page 35 of the old part 1 of that
Hopefully this is the last page that needs new drawings, but I have said that before! And extensive panel re-arrangement will still be needed in the ybrik section, where I knew even at the time I drew it that I would have to come back and split it into more pages later. I sure know how to plan ahead.
The cartoon which pog watches on this one I had not thought the slightest bit about in apparently nearly ten years, going by the October 2005 date on the .fla-fla flash file “thingswithproblems.fla”. This would be a great opportunity to put something clever or legitimately satirical there, but I could not think of anything I could put here that would work that I was also comfortable having in my “serious” comic strip. Initially, ten years ago (and it appears as if I only got around to changing it LAST year), I had the right one handing over a vibrator, or the only thing I could turn up in an image search for the word that was not specifically sculpted to resemble a phallus, and it bothered me. It bothered me that I would not put a “real” one there, but if I had that would have bothered me even more! Now see here, I cannot make a sex joke because I have never done any sex deeds and I have no idea how many normal people actually know what a vibrator looks like, and if they would be able to pick one out that was atypical of the pictures I could find of them. Literally my only sight of one prior to then had been a Mad-TV sketch called Sex Toy Story that aired in 1997 or thereabouts, (the period when I thought I was pretty bad for daring to say “go the hell”) in which “Buzz Lighttouch” had a fairly generic rod-shape, so I assumed I could get away with one, but ultimately I had adequate doubt to remove it. My compromise replacement, an electric hair-cutting machine, is still unpleasant to use on one’s teeth, but no longer gross (even assuming the thing is cleaned once in a while), and thus not in line with the sort of gross cartoon I probably thought I was making fun of ten years ago.
Consider that tomorrow/today is April foist, April’s Fool Day, a 47 hour period known for its varied pranks, which run the range all the way from annoying to obnoxious. However, in order for a prank to be effective, there must be a shared level of understanding between the prank-applier and the prank-receiver. When I am kidding, people think I am serious, and when I am serious nobody knows what I am talking about, and just nod and say “yeahhhhh” because I am perceived as too unstable to be told the truth about how foolish I appear (and as such not worth looking for merit in the words of should I not actually be foolish on that occasion). My conception of what is strange about something is often not what somebody else would find strange, and if it relates to something that a normal person does, I probably do not understand how it works to begin with. I don’t even understand how pepper works. Little black dots that you put on your food that make it taste exactly the same, glorious. Therefore pranks, satire and I generally do not get along. I can invent a surrogate object, idea, behavior or structure that has no relation to a real thing, but satire requires reality.
Also I only just realized what day it was.
“Thankfully” actual tv cartoons have not gotten any less cheaply produced in a decade, so that part still goes. I think we can safely agree that pog is watching a terribly-written, awkwardly-paced program regardless of its degree of similarity to one that exists. Unless you think I am kidding.
My next dork in progress. It is also a previous dork in progress since I tend to dork on them out of order.
Initially the lowest creature had only the slightest resemblance to a stegosaurus. It is mildly more accurate now but I wonder if I would be better off going in the deliberately inaccurate direction like I ordinarily would with anything else I could not draw properly (such as homo-sapiens-sapioids), and I cannot say with certainty that I initially set out to draw a specific lumpus beast anyhow. But there may yet be value in learning to draw specific beasts. For example, if I need one quartered.
Gosh look at how corny that guy is. I saw this picture years ago while briefly considering bowling for dollars and all I could think about was his corniness. I declared him King Corny at that point in time and since then have used him as a standard to judge the corniness of others.
For example, Philip Casnoff, who portrayed Frederic Trumper in the sick-fated Broadway version of Chess is Duke Corny. I decided that based on his voice in an audio recording, which does not suit this visual medium, and it is impossible to sing One Night in Bangkok without being corny anyhow, but it establishes that there is a hierarchy.
Captain Corny appeared in the 194eh film Showboat. Observe how he lets other people do the talking while he lingers behind to provide crucial corniness. He is less corny than King Corny, but he is still exceptionally corny.
This film is a remake of an earlier film also called Showboat in which Captain Corny was portrayed by a different actor who was nonetheless still corny. The captain is the one wearing the music-proof hat that says CAPTAIN on it, since he was concerned it was not obvious enough in the picture I just posted, and his astounding corniness has so clouded his mind that he has forgotten that in his timeline, the film I took the other picture from has not yet been made and in fact depends on his own being noteworthy for that to even be considered.
it is rumored that seeing The Hulk turns you corny.
Staff Sergeant Corny appeared in 1970s magazines. I drew a picture loosely based on his life once.
It has been stored in an apparently very smudgy place the last 3ish years but I think his message is still as relevant as it was in the 1970s: you are HIM and affluent and you lounge on your absurdly huge British lawn in gloomy weather just to flout your affluence and 1970sness. Women are someone else, and attracted to your presence, but they act bored once they get there.
He/you may or may not be a secret identity of
Bruno Brazil, akabaka Marquis di Corny. In the 1970s all the action heroes were grey-haired corny men with roughly rectangular-shaped heads.
Of course there are multiple sovereigns in this world. In France there is le Roi Corny.
Pay attention! I just told you.
I found this record in my attic recently, and after of several minutes cracking myself up saying “nat king cole was a merry nat soul” I considered that he might also be Nat King Corny. At that point I started writing this post and it was too significant an issue to be addressed the same day.
He may be related to King Kandy, who is also corny, but not king OF corny. He may hold the ceremonial title of King Korny but that is not officially recognized by the Corny Council. But why, of all possible alliterative candy themed hero names, did he have to be KING Kandy? Why not Captain Candy or Candy Commander or Candytastrophe? And why kandy with a K? Notice how the nerd instantly knows that he has transformed into King Kandy. He stutters while THINKING due to how stupid it is but even though he IS King Kandy and did not exist prior to that moment he has no power to call himself anything else. Not even King Kandy Korn, as an anonymom commentator suggested.
That may konstrue kopyright infringement against Kin Korn Karn anyhow.
These dorky thugs custom made to be beatable by King Kandy know that King Kandy IS King Kandy, with a K, even though all he does is think narration of his present situation and never at any point royally decrees “I am King Kandy.” That rogue band of Bono impersonators better watch out; they’re tangling with someone who can be foiled by carrying a paper towel around.
Recently it came to my attention, though less recently than Nat did, that the film Wreck-em’ Ralph featured a character named King Candy, but without a K, so he does not factor into my life, and shall not be pictured here.
However, Candy Land predates both, and ALSO has a King Kandy, and ONCE MORE with a K. This is a game for children and going out of its way to spell stuff wrong. Also there is no actual player input and you could rig the game by determining the number of participants and sorting the cards before playing, which would be cheating, but if you figure that out at the age of 4 you deserve to win. This King Kandy seems to have substantially altered his appearance at least three times through the years, but each has been more dopey than corny, and in none of those situations has he been a 6 foot tall regular proportioned man who yells/thought-projects out SOCKAMAGEE. However, never once has he spelled his name with a C, either (nor considered amending his diet), so clearly he is not bothered by the potential for mistaken identity.
Consider that candy is notorious for using artificial ingredients, and needing to mispell things like “chocolate” to be legally released from having to include any. King Kandy is so unnatural that he cannot even legally be called candy, and he MAKES the laws!
All Kings [c,/k]andy outrank San Fran Cisco’s notorious Candy Baron, even if he is adequately corny and seems to dress more respectably than any of them. You cannot see his whole body. He may also be covered in pink.
I cannot trust anyone! And worse still, I fear there are more corny stories to come.
I am glad I can make things that nobody else would ever claim to have made. That is what this one has going for it.
A question lately occurs to me:
A lot of people sure seem to think they have!
And what is more, they think it noteworthy that they think they have seen it. They honor the deed by listing products and brands and calling it a day, except when they copy each others’ lists of contextless product acknowledgments and go home early. Remembering further back than five years is HARD.
I had high expectations for this one; it was going to go back in time and CHANGE my Childhood, making all the other lists inaccurate, and thus not my duty to disprove, but then it was just a bunch of fan drawings stolen off of deviantart without any credit to the admittedly uninspired but none-the-less credit-worthy artists, but with ample space to give the thug dork who copied them credit for doing so. Granted, no name is supplied and none of the social media scripts on the page WORK, but it has a heaping hamburger helping of advertisements, many of which do work, so it ultimately serves its purpose: getting real money to scumbags who have no discernible skills. This is the kind of person who insists critics “need to stop the hate” and then blocks all from replying.
I realize brainbread lists are nothing new, and people have gotten paid for the task of acknowledging that things exist and selling advertising on it for about a decade now. Half a millennium ago you gained fame by traveling around the world, gathering wonders that had never been seen in your homeland before. Now you don’t go anywhere and show people stuff they already had and got rid of, and there is actually more demand for this. My gripe is the fixation on the word “childhood,” specifically MINE. Certainly weak-willed dorks have been lamenting the ruination of [their] childhood(s) ever since Marco Polo brought back erotic fan fiction from the Far East; MY childhood this, MY childhood that, but only recently when this was turned around into YOUR childhood, (akaaaa mine), did I take personal offense. If you want to sum up your entire history of conscious functioning as a system of stagnant, staring inaction you may, and furthermore declare this unremarkable period of subservience to sponsored sludge and the sponsors themselves as something pure and infallible, but I refuse to have mine defined with anyone else’s! If My Childhood is anything special, it could surely not be summed up with a photograph of a bag of Keebler Ripplins. And if it can be, then it was wasted and is not worth discussing!
Pizzarias were better, anyway.
But not as good as “pizza,” that I can still buy, so I do not lament the facsimile-chips’ loss.
These things seem to be in agony, however.
You might notice, browsing those lists, that a Ninja Turtle product from 1989 will appear alongside some weird fad toothbrush from 1998, and wonder how those could simultaneously define the same childhood 9 years apart. In fact “your childhood” just means “potential childhood period of anyone currently in the 18-35 year old target demographic favored by advertisers.” That means in three years (as of yesterday) my childhood will officially no longer exist. And I almost believe it, because that is less important to me than my currenthood anyhow. It also means that the original websites from 18 years ago which literally just posted pictures of He-Man action figures and said “hey remember these?” are possibly part of someone’s childhood. I am lucky perhaps to not have gotten so hooked into having my nostalgia packaged and sold back to me by an outside party that to have it no longer available will be a painful blow. 25 OCCUPANTS FROM LISTS ABOUT YOUR CHILDHOOD THEY DON’T ACKNOWLEDGE ANYMORE
25. Saturday Supercade. Hey, remember when Saturday Supercade used to be on these lists? Well the people we want to see these lists don’t!
24. Handi-Snax. Gosh these were terrible! You should be GLAD nobody wants to convince you these were great anymore!
23. Juiceboxes. Nope! People who presently were kids in the past only had nutrient-free fake juice skittle-water in BAGS!
22. The pinball machine on Sesame Street. Better download the 5000 clips of this from youtube now that they aren’t relevant enough to be uploaded 5000 times! And hopefully these lists will be out of style before we get to the point where youtube is on them.
You know what I wanted to do as a child? Stop going to school. Now I am not in school, and I am glad. I cannot even drive a car and I like this better. I miss my grandmother, emergency broadcast system tests, being able to hear rain through my bedroom window and still having the capacity to be excited by the thought of the future, but overall I prefer this now, and look at how angry I am!
Entertainment made for people who were then the age I am now emphasized how much I would wish to be a kid in school once I no longer were. But now I can buy any weird cookies I want that my mother would never buy and can play every stupid Nintendo game on my own computer without having to hoard impractical lumps of plastic and stick a Lincoln log in the disk drive to hold one in place. I have the freedom to kill myself eating bacon pizzas, and maybe I will, if I enjoy that.
Alternatives to pizza do not look like that! A big heap of vegetables is not going to make me magically not want a very specific pizza! Maybe that is My Childhood’s fault, for getting me chemically dependent on horrible food! My Childhood is an irresponsible creep! How dare you remind me of it!
Here is a brief list of things I do not miss about the 1990s:
Roberto Benigni
the Dave Matthews band
the dos prompt
floppy disks
boot disks
Red Baron being the only frozen pizza
AOL busy signals
AOL
Video games that broke and/or needed to be paid for
When I ate pop tarts and hot pockets
Going to school (I told you!)
Not having a means to listen to whatever music I wanted and having to rely on radio stations or whatever CDs I could find, and thinking that was all there was.
Having to watch tv shows when they came on
Wanting to watch tv shows
Having to seek out and hoard vague pictures from tv shows to prove that they existed.
Elmo
Needing to use film to take photographs
Pop-up advertising (specifically, not being able to block it easily)
Tomagotchi-alikes
Molly Shannon
Real-player
Rwanda Genocide
Crash Bandicoot
I found that after I conquered nostalgia on my own terms, it was harder and harder for me to have a similar experience of rediscovery, and I just had to stop. But once something is monetized, it must be pushed and pushed until it explodes. As consumers become desensitized to incessant nostalgia-baiting, content regurgitators will have to dig deeper and skew yet vaguer and more generic.
13 non-food items you put in your mouth
7 jiggly rainbow keys that match no known locks
9 ingredients in your bottle formula that are more dangerous than anything your parents are worrying about in their own diets
18 Gametes You Wish Had Hooked Up!!
46 chromosomes that literally created your childhood! Unless you have Klinefelter syndrome or something
Nostalgia-baiting is this generation’s version of “when I was your age” except it is more like “When YOU were YOUR age” because they just pass it between themselves since nothing happened and they have no one to pass it to. It cannot be used to tell kids how easy they have it because part of the process is emphasizing how AWESOME it is, and much of what would be cited has not changed in 30 years anyhow because now a lucrative commercial property is never allowed to die. These people have NO STORY to tell because the whole point is that I was there too! So they just mention items that might be in the story. Perhaps the next generation’s childhood will just be their parents’ childhood and they can save themselves some trouble.
I have seen some people who claim to “blog every day.” Is that something to be proud of? There is no legal guideline for what constitutes “blogging” and it can amount to nothing more than posting a video you found or had found at you. I should not compare myself to such people. If my page is just stuff off of other peoples’ pages, why should anyone come to it? With that in mind, here is something nobody else would want on their page. I fell out of practice on this method, but most of my better pictures are done in the method so clearly it should not be ignored. Nor should consideration of subject matter quality.
Street tacos, made with real gravel and grit. Throw on some mud gravy if you feel adventurous. Then put it in your mouth at some point.
Unless I am to take this as “tacos from a street vendor,” which means face and brain matter, for the authentic cabeza flavor, and the cost-effectiveness that one reasonably associates with selling food out of a truck, unless you are still saving up for the truck. I forgot to check the ingredients but I am sure they are in there. Sure, I would eat that frozen and reheated. I hope this same brand starts offering street pizza as well. After eh, what is “evol” but evolution –survival and adaptation of the fittest– cut short? (It is also evil misspelled).
I hate the phrase “the inmates are running the asylum!” I have, on two distant past occasions, been involuntarily hospitalized, and if by some error I suddenly had freedom the worst thing I would do is leave. I would not trust in my ability to operate it as a business. Using the word “inmate” suggests an expectation of a prison-like state of affairs; what do you think most prisoners would do? Stick around and wait for Batman to show up? If you think they are wearing strait jackets also (and they would not be) then they would be in no condition to fight!
A scrap of another cartoon I never finished! Almost three years ago! It would have been the first verified appearance of the pathetic snake. I am not good at coming up with stories for these things, just nonsense filler for between what ought to be the important parts.
The other cartoon I have the “story” for but I keep adding needlessly elaborate background characters that need to be redrawn constantly and at some point I am going to have to sing the dang song into a machine. And then there are at least four more parts that I at the moment only have idiotic rhyming lyrics and midis for. There is no reason for me to say this because if you ever see the result, it will be eight or more years from now long after your mind has found a less useful fact to push this one out with.
page 34 of part 1 of that.
Can you believe it, I made the world’s slowest paced comic strip even slower. I like to imagine it will speed up once I have thoroughly established what “normal” is, 130 pages in, but I also like to imagine that eating an 18 inch diameter bacon-topped pizza once a week is not going to have lasting negative consequences. Show me another comic strip where it takes five years of real time for one fictional day to pass and I will ask you why you bothered, given my record of intense jealousy/hostility when shown anything.
Yes here it is, another page inserted among the redraws that it has nothing stylistically in common with. My current “plan” is to split “part 1” into two sub parts for my test printing, which necessitates a clean break right about this point, and this will begin part 2 of part 1, because 33 pages cost less to print than 65.
I suppose this could be “cleaner,” and I deliberately disregarded a note I wrote to myself, “start zoomed out,” because I forgot the reason I wrote it. The first scene of a story or in a new location should start zoomed out, or zoomed in, by my reckoning. This is zoomed in, but not taking up enough space that it works. But in the “full” book it will follow directly from an out-zoomed look at the same thing. Of course I then will not need the clean break I set up these two pages to create, but apart from that it explains, or is the closest I have come to explaining where elpse and nemitz are going, and I do not want it to seem like I just made it up “now” when elpse tells the lizard what they are doing in the nextish “new” pages I am drawing, even if I did make it up just now, because when I first drew them I was not even considering them far enough ahead that I considered they were going anywhere.
There is the cost, and also I am at this point terribly impatient with the process and myself, and not interested in spending another year redrawing pages before I finally take the chance and realize “oops” it does not work after eh. It certainly does not work on tapastic, the comic strip community website, where the image size is capped at 940 pixels wide, yet narrower than I already show things, so if anything it will be HARDER to read, and requiring another full set of jpgs at the different size! Oh is my work never done? Moments after my registering, a variety of automated messages posing as human acknowledgment reminded me that people only read comics on mobile devices these days and that I had better plan my project to have big text and vertically scrolling frames. If you have already been drawing a comic for years and haven’t either had a quantifiable success or given up you are a statistical anomaly and not worth considering.
Technology is REGRESSING and proud of itself for doing so. Tapastic is at least immensely superior to tumblr in its display capabilities and organization; it actually HAS some.
By the wuh that is tap-astic, not taptastic, which I was certain it was for several days. I assumed it was some play on “fantastic” that I was not grasping, and perhaps should be glad that it is not a traceable play on anything because I am an ancient out of touch bog monster that barely comprehends what the other bog monsters are doing.
In fact the person who initially had an issue with the red and green imps not being explained also believes that print, the realm of media, is a person who is dead, and so if I trust his opinion at all, only my own latter purpose is served. He also hates old people. Unfortunately old people (that is, anyone older than me, which really is not THAT old) are the ones who buy my pictures at at local art exhibitions! No no no, I cannot connect with younger folk. They have too many rules. They want comic strips featuring minimally defined smiling lumps that always explain what they are doing, except when they are referencing tv shows or movies, references the grasping of which the entire project rests on, which will not be explained, and somehow despite such conditions for readership do quite well for themselves. If I have any shot at selling this comic to anybody it will be the surviving 40-year olds who still buy comic books but are not opposed to the idea of going outside the major established brands, plus anyone I personally coerce who knows they can see it on the internet for free. There are younger comic book buyers, but they already got word that I broke the rules. They know that I have never donated money to incentivize the playing of a video game by a party other than myself or publicly upheld the honor of my “childhood.” Also the comic is kind of boring.
That seems like a bitter plea for encouragement, but the existence of this post should be taken as evidence that against all reason I have not given up. I over-analyze my situation and discuss the negative aspects. But I have been poking at the work almost as long as the audience I am missing has lived; I do not know how to give up! I do not remember what I did before it! Apart from being annoyed at myself for not having started yet, and really want to stop going to school, and I did both those things. That is good!