding ways to prolong the “not reading what I say to them and repeatedly offering the same obvious and wrong solution” phase, while I am also sick and going to a horrible hospital that drains energy out of me that i don’t have because someone else is sicker than I am. I do not request or desire the sympathy of strangers, but I wanted to explain some of that somewhere, because I do not like submitting unsatisfactory work unless I also get to complain about it. However, this is a shorter negative portion than I usually accompany comic updates with, so I may be at last making real progress.
page 19 of part 3 of the dumb comic strip. I am glad these dark scenes have been moderately colorful.
Following this is an interlude with secondary characters that looks like it is going to be three terribly cramped pages. When I years ago drew in the requisite background data which this interlude as following from, I imagined it would be important, but it may ultimately be superfluous because I have realized while writing it that neither character thinks the interlude is all that special. In fact, the only important thing that happens in the interlude is the first mentioning of yet one other character whose appearance I have, as before, not written yet, and will not arrive at for rather some time. I go to great lengths to disguise the fact that I invent most parts as I get to them! Still theoretically easier than having a plan.
Whoopth. For the first time I completely forgot this website was here. Which is silly since I have a backlog of drawings that theoretically can be presented with minimal recontextualization. I just use too many gosh darn ding dang rink dink oing boing thank you moing websites, and I seem to have had visible existential crises on half of them. Including this one, but that is almost a tradition here. It should not lead to a lackage of updatage.
Warning, the fish is not a role model. It is not even human.
I think the creature may be a snake when it is treated badly, and a fish when it treats others badly.
Also, I do not personally think anybody with a reasonable job is a “hack.” Initially the question was “have you had any studio employment?” but late in the process it seemed wrong, yet I could not think of a better way to ask the question properly in the space I had left for it. In any event the point is that the fish is a jerk.
One more redrawn page.
I did not consider that when redrawing old comic pages it may turn out impossible for elpse to be holding nemitz in the depicted manner.
I also did not give deep consideration to whether I should replace the psychedelic patterns in the doorway here. Initially, it should not surprise you, I had not yet designed an interior for the room. Now that I have one, it is less interesting to show that than the pattern. However, it is less distracting and confusing. As bland as it looks, if were to REDESIGN the room, then I would OBVIOUSLY not do it until after I drew this page!
the tower on an isolated island on the next page is a problem. every other exterior shot suggests a group of stupid little dome houses with just trees behind them. HOWEVAH