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.

page 33 of part 3 of this. One good thing does happen, but not much el[p]se. It took me less than two weeks to make, though, which is good, I hope, and not just reflective of my shoddy work on the backgrounds and the already mentioned not much occurring. The only thing in my favor is that I can hold a thought for twenty years. I think usually web comic people hit their peak within two years and finish everything they ever planned on doing within ten. I don’t have to/can’t beat anybody, but eventually they will all retire or move to endeavors that I am not also trying to do, unless battling for the last piece of breathable air becomes a common activity in the near future.

as I possibly said but was in such a hurry i do not remember, I have started touching up the pages that would go into the third comic book.
The character introduction up front is, no longer feels necessary, being left-over from before i redrew the first sections, when they made even less sense than they presently do! And so I extended the imagery on the first page and took the introduction out. but still have it on the web page! In order for it to go in the next book I will need to think of four additional, remotely characters to reintroduce, but i do not want the lizard to be among them since I mean for first time viewers to not be expecting it to appear, even though indicated at the closing of the previous section that it intended to appear again.
Apart from that, what I primarily to do is adjust lettering, add shading to often unshaded pictures, and revisit some radical ideas i had twelve years ago about where muscles went on legs. The overall “process” is going much more smoothly than the previous such series of events, since I am not starting from such a low point; You probably would not be able to tell which ones I have updated and which ones I have not! But it still will not be complete soon, because nothing I do ever happens soon! And so rather than forcing this through to its finish, I have begun the next new NEW page, since I have not put one out since November. Of course I have not put out a cartoon since March 2017 and have no immediate expectation of resuming that, and have had no new music since July 2017 I think. I also again started accepting money from people in exchange for time consuming irrelevant drawings that don’t reflect my interests or expand my audience, more because I need the validation than the money (and not surprisingly don’t command much of either), which holds overall matters up yet further. What do you want from me? I am only three people!